Smithfield Foods and J.P. Stevens

The news last week that workers at the world's largest pork slaughterhouse had won a union election after 16 years of effort was widely hailed as a turning point in employer-employee relations at the Smithfield Foods plant in Bladen County. It harkens up memories of the euphoria that workers felt in 1974 after a long and bitter campaign to organize J.P. Stevens' textile plant in Roanoke Rapids. Workers then thought their union victory would be a turning point in the South -- and state AFL-CIO President Wilbur Hobby said it was "a new day in Dixie." He also prophesied a trend toward unionization: "J.P. first, the textile industry second and then the whole South."
The victory at the Stevens plant was even memorialized in the 1979 movie "Norma Rae" featuring Sally Field, who won an academy award.
But it took the union another six years to negotiate a contract with Stevens, and the union victory never led to the sweeping unionization of the industry or North Carolina -- let alone the South -- that the late labor boss Wilbur Hobby imagined.
Some optimists believe the workers in Bladen County could have a contract within six months, and it does sound as though Smithfield Foods is more amenable to working things out than J.P. Stevens was 34 years ago. "We respect the employees' decision and look forward to working together," said Dennis Pittman, a company spokesman, after the vote, according to news accounts.