Birth of a union: The long game at Smithfield

It’s safe to say Mathew Barr did not know what he was getting into.

It was 2007, and the UNCG film professor had just finished playing out his latest documentary: Wild Caught: The Life and Struggles of an American Fishing Town, a story of four fishing families in and around Sneads Ferry, on the North Carolina coast. Battered by waves of industrialization, regulation, pollution and time, these fishing families faced extinction not just of their businesses, but a culture and a way of life.

The film had done well on the worldwide festival circuit, with a local screening at RiverRun in 2007, and had became the cornerstone for a larger concept: the Unheard Voices Project, which would seek to document the struggles of working people against the forces of modernity.

He had started work on another piece, With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Company, which eventually chronicled the last days of a furniture factory in Martinsville, Va. after 80 years of operation. In talking to labor organizers for that story, Teamsters Local 391 President Jack Cipriani tipped Barr off to the situation at the Smithfield hog-processing plant in Tar Heel, NC, which at that time was 12 years into its storyline.

©

 

“Our intent was to do the film about union organizers,” he says from his office in UNCG’s Brown Building, a corner spot at the end of a labyrinthine hall. “These guys…. The money is bad. They get sent into towns like Lumberton to try to get a union going. It’s sort of exciting — like Norma Rae, one of my favorites, you know, you get in there, try to bring people together. And there’s so much hostility to unions down here. From workers, even!

“It’s like a mission,” he continues. “Like being a minister. They come out of the plants themselves; they become stewards and then organizers.

“They are relentless.”

So he grabbed his rig and hitched a ride on the bus to Colonial Williamsburg, where 700 workers from the Smithfield Tar Heel plant, along with organizers from the state NAACP, Jobs 4 Justice and Greensboro’s Beloved Community Center, intended to disrupt a Smithfield shareholders meeting. When he saw another documentary crew on the scene making what would turn out to be Food, Inc. — with, he says, much better equipment — he suspected he might be onto something. His encounters with the Rev. William Barber of the NC NAACP and the Rev. Nelson Johnson deepened that certainty.

The connection between civil rights and workers’ rights, he knew, could forge a powerful coalition, as it did in the protests leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he began to see how the Smithfield story could be fleshed out as a feature.

[pullquote]Matthew Barr screens Union Time: Fighting for Workers’ Rights at the Global Learning Center Lecture Hall of Bennett College on Friday at 7 p.m. as part of the 2017 Black Media Festival. It is free and open to the public. For more on Barr and his films, see unheardvoicesproject.org.[/pullquote]

Meanwhile, he had to jockey for space on the bus with the Food, Inc. crew.

“I had to fight my way in to make this film,” he likes to say, “and I had to fight my way out.”

The result, Union Time: Fighting for Workers’ Rights, is finally ready to be seen.

***

By the time Barr checked in, the saga of the Smithfield plant at Tar Heel had been plodding along for almost 13 years. Opened in 1993 as the largest slaughterhouse and processing plant in the world in the flats between Wilmington and Fayetteville, one of the poorest parts of the state.

A large operation like that commits myriad offenses, including animal cruelty, environmental damage, and health issues associated with the products of factory farming.

But more than anything, work at Smithfield was dangerous: More than 30,000 hogs, almost 300 pounds each, moved daily through the gauntlet at Smithfield, where thousands of workers, many making just a single knife cut on each carcass, broke down each animal.

Some places of the plant were freezing cold; others unbearably hot. Blades were everywhere. A montage of missing digits and limbs, puncture wounds and broken bones fills the opening scenes of Union Time, along with descriptions of musculoskeletal disorders, all of which the company inadequately addressed.

©

 

Though most of Smithfield’s workers around the state had been unionized, the Tar Heel plant, in right-to-work North Carolina, was not. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union came to town in 1994 and were able to schedule a union vote for the workers. In advance of the vote, Smithfield hired anti-union consultants and ran their playbook to discourage their workers from organizing: intimidation, physical violence, one-on-one inquisitions and more.

Union talk had always been dangerous in North Carolina. In April 1929, Gov. O. Max Gardner responded to a strike in Gastonia by sending 250 National Guard troops to the Loray Mill to break it up. One hundred masked men destroyed the headquarters of the National Textiles Workers Union at the site, and in an altercation between Gastonia police and striking workers in June, police Chief OF Alderholt was murdered.

An editorial about the incident in the Greensboro Daily News read, in part: “Gaston County is desperately near the mood to try a dozen or more malcontents for murder and condemn them for what they think of God, marriage and the Bible.”

In 1997, the year of the second union vote at the Tar Heel plant, attitudes towards union in North Carolina had not evolved much. The second vote was marked by the presence of Gaston County sheriff’s officers in riot gear, threats to union organizers and plant workers and a moment during the counting of the votes when the power at the plant went out.

The union lost that election, too, but the UFCW responded to Smithfield’s bad behavior with a lawsuit, heard before the National Labor Relations Board and referred to the courts for judgment.

That conflict lasted until 2006, when Smithfield, after years of appeals, finally lost the case. An appeals court forced the company to hire back everyone who had been fired for union activity, with back pay, and to allow for another union election, this time without the hijinks.

The story, Barr saw, already had everything: a big corporate enemy, a slew of hardworking underdogs fighting for better lives, a big-name product in every supermarket. There was a Pinkerton-like private police force deployed by Smithfield. There were heroes like Keith Ludlum, the war veteran who was the only fired worker to take his old job back after 12 years, just so he could help build support for the union; and Ronnie Simmons, who suffered through the plant’s earliest years.

Simmons, in later interviews, delivers what may be the most poignant line in Barr’s film. After seeing a worker become injured by a stampede of hogs, she noted that the worker was pushed aside while the hogs were tended to. She came to a stark realization.

“This is not a human job,” she said. “This is like an animal’s job.”

But this was before, when all Barr knew was that he had a story and a cause he could believe in. And he was unsure how it would turn out.

Wild Caught, he notes, was kind of a sad film. And With These Hands, was “really downbeat. We were in a closing factory covering its death knell.”

And he didn’t have high hopes for the union at Smithfield, either.

“They’re trying to destroy the unions in this country,” he says now in his office. “And they very likely will.”

***

Barr began in film inauspiciously, shooting 16mm with a wind-up camera when he was just 13. He got his undergrad degree from San Francisco State University and then bounced around UCLA’s film school for a few terms until he got his MFA in 1989. The idea had been to go into features then, and he wrote two successful scripts before matriculating at UCLA: the 1981 Wes Craven film Deadly Blessing, starring a young Sharon Stone, and “The Forgotten,” a made-for-TV movie starring Keith Carradine and Stacy Keach.

©

 

But as a product of his time and place, Barr had been involved politically as well. His first arrest came while at San Francisco State, at a protest demanding the school establish a Black Studies Department. That was where he met Danny Glover who would go on to become a big-name actor and then, later, would narrate Union Time.

“Danny was always very politically active,“ Barr says now.

Barr’s last arrest, he says, came at a Moral Monday march in Raleigh, in support of Rev. Barber.

In 1990, he made a film about hate crimes used as a training tool for police departments

His own big break came from a documentary called Carnival Train, made during five years spent with a traveling carnival troupe, working as a “jointy” at one of the games of skill, sleeping in the game kiosk and shooting still photography of the performers.

The film, which came out in 1999, almost didn’t happen. But when it did, he says, it got him his tenure at UNCG, where he has been since 1994.

Union Time, he knew, would have to be different than all his previous work. Without using the point of view of activism, as he had done in earlier films, or the tools of narration that he had applied in the past, this film must be a work of journalism.

“I knew from the get-go, in 2007, that this was a really complicated case,” he says, “and that there would be no point in doing a film that was overtly pro-union. I’m not anti-union, I’m pro-union. I’ve been in unions.

“It was important to make a story about the union that was essentially bulletproof,” he continues, “this way it would not be attacked legally, or be attached to the legacy of the RICO lawsuit [Smithfield] launched against the union, which I was very aware of. I had to worry about my own liability. We had to clear the film with [our lawyer], because they could still sue us. Everything had to be as bulletproof as possible.”

The result is a sort of oral history, with horrifying anecdotes from factory workers and organizers peppered with weighty analysis from academics, historians and labor lawyers. Some of the most inspirational moments come from the Revs. Barber and Johnson, emphasizing the connection between workers’ rights and civil rights.

“The struggle for workers’ rights implodes at the issue of race in the South,” Barber says early on in the film.

Among the film’s other chilling moments are the description of an ICE raid held at the plant in 2007, and still photos of the more gruesome injuries.

But the overarching theme is one of determination and endurance — from the opening of the plant to the establishment of the union, this organizing process took 16 years, and things didn’t always look so rosy.

“That’s the point of the movie!” Barr explains. “We’re at a moment of crisis in this country, and here’s this story about people who hang in there. I’ve never had such a great response to a documentary before. It took 14 years to show you how fucked up the system is.

©

 

“I had to draw from the courage of the workers who were in there being bullied and intimidated,” he continues. “Just a bunch of gutsy people who fought it out for 16 years.”

***

At his desk, Barr is planning the screenings for Union Time. There’s one this week at Bennett College, where the Rev. Johnson will be on hand for a Q&A after the screening. He just showed the film to the National Labor Relations Board last week in Washington, DC, and is organizing other screenings at Cornell University, UCLA and Wake Forest University.

He’s on the phone now with Ronnie Simmons, one of the workers who became a steward and, later, an organizer for the UFCW, trying to entice her to come to the WFY screening.

“I know it’s a long ride from Lumberton,” he’s saying, “but maybe we’ll go out to get a bite to eat afterward, and they’ll put you up in a nice hotel room.”

He pauses.

“I’ll tell you,” he says, “the people in DC ate it up.”

Pause.

“They want to destroy everything!” he says. “This is the fight we’re into now with this movie. It’s like, look at what these guys did. It’s a huge achievement.”

Another pause.

“I think they got caught up in the story,” he says. “They wanted the good guys to win. And they did win.”

After the call, he thinks for a moment.

“The coalition built for that fight,” he says, “is the coalition coming together now for the fight.”