Nearly 1,000 Hispanic Workers Walk Off Job

(Tar Heel, North Carolina) Twenty percent of the workforce at a Smithfield Foods Inc. hog slaughtering plant walked off the job in protest of the firing of about 75 workers who provided false identification documents. The Smithfield plant employs 5,000 people and is considered the world's largest hog processing facility.

From KansasCity.com:

About 300 workers were protesting this morning outside the plant in Tar Heel, N.C., said Libby Manly, a representative of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which helped organize the protest and has been trying for years to form a union at the plant.

So, the company complies with the law and fires several dozen likely illegal aliens and the union organizes a protest. Are we to assume that the union wants the company to break the law?

Smithfield spokesman Dennis Pittman said the company was only complying with a request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to gather the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and gender of workers at the plant. About 600 workers were found to have unverifiable information.

Frankly, I'm at a loss to understand what the union is trying to accomplish by organizing the Hispanics to protest.

From HeraldSun.com:

"This walkout -- which apparently was instigated by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union -- is totally unjustified," Pittman said. "If Smithfield were to do what the union is calling for, we would be breaking federal law by knowingly employing undocumented workers. The union should stop trying to pressure Smithfield to break the law."

I wonder whether a national labor relations guideline covers the Smithfield circumstance. If so, it's probably being violated. Unions shouldn't be encouraging companies to break the law.