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Reviewed by:
  • Union Time: Fighting for Workers' Rights dir. by Matthew Barr
  • Roger Horowitz
Union Time: Fighting for Workers' Rights. Documentary film. Directed by Matthew Barr. 69 minutes.

A stunning moment of déjà vu hit me about forty-five minutes into viewing the documentary Union Time, which charts the union organizing campaign at the Smithfield Foods hog slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, NC. Many years ago, Chicago packinghouse organizer Todd Tate told me that a turning point in the [End Page 198] Armour and Co. organizing campaign in the 1930s came when he and other workers protested the heat levels in their department and demanded the company install fans. Workers sat down on the job when the company resisted, even though the union did not yet have legal standing. The company gave in and installed the fans, giving "a big boost to the power of the union," recalled Tate. "Guys said, if the union can do that, maybe I want to join."

In Union Time, a strikingly similar episode is related by Terry Slaughter, a union activist in the stockyards department that shackled the pigs brought by truck to the plant. The only water available to workers was hot, kept in containers that pigs also drank from. After repeatedly asking for cold water, the workers sat down in a planned action when their demand was again ignored. As halting the flow of pigs into the plant would bring production to a halt, management swarmed over the workers, issuing threats but failing to get them back to work until they promised to permanently correct the conditions. The strike—closely followed by other workers—forced Smithfield to emulate Armour's concessions. To defuse the protests, "they actually built us our own lunchroom, they put TVs and refrigerators in there, vending machines," Slaughter recalled; "I think that right there really did something to the entire plant."

This latter episode is only one of many of remarkably closely textured anecdotes related by workers and union activists in Union Time. Filming conducted between 2006 and 2008, during the organizing campaign, allows viewers to see many real-time key episodes of the union campaign that resulted in a victory for United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1208. Subsequent oral recollections by shop floor activists, including commentary by the workers who comprised the union rank and file, largely carry the narrative. Larger context is supplied by UFCW staff member Gene Bruskin, who orchestrated the union campaign, with limited intercession by narrator Danny Glover.

Union Time begins without drama or much of a hint of what will follow; a more suggestive opening would have been desirable. It starts with narrator Danny Glover explaining the relocation of companies such as Smithfield to North Carolina to take advantage of the area's poverty and an environment inhospitable to unions; Glover's explanations are interspersed with those of workers and authorities (professors, lawyers, consultants) explaining the rough working conditions for workers at the Tar Heel plant after it opened in 1992. Anchored by chilling descriptions of the modern "drive" system that forced workers to labor at a frenetic pace, we see how a union core formed, even as it was unable to overcome determined—and often violent and illegal—company resistance. There is a short historical section on the success of unionism in the 1940s, which is passably accurate but unfortunately does not draw on the abundant oral histories of workers from that era, and diplomatically avoids calling attention to the UFCW's complicity in the virtual collapse of meatpacking unionism in the 1980s and 1990s. This section of the film (the first twenty [End Page 199] minutes) moves slowly, relying too heavily on narration and commentary from outside "experts."

Once Union Time gets to the Justice at Smithfield campaign that commenced in 2006, the tone changes for the better. Interviews with workers and union leaders, rather than outsiders to the union effort, drive the narrative. Clearly the UFCW had learned a few things from its debacle in the 1980s and failed efforts to recover in the 1990s; it invested heavily in a campaign that combined aggressive shop floor organizing with an "air war" (public relations) campaign targeting the...

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