In a somewhat major legal development, the United Food and Commercial Workers and Smithfield Foods have settled a ground-breaking RICO lawsuit, just before the case was scheduled to go to trial.
The terms of the agreement are still sketchy– what we do know is that the union has agreed to end ALL corporate campaign activity. The company and the union have also agreed to a “fair election process” though they did not elaborate on what the terms of such an election would include. The specific circumstances surrounding what exactly the “fair election process” entails will ultimately determine whether this is a good deal for workers. Some “fair election agreements” are very one-sided in favor of unions and that might be the case here. The fact that they are just not having a regular NLRB election (or, at least they are not calling it that) means that we should at least approach this with some caution.
But reading between the lines, it looks like UFCW might have caved. The union was obviously fearful of going to trial and losing. Having the corporate campaign deemed a violation of RICO statutes could have opened up the litigation flood gates. UFCW tried – unsuccessfully – at several turns to have the case dismissed. It seemed that they were reluctant to have this head to the jury.
There is also the very real possibility that the prospect of an EFCA friendly President and Congress made fighting over a corporate campaign a moot point. The clear goal of most corporate campaigns is card check/neutrality agreements. EFCA would mandate both of these provisions. In labor’s eyes, it will be nice to still have corporate campaigns at their disposal – and so maybe it did not seem prudent to have them classified as civil RICO violations – but at the same time maybe UFCW figured it was just not worth their time and money to fight for a tactic that could become far less important as of next Tuesday.
