at a slaughterhouse, some things never die; who kills, who cuts, who bosses can depend on race

Charlie LeDuff Juni on the 16 th, it should be 1.
At this time, the white man usually came out of his glass office and stood on the scaffolding above the factory floor.
His palms were placed on the rails and his elbows stretched out.
He looks like a tower guard or border patrol.
He stood with his head tilted.
1 point means that the working day is coming to an end.
Quotas must be met, doubling the workload.
Around 1, there is always meat overflow on the conveyor belt.
As a result, the pace of the workers doubled, cutting pork off the shoulders with a single drivemindedness.
When the slaughtered slate passed, they stared blankly, like a mule with a wooden blindfold.
It is called the picnic line: 18 workers lined up on both sides of the belt to carve meat from the bones.
At Smithfield packaging, as many as 16 million shoulders come down this line every year.
The largest pork producer in the world.
This is about 32,000 people per shift, 63 per minute, and each worker works eight and a half hours a day, 1 person per 17 seconds.
When you stare at the belt for the first time, you know that your body will give in before the machine appears.
On this day, the boss saw something he didn\'t like.
He climbed down and approached the picnic line from behind.
He leaned against a wide ear.
Black man with shoulder
He rode him all day, the day before.
The boss scolded him very well this time, but no one heard what he said.
The roar of the machine is too fierce.
Nevertheless, everyone knows what is expected.
They work harder.
AD whites stood and watched for the next two hours, blacks worked in their team, Mexicans worked in their team.
He stood there with his head tilted.
The ad during the shift changed the blacks to walk away, wash themselves down, and hand in the knife. Then he let go.
He threatened to murder his boss.
He promised to resign.
He said he was losing his mind because he was standing near a cut-off pig head conveyor belt with their mouth yo open, which made him an excellent comedy.
\"Who does that bastard think he is?
Black people want to know.
There are enough pigs, he said, and don\'t worry that there are no meat spots on the bones.
Continue to treat me like a Mexican and I will beat him.
At this moment, the boss came over and the black man bowed his head.
The first thing you learn in a pigsty who gets dirty work is the value of a sharp knife.
The second thing you learn is that you don\'t want to work with a knife.
Finally, you know that not everyone has to work with a knife.
White people, black people, American Indians and Mexicans all have their own radio stations.
Several white people on the payroll are often mechanics or supervisors.
Only a few are regulators for Indians;
Others tend to clean humble jobs like warehouse jobs.
With a few exceptions, this makes the blacks and Mexicans have dirty jobs in the factory, which is 50-
In this muddy corner of North Carolina, a person can earn more than $8 an hour.
Although Smithfield\'s profits have almost doubled in the past year, wages have remained the same.
So many Americans here have resigned and hired many Mexicans to take their place.
But in addition to management, workers see each other as a problem, and they see competition in terms of skin color.
The locker room is its own.
The cafeteria is also isolated.
Hostility spread to the town.
The game is usually played by itself.
On Interstate 95, there are four bars each in one color: white, black, red and brown.
Language is also denominator.
There are English and Spanish lines in the waiting room of the Social Security office and the county health office.
This means that different groups don\'t really understand each other, and they tend to be skeptical about what they know.
Advertising you begin to understand these things as soon as you apply for the job.
The hiring manager told 30 job seekers that blood and fuel consumption \"treat meat like you eat yourself\" and most of them are unlucky and eager to work.
The Smithfield factory will take almost any man or woman with a pulse and shiny urine sample, and few people ask.
The reporter was hired under his own name and admitted that he was currently hired, but was not asked where or what.
Slaughtering pigs is repetitive, brutal work, so hard that after spending three weeks on the factory floor, you have no doubt as to why the turnover is 100%.
5,000 people resign each year and 5,000 are hired.
You hear people say they don\'t kill pigs in factories, they kill people.
The personnel staff said the company was so desperate for workers that its recruiters combed the streets of the immigrant community in New York, where word of mouth had reached Mexico and elsewhere.
The company even caught criminals.
During the morning orientation, several prisoners were released in green uniforms and from the county prison.
The new worker was given a safety speech and tax documents showing a promotional video and was told that there was enough methane, ammonia and chlorine in the plant to kill every creature in Bladen County.
Among the 30 new employees, black women were assigned to the chit worm room, where they would scrape feces and worms from their intestines.
Black people were sent to the slaughter site.
Two white men and Indians were given the opportunity to make boxes.
The reporter turned down a lunch box job and ended up doing knife work with most Mexicans to cut the sides of the pork into smaller and smaller products.
That morning, two women stood in the recruitment Hall talking about their pregnancy in Spanish.
A young black man is enough to listen.
The town in the next county is packed with Mexicans.
They started showing up three years ago. -
Attracted by factories to rural Robertson County-and never left.
They were standing in groups around the corner, and the young Black never knew what they were talking about.
They took the job and did it with less money.
Some people have houses in Mexico and he lives in a trailer with his mother.
Now here he is trying to find the only job around him and he has to listen to Spanish and have to compete with farmers.
The world is going to hell.
\"This is America. I want to start listening to some english now! \'\' he screamed.
One of the women told him where to put his head out to listen to the echo.
\"So you can hear some English,\" she said . \"
A white old man with a face pinched like a baking pot complained, \"the tortillas are worse than the slaves\" and the Indians laughed against the wall.
At the door, the prisoners turned from one foot to the other, watching the scene unfolding from behind the smoke cloud.
The hiring manager came out of his office and broke up before things deteriorated into a quarrel.
He then distributed the employment stub.
\"I don\'t want any problems,\" he warned . \"
He told them to report to the factory on Monday morning to collect their carving knives. $7.
An hour, it hurts all day on Monday.
The fog rises from the swamp until 4: 45 in the morning. m.
Thousands of headlights meander along the ancient country road.
Cars take people from the depths of the forest, from single and double trailers, from the coal slag --
White men from the towns of Lumberton and Elizabeth;
Black people from Fairmont and feitville;
The Indian of Pembroke.
Mexican from Red Spring StreetPauls.
They come together at the Smithfield factory, a 973,000. square-
At the foot of the Pipe and Steel near the Cape of fear River Leviathan.
The factory sits above the tobacco and cotton fields, surrounded by pine trees and some ancient painted plantations.
Built seven years ago, it is by far the region\'s largest employer, 75 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean, 90 miles south of the booming research triangle near Mount Chapel.
The workers crowded in, and their faces became stiff due to sleep and cold, just as the milk stews hardened.
They punched in at 5 in the morning. m.
Waiting to distribute the knives, the cleaning staff will burn their eyes and throat with freshly applied chlorine. Nobody spoke.
The corridor is a brown river.
Mexican skin
The six prisoners who started that day looked confused.
\"What is going on?
The only white prisoner, Billy Harwood, asked an older black worker named Wade Baker. \'\'Oh,\'\' Mr.
Seeing the prisoners talking about Mexicans, Baker said.
\"I saw you leave for a while.
Billy Harwood left. -
For nearly seven years, in order to buy crack, they wrote false wage checks from the family pizza company.
There was Rip Van Winkle standing there.
He has Mexicans everywhere.
What he did not know was that one of the three newborns at the nearby Robertson County clinic was Latino;
A pastor in Honduras said the Roman Catholic Church in the county held a special Sunday Mass for Mexicans;
The school needs Spanish speakers to teach English.
He has less than a month of advertising for his sentence.
Harwood accepted pork work to save a few dollars.
One sentence in prison is that the job is an easy job for a white man.
But it doesn\'t look like any cakewalk.
He won\'t get a boxing job like other white people do.
Apparently, like Mexicans, prisoners are at the bottom.
Billy Harwood and other prisoners were arranged on the picnic line.
Seven dollars for knife workers
Start in an hour.
In Mexico, an average of $4 a day is unimaginable.
But there is a price for American money.
This work will burn your muscles and slow your mind.
After a few hours of staring at the meat, your neck is tense.
After thousands of cuts a day, your fingers can no longer be opened freely.
Standing in the wet 42-
The air keeps your knees locked, your nose turning, and your teeth beating.
The whistle rings at 3, you get home at 4 and pour the peroxide on your mark before 5.
You took painkillers and stood in the hot shower trying to wash everything off. You hurt.
By 8, you are exhausted in bed, thinking about work.
The prisoner said he felt cheated.
He should not do his job in Mexico.
He was already talking about resigning the next day.
\"Man, this is not true,\" he said, rubbing his wrist as if he were in handcuffs.
\"This job is a butt job.
They treat you like animals.
\"If it weren\'t for the Mexican Mercedes Fernandez, he would probably resign after the third day.
He took a spot next to the conveyor belt next to her.
She smiled at him and taught him to make a cut.
This is where he is-the-job training. He was peep-
His eyes, a tooth dropped, and he squatted in the food in prison, but he acted as if the little woman had taken a fancy to him.
In fact, she later revealed that she was more obsessed with infatuation.
During her year at the factory, he was the first white person she worked.
Other staff noticed that she helped white people and it was very unusual for a Mexican to work shoulder to shoulder, try to speak and even make eye contact.
As for the blacks, she avoided them.
She was afraid of them.
\"Black people don\'t want to work . \"
Fernandez said when a new group of prisoners came to work on the production line. \'\'They\'re lazy.
\"All the advertisements about the factory cut off the connection between people.
If it\'s not a language barrier, it\'s noise. -
Hammer of compressor, Scream of pulley, grinding of line.
You can hardly hear you.
To get someone else\'s attention to the cutting line, you slam the butt of the knife on the steel railing, or you lose a large piece of meat. Mrs.
Fernandez sometimes throws a shoulder at a friend on a conveyor belt and waves hello.
The kill floor sets the pace of work, and for those jobs, they pick strong people and pay the highest salary, up to $12 an hour.
Many others are willing to try if these people do not reach the quota.
Mainly black people working on the ground, stone-
With the exception of some Mexicans, all of them have good-hearted jobs with higher wages and seem to be out of range.
The factory workers gave various reasons: the Mexicans were too small;
They don\'t like blood.
They don\'t like lifting weights;
Or as a black man said, simply say, \"We have built this country and we will not give everything to them . \". Kill-
The floor work was hot, fast and bloody.
The pig was driven in from the farm and then stunned by an electric gun.
It was lifted onto the conveyor belt, dazed but not dead, and passed on to a group of waiting people wearing bloody smoke and blank faces.
They cut their necks, tied their hind legs, watched the machine lift the body into the air, allowing its life to flow out in the form of a purple surge into a steaming collection slot.
The body goes through the hot tub, rolls on the factory floor, and then pours on the table with the full force of one quarter
A ton of water balloonIn the misty-
In the red room, people cut along its back ribs and string the beast with hooks.
It was lifted up again, passing through the room with pulleys and bars, where it hung with hundreds of other people, as in some terrible dry environment --cleaning shop.
It was then passed through the flame Wall and met more black people on the other side, who stripped to the waist under the smoke and scraped away any falling bristles.
The place is filled with sweat and fear of animals, steam and blood.
These beasts do not waste anything, not plasma, not glands, nor bones.
Everything was used and the killer repeated the slaughterhouse\'s legend that even the scream was sold.
The body was put in the fridge for a night and rolled over to the cut floor.
Cutting the floor is relative to killing the floor in almost every way.
The workers are mostly brown. -Mexicans --not black;
The lights are yellow, not red.
Steam comes from cold breathing, not hot water.
The pigs are stationed here.
The pieces were cut along the disassembly line into ribs, ham, belly, waist and ribs.
The people who cut the line work crazy.
Keeping the conveyor belt moving, packing orders, putting bacon, ham and sausage on the public breakfast table is stressful.
No clocks, no windows, no debris from the outside world.
Everything is pork.
If the team can\'t keep up, the killer must slow down and support the slaughter.
There is almost nothing to do with the boxing line, and it takes the company\'s salary time.
The black people who kill will be angry with the hacked Mexico, and the Mexicans will be angry with the white police who pushed them.
10,000 Mexicans never flinch. They cannot.
Some people have legal working papers, but people like Mercedes Fernandez don\'t.
What\'s worse, advertising.
Fernandez owed the smugglers thousands of dollars, who secretly brought her and her family into the United States and owed more money
Find the birth certificate and Social Security card required for employment.
She and her husband Armando are expected to be in debt for many years.
They have a mouth to feed home.
Mexicans were so scared to be singled out that they didn\'t even tell each other their real names.
They have their names, their jobs.
As their American supervisor said, the paper name and \"Hey, you \".
In telling their story, Mercedes and Armando Fernandez insisted on using their real names to protect their identity.
What they don\'t want to use is their job name, which was bought in back alley, Barstow, Texas.
Few people welcome new arrivals with open arms.
Long before the arrival of Mexicans, the poorest Robinson county in North Carolina was already a disturbing ethnic mix.
Of the 1990 people living in Robertson in the 100,000 census, nearly 40% were Lumbee india, 35% were white and 25% were black.
Until more than a decade ago, the county schools were in fact separate, from the police to the court clerk to the judge, and none of the people of color worked in any meaningful County.
At some point in 1988, two Indian armed men occupied local newspapers, took hostages and asked to investigate corruption in the security sector and its treatment of ethnic minorities.
In the same year, a prominent Indian lawyer, Julian Pearce, was killed and the suspect died in a broom closet before being charged.
The rank of power is summed up on a plaque hanging by the Court commemorating the death of the First World War.
It lists veterans by color: the top is \"white\", the middle is \"India\" and the bottom is \"color \".
This grade reflects the grade of the live pig factory. The Lumbees --
They fought hard in the county and set up their own construction enterprises. -
I like to say they are too smart to work in a factory.
A few people working there seem to end up getting cleaner work.
But with the Red Devils and blacks making progress in 1990s-
The Indian sheriff was first elected, and a black man is now a public defender ---
Latinos began to arrive.
S. Census Bureau estimates that 1,000 Latin Americans lived in Robertson County last year.
People will only laugh at this number. \'\'A thousand?
Hell, more than that in Walmart.
\"I went to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon,\" said Bill Smith, county health service director . \".
He and other officials speculated that Robertson had at least 10,000 Latinos, most of whom had arrived in the past three years.
\"When they built the factory in Braden, they promised to have a tricky effect ,\"Smith said.
\"But that\'s not how the money came down.
Brendan got the money and Robertson got the social problem.
\"Robertson\'s ads put pressure on public resources.
There are unqualified housing.
There was violence.
Last year, there were 27 murders in Robertson, mostly in rural areas, higher than in Detroit or Newark.
Three Mexicans were robbed and killed last fall.
Latinos have also been victims of highway jams. In the yellow-
In the factory-walled lounge, Mexicans talk to each other about their three killed people, about the vague faces and guns of midnight tourists who know that illegal workers use mattresses
Like many Mexicans, Mercedes Fernandez will not venture out at night.
\"There\'s a problem with black people,\" she said . \"
They lived in the past.
They were angry at slavery, so instead of working, they stole from us.
\"She and her husband never stayed in the parking lot during the shift change.
This is when the anger of a long day is about to erupt.
The car was kicked at the parking point or on the fender and his face was slapped.
Traffic is a snake.
Car riders lined up for a quarter --
Crawl a mile along the plant
Lane exit to the highway.
Usually no one will let you in.
There was a lot of friction between the black and the Mexican.
Black and Blue meat is backed up on the conveyor belt and spilled over the floor.
The supervisor climbed down the scaffold and chewed out a group of black women.
Some skin left on the meat.
There is a new Skinner working and it is expected that the cutting line will make up for his shortcomings.
The whole team groaned.
First, people began to abuse each other in Spanish and English, and they could hardly hear the words in the roar of the factory.
Black women began to wave knives at Mexicans.
The Mexicans waved to them.
The blade is close.
A Mexican spat at black people and was fired.
Please click on the box to verify that you are not a robot.
The email address is invalid. Please re-enter.
You must select the newsletter you want to subscribe.
View all New York Times newsletters.
After watching the knife, Wade Baker went home to sit in the recliner. CNN played.
It\'s good news on Wall Street, TV says.
Wages remain stable.
\"From when is it good news that a man is not paid?
He asked TV.
TV told him money was everywhere. -
Except here.
Still tilted at 51, sir.
Baker\'s life has improved since his youth at Jim Cronan.
What can you say?
You can sit in the car with a white woman.
You can stay in a motel and eat at a restaurant.
Black people come from white territory.
\"Things are much better in society . \"
Baker said wearily in front of TV.
But as black people, our economy is going backwards.
Each of us does better, and two of us do worse.
\"His Town, Chad Byrne, is a dull strip of peeling paint and twisted porches and houses like running --
Like rotten teeth.
Young people float out of the slag.
The pool hall of the block leading to the empty street.
There is a bank, a gas station, a chicken house and a motel in the city center.
When you drive out, the lights darken and the house grows old until you end up in a flat field of smoke. Mr.
Baker and his grandson, Monte, stood on the street to watch the Christmas parade when a sloppy man came over. It was Mr.
Baker\'s cousin, who smelled kerosene, had dust on his hair as if he lived in a vacant building and warmed up with a portable heater.
He asked for $2.
The ads are ironic, aren\'t they? \'\' Mr.
Baker said he was only eight rich when his cousin left.
\"He asked me the same question 10 years ago.
\"A group of Mexicans stand across the street, hang out near the gas station and watch them.
\"People here always want to blame the system,\" he said . \".
\"It is true that the system is anti-black and anti-poor.
Things are indeed run by white people.
But being angry only means that you fail in your life.
Instead of complaining, you should work harder.
He stood quietly with his hands in his pocket and watched the procession pass.
He watched the Mexicans across the street laughing in new clothes.
Then he said, almost afterwards, \"the day when Mexicans will catch up with hell from black people is coming, just like black people catch hell from white people.
\"Wade Baker used to work at the post office until he lost his job because of drug use.
A few years ago, when he came out of the haze, he had nothing but the factory.
He said he accepted the job because I didn\'t have 401.
He accepted it because he learned from his mother that you would not stand with your head down and reach out and wait for another person to give you a dime.
Evelyn Baker is now bent Gray, the granddaughter of a slave and a farmer.
She grew up in tar.
A paper house for a white family, cotton picking and tobacco.
She supported her three boys by cleaning the white man\'s home alone.
Later in 60 years, good things began to happen.
As it is now, there was a shortage of labor at that time.
The manager of the textile factory began to provide black people with machine work. Mrs.
Baker was 40 years old.
\"I started out with a dollar, 60 cents an hour, honey, that\'s a lot of money,\" she said . \".
When she was in her 70 s and 80 s, there was a lot of work and she was able to save money and increase her family.
By the early 90 s, textile mills began to move to Mexico.
Since then, Robertson County has lost its job for about a quarter.
Robertson\'s advertising unemployment rate is hovering around 8%, twice the national average.
It is 10 in the neighboring Columbus County. 8 percent.
In Braden county, the pork factory is 5% kilometers away in Braden. Still, Mr.
Baker believes that people who want to work can find a job.
As far as he is concerned, there are too many young people who should work, even in the pork factory. His son-in-
The law used to work there and now quit and hang out at other gas stations where young people sell drugs. The son-in-
One day last fall, the law came over and threatened to cause trouble if the Baker wouldn\'t let him borrow the car.
This may become messy; the 71-year-old Mrs. Baker keeps a .
Hidden in her arms.
When Wade Baker came home from the factory and heard what was going on from his mother, he picked up the pistol and walked to the corner looking for his son --in-law.
He waved his gun and chased several young men in the dusty dark area.
\"Don\'t move so I can shoot one of you!
He recalled yelling.
This will make the world a better place!
\"He dispersed the man without shooting.
Later, he sat in the car with a pistol in his seat and his hands between his knees. he stared at the night and said, \"it\'s definitely more than that.
The white man drove past and looked at the smile.
\"Living and hating ItBilly Harwood, he had been working in the factory for 10 days when he was released from Robertson County Correctional Facility.
He stood at the door of the prison in his overalls, carrying his belongings in plastic bags and waiting.
A friend sent him to the Salvation Army shelter, but he felt like a prison.
Black everywhere.
Don\'t leave after 10 pence. m.
Smoking is prohibited indoors.
\"White Boy, what are you doing here?
They asked him.
He groped for a cigarette outside the shelter.
He wants to leave the factory.
It\'s a bad job, he said, but at least I\'m not a black man.
I will find other jobs soon.
I\'m a white man.
He hopes to find a roof job through a friend.
In his view, the white society is self-care.
On the cutting line, he worked slowly and asked Mercedes Fernandez and others to make up for his shortcomings.
He only cuts his left shoulder.
His hand is easier.
Sometimes the left shoulder moves down after 3 minutes.
He did not clean the bones when he cut them;
He left a large piece of meat on it.
Lady advertising
Fernandez was disappointed with her first experience with white people.
A week later, she tried to avoid Billy Harwood.
She says she thinks it\'s not just black people who are lazy.
Nevertheless, one morning, the supervisor came and took a look at Mr.
Harwood was badly cut on his shoulder and threw it to his wife.
Fernandez blamed her.
He said nasty things to her family.
She couldn\'t understand what he said, but she was scared.
She could not wipe the tears from her eyes because the gloves were covered with greasy pork shreds.
The other knives are embarrassed to lower their heads.
Her life collapsed.
She and her husband both work on the cutting floor.
They never saw their daughter.
They are 26 years old but rarely have sex.
They just want to save enough money, install water pipes in Mexican houses and start a business there.
They are from the town of Tehuacan, about 150 miles southeast of Mexico City.
His mother owned a bar and a home there but didn\'t give them anything.
Mother must be careful when she is old.
\"We are here to work, so we have a chance to grow old in Mexico . \"
One night, Fernandez said, cooking pork and potatoes.
Now they are smuggling thousands of people.
In the evening, her hand was swollen into claws and stung at work.
She feels trapped.
But for the money, for the $9, she persisted. 60 an hour.
Smugglers still need to be paid.
They explain their story this way: a year ago, Coyotes drove her and her family away from Barstow and left them in Robertson.
They don\'t know anyone.
They don\'t even know they\'re in North Carolina.
They found shelter in a trailer park that used to be black but was soon packed with Mexicans.
There is a lot of drug trade and a lot of tension there.
One night, sir.
Fernandez said he asked a black neighbor to move his business inside and the man pointed a pistol at him.
\"I hate black people . \"
Fernandez spoke in Spanish and sat in the lounge less than 10 feet metres from him.
Baker and his black friend. Mr.
Harwood sat outside two tables with the White and the Indian.
After the shooting,
Fernandez packed up his family and moved to the country, sitting alone on a brick foundation in the woods.
The only connection they have with people is via a satellite antenna.
Except coyotes.
Coyotes know where they live and come to get money every other month. Their 5-year-
The old daughter has no playmates in the country, and there are very few in school.
That\'s what her parents thought.
\"We don\'t want her to be American,\" her mother said . \"
The ad says we need a union, and when a woman stands under them, gives way with a row of pig steel bars.
A disgusting th slammed on her side and knocked her meaningless, barely covering her face with the bars. As co-
The workers hurried to help the woman, who was in charge of rotating her hands in the air, a signal to keep working.
Wade Baker shook his head in disgust when he saw the scene.
The disassembly line can\'t stop anything.
\"We need a union,\" he later said in the lounge . \".
He stared at his check on payday: $288.
He spoke softly to the black worker sitting next to him.
Everyone believes that talking about unions will get you fired.
After two years in the factory
Baker earns just over $9 an hour, to meat from the cut line, just under $20,000 a year, 45 cents less than Mrs. Fernandez.
\"I don\'t want to be racist against Mexicans,\" he whispered to black workers . \".
\"But they dragged on their wages.
Purely economics.
They say Americans do not want to do the job.
This is not true.
We don\'t want to do it for $8.
We can pay $15.
\"These people know that in their 70 s, when the meat processing industry was centered around northern cities like Chicago and Omaha, people had a union that gave them $18 an hour. But by the mid-
To reduce costs, many packaging plants have moved to small towns where they can pay lower non-healing wages.
Black people sitting around the table are also convinced that Mexicans have barely paid income taxes, and they have applied for 8, 9 or even 10 exemptions.
These people believe that illegal workers should be driven out of the factory.
\"It\'s all for money,\" Mr. Baker said. His co-
The workers shook their heads.
\"There is a plantation on the roof,\" one said . \".
As far as they are concerned, many Mexicans at the Tar Heel are concerned that the Union will review their illegal status and force them to leave.
The last attempt by the union of joint food and commercial workers to organize the factory was in 1997, but the idea was almost rejected.
One reason Americans refuse to vote for the Union is because it refuses to take a stand against illegal labor.
Another reason is intimidation.
On the morning of the vote, when the workers arrived at the factory, the deputy sheriff of Braden County met them with riot gear.
Scribbled on the Union trailer \"the love of the Negro \".
According to Union statistics, five years ago, the factory had a workforce of 50% blacks, 20% whites and Indians, and 30% Latinos.
The numbers are roughly the same today, company officials say.
But from the inside of the factory, the fault seems to be more like 60% Latino, 30% black, 10% white and red.
Sherri Buffkin, a white woman and former purchasing director, testified at the National Labor Relations Commission that,labor-
The union said in an interview at the practice race, which was brought up on 1998, that the company distributed workers by race.
She also said that in the 97-year elections, management kept the list of union sympath\'s people, fired black people and replaced them with Latinos.
\"I know because I fired at least 15 employees myself,\" she said . \"
The company denied the allegations. Michael H.
Smith Field\'s lawyer, Cole, will only answer questions in writing about the company\'s labor practices, saying that the work of the Tar Heel plant was awarded through the tender process, not by race.
The company also denied that it had retained the union\'s sympath list and that it had singled out black people for dismissal.
The hog business is important for North Carolina.
It\'s a billion. dollar-a-
In this state, there are nearly two pigs every year.
There are 5 million people.
Smithfield Foods, a listed company based in Va Smithfield.
Become the first
World pork producers and processors.
It kills more than 20% pigs and more than 19 million animals every year.
The company has acquired a network of factory farms and slaughter houses, raising concerns among federal agricultural officials and lawmakers who believe the company has taken business away from smaller farmers.
According to environmental activists, Smithfield\'s actions have polluted the local water supply. (
The Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $12.
6 million in 1996, Virginia\'s processing plant discharged pollutants into the Pagan River. )
Joseph W. chairman and chief executive ·
Lute III declined to be interviewed.
Smithfield\'s employment practices have not received such close attention.
As a result, more Mexicans are hired every year.
Ed Tomlinson, acting director of the Charlotte Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, said \"an illegal foreigner will not complain so much . \".
But the company said it would not intentionally hire illegal immigrants.
Mr. Smithfield\'s lawyer.
Cole said all new employees must produce documents proving that they can work legally in the United States.
\"If the documents of any employee appear to be true and belong to the person who submitted the documents,\" he said in a written reply, \"Smithfield is required by law to treat the documents with superficial value.
\"Naturalization Service\"-
There are only 18 agents in North Carolina. -
Mr. Smithfield, because no one filed a complaint, he did not investigate Smithfield. Tomlinson said.
He said, \"there are more jobs than people, and a lot of Americans do dirty work for a while, and then go back to the couch and eat candy and watch Oprah.
\"When Billy Harwood was held in solitary confinement, he was not suitable for a conviction and he liked a book to get him through it.
A guard will come over with a car.
But when the prisoner asks for a new book, the guard likes to tear off the last 50 pages before handing it over to him.
The guard is a very interesting person.
Billy Harwood said during the break that the ad \"I\'m good at making up my own ending \".
My book will not end here.
I should be on the roof at any time.
\"But a few days later, he found out that the white contractor he was counting on already had a full roof crew.
They are Mexican and work less time than he earns at the factory.
In the third week he cut the pig, he got a new supervisor-a black woman.
She did not like his work ethic.
He walked too slowly.
He went to the bathroom too many times.
Is the bladder infected?
When he came back, she asked, standing in his place.
She banned him from going to the toilet. He boiled.
Mercedes Fernandez heads down.
She said she was sure of it: he was the laziest person she had ever seen.
She is now standing next to a black man, a prisoner from the north.
They call him K. T.
He is very kind to her.
He studied Spanish hard.
When paying for lunch on Friday, Billy Harwood was paid five hours less than others, even though everyone punched in on the same clock.
The supervisor deducted him.
The prisoners laughed at him.
\"You might be white,\" K. T.
I said, \"but you came in wearing the green clothes of the prison, which made you a black man.
\"The ending was not as written by Billy Harwood: there was no place to live and no job that was not suitable for donkeys.
He resigned and brought the greyhound back to his parents\' trailer on the mountain. When Mrs.
Fernandez came to work the next day, and a Mexican named Alfredo stood in the position of Billy Harwood.
After the end of legal discrimination, race still sparked political debate.
But public discussion of race relations seems moderate.
Race relations are defined not so much by political action as by day-to-day experience, schools, stadiums, pop culture and worship, especially in the workplace.
These encounters-
In the most literal sense of race relations in the everyday sense-
Compiling this series of reports is the result of a year-long inspection by the Times reporter.
We are constantly improving the quality of text archives.
Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions to archid_feedback @ nytimes. com.
A version of this article appears on page A00001 of the National edition on June 16, 2000, with the title: at the slaughterhouse, something will never die;
Who killed who cut who the bosses can rely on race