I was just lamenting the other day that, too often, there are not young people–I maintain we are all young but I’m talking people south of their early 20s–involved in the labor movement. But, here you go, something to point out as a positive, if perhaps isolated, exception to the rule.

Meat-packing firm is target of effort

By Adrienne P. Samuels,
Boston Globe Staff
SOMERVILLE, MA

About 50 fifth-graders and their parents marched outside a supermarket yesterday to lend their voices to a growing nationwide protest against stores stocking the products of Smithfield Packing Co., the world’s largest pork processor.

Smithfield’s packing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., made news recently after 1,000 workers walked out in protest of what they described as unfair labor practices relating to the company’s illegal immigrant, Latino, and African-American workers. Union organizers and meat packers allege that Smithfield will not allow Hispanics and blacks to work together and that people who are injured on the job are denied claims for workers’ compensation.

The children, part of the Sunday school affiliated with Workmen’s Circle, a Brookline-based Jewish cultural center, took up the cause as part of their educational training. The school teaches social responsibility, and each year encourages fifth-graders to conduct a protest.

Shouting “1-2-3-4, don’t sell Smithfield at your store,” the children and adult supporters of the United Food and Commercial Workers union waved signs and drew police to the Foodmaster store on Alewife Brook Parkway. Foodmaster, like other stores in the Boston area, sells such Smithfield products as Eckrich sausage and Butterball turkey.

Ronnie Simmons, 56, a Smithfield employee, traveled from North Carolina to help with the two-hour protest. “We need a contract, health benefits, and better working conditions,” she said.

Smithfield officials have said the protests have more to do with the union than labor practices than they do with the company.

The Upnited Food and Commercial Workers union has tried since the early 1990s to unionize packers at the Tar Heel factory, where workers have twice voted down the union.