[SustainableTompkins] SUPPORT SMITHFIELD WORKERS RIGHT TO CLEAN DRINKING WATER

[Tony Del Plato]

Dear folks:
Please take a moment to read the following about an elemental plea for
justice. Sustainability has to include speaking truth to power. It is
unacceptable that unclean water is given to workers. This is too wrong to
remain silent.
Tony Del Plato
Ithaca, NY



   *ACTION: SUPPORT **SMITHFIELD** WORKERS' RIGHT TO CLEAN DRINKING WATER*

*CALL **SMITHFIELD**'S TAR HEEL PLANT TODAY!*

*910-862-7675*

*Ask to speak to Vice President Larry Johnson.*

*Tell him that access to clean, sanitary drinking water is a fundamental
right for all workers! **Smithfield** needs to stop confusing workers with
the hogs they produce!*

If you thought that the most fundamental labor battles were won in the
nineteenth century, you should take another look at Smithfield's Tar Heel
packing plant, where, hard as it may be to believe, workers have been
engaged in a struggle for access to clean, sanitary *drinking water*.

For more than two months now, plant managers have refused to even meet with
the group of Smithfield's livestock workers—the men and women who herd the
32,000 pigs that are shipped to the plant each day—who have raised the
drinking water concerns. Yesterday afternoon, 19 employees marched to
managers' offices, demanding clean, safe water. Once again, managers refused
to meet with them as a group.

*Foul Water*
In the heat of a Carolina summer, temperatures inside the plant can soar to
more than 100 degrees. In such conditions, drinking water quickly becomes a
serious health issue. Yet many plant drinking fountains are clogged with
filth, and others are simply unusable. Workers rely on management to provide
them water. They complain that that they work long hours before the water is
brought out, and when it arrives, it's been dragged across a plant floor
contaminated with hog waste and blood. Workers have even witnessed a hog
gnawing on the spigots!

*Allies & Next Steps*
Dozens of North Carolina churches, civil rights leaders and employment
advocates are standing alongside workers in this struggle. Yesterday
afternoon they issued a letter to the plant protesting the "squalor-like
conditions" the livestock workers are forced to work in.

Today, workers will file a formal complaint with the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration to report these and a number of other issues.

Smithfield workers continue to fight for the most fundamental health and
safety issues. They need your voice to support them. Please take a moment
and lend your voice to their struggle.

*ACTION ITEM: CALL **SMITHFIELD**'S TAR HEEL PLANT!*

*910-862-7675*

*Ask to speak to Vice President Larry Johnson.*

*Tell him that access to clean, sanitary drinking water is a fundamental
right for all workers! **Smithfield** needs to stop confusing workers with
the hogs they produce!*

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-- 
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it
deliberately with faulty arguments.
  - Friedrich Nietzsche