Alabama's massive chicken industry, immigrants and Obama's plan

Alabama's massive chicken industry, immigrants and Obama's plan

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A worker poses is the uniform she wears to work in the chicken plants in Albertville, Ala., on Wedneday Feb. 4, 2015. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)
Sharon Steinmann

By Casey Toner | ctoner@al.com
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on March 01, 2015 at 8:00 AM, updated March 01, 2015 at 10:23 AM

ALABAMA CHICKENS

• AL.com investigates: Alabama, one billion chickens sold
• Alabama's massive chicken industry, immigrants and Obama's plan

Javier Garcia cuts chicken.

Five days a week, the undocumented Honduran immigrant hunches over his workspace in an Albertville processing plant and slices about 840 pounds of raw poultry into chicken strips.

He wears goggles to protect his eyes from chicken fat and oil, winter gloves to keep his fingers warm in bone-chilling factory temperatures, rubber boots to keep his feet dry, and a clear blue rain slicker to shield his body from the chicken fluids.

All told, it's a good job. Garcia puts in 40-hour workweeks, makes $8.50 per hour, and takes in enough cash to provide for his wife and their two young sons.

It's the kind of work he could only dream about when he made $5 a day as a child farmhand in Honduras - a country he left when he was 24-years-old in search of opportunity.

"You couldn't even buy shoes for your family because you don't have money to eat," said Garcia, 40. "Here you make a little bit and you buy what you need."

His life may soon take another change due to U.S. President Barack Obama's executive order on immigration.

More than 5 million undocumented immigrants - many of them with children-- are set to be protected from deportation for three years under the order, which has polarized Democrat and Republican ranks.

The order is in stark contrast to an Alabama immigration law passed in 2011, later defanged by the federal courts, that its sponsor said "attacks every aspect of an illegal alien's life."

State Rep. Barry Moore, (R-Enterprise) called Obama's order "one more disaster," that will continue to divide limited resources to a greater number of people.
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A Tyson truck drives through Albertville, Ala. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

"We need to secure the borders and document the people who are here," said Moore, whose district includes factories from two of the state's largest poultry producers.

But the White House plan is on hold after a federal judge in Texas made a last-minute ruling in favor of 26 states - including Alabama - that sought to block what some opponents have called unconstitutional executive amnesty.

The issue continues to divide federal lawmakers. On Friday, Congress agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security for one week after Republicans had threatened to defund the agency unless Democrats agreed to help block the White House orders.

Meanwhile, Obama is pressing ahead and has pledged to challenge the federal ruling in court. "I think the law is on our side, and history is on our side, and we are going to appeal it," Obama told reporters at the White House on Feb. 17.

In Alabama, immigration advocates estimate the order could benefit up to 25,000 undocumented immigrants. Like Garcia, many of them work in the poultry industry, which offers steady employment and jobs that don't require English literacy.

All told, Latinos and Hispanics make up about 32 percent of the 532,000 workers in American poultry plants, a 2012 report from advocacy group the National Council of La Raza states.

Alabama employs 12,680 chicken cutters and trimmers - the largest number those types of workers in America. And there's no reason to believe, given our national appetite for chicken, that they will be leaving anytime soon.

"More immigrants keep on coming every day," Garcia said.

Chicken shapes a city

In Albertville, the largest city on Sand Mountain, chicken is everywhere.

Signs from major industrial chicken producers such as Tyson, Wayne Farm, and Pilgrim's Pride checker the landscape of the city, and it's not uncommon to see semi-trucks hauling stacks of live caged chickens through the city streets.

About 5,889 Hispanics and Latinos lived in Albertville in 2010 - about double the amount that lived there ten years earlier, census figures show. Whereas Latinos and Hispanics make up about 4 percent of the state, they make up about 28 percent of Albertville.

Leslie McClendon, Albertville City Schools English language coordinator, said Hispanics represented about forty one percent of the student body.

Similarly, students come to the school district speaking Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

"We want them to be worldly," McClendon said. "We want them to know there's much more than Albertville, Alabama."

Many of district parents work in the chicken plants, a backbone of the community. School officials say Wayne Farms even allows the district to host parent teacher conference inside the plants; on-the-job parents can keep track of their children's activities through a district billboard in the employee break room.

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Chicken processing at the Auburn University Poultry Science department. (Julie Bennett/ jbennett@al.com)

District Supt. Ric Ayer said they lost upwards of 200 children when the state passed its immigration law, HB 56. But they returned, he said, when they found the enforcement of the law wasn't as tough as rumored.

Meanwhile, the district saw a rise in parents with refugee status and other documentations, Ayer said. Head hunters recruited immigrant workers to Albertville and word-of-mouth offers lured others to Alabama.

Wayne Farms had hired West Virgina-based employment agency East Coast Labor Solutions to bring documented immigrants to Albertville to work in light of HB 56.
Frank Singleton, company spokesman, said the law had a "cooling effect" on the labor pool.

"It was significant enough that we did some employment recruiting in the community, job fairs to fill the positions that were left," Singleton said. "The market adjusted to that."

East Coast Labor Solutions did not return multiple messages for this story.

'We need a steady workforce'
Organized poultry labor has a plan.

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ose Aguilar and other union representatives from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Mid-South Council hand out information about immigration executive action by President Obama at Emmaus Foods in Albertville on Feb. 4, 2015. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

On a balmy Thursday afternoon last month, workers with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stood outside a non-union processing plant in Albertville and handed out flyers to poultry workers leaving work.

"A victory for Gem Stone Poultry employees," stated the flyer, in English and Spanish.

The flyer outlined the basics of Obama's immigration order and listed the requirements to qualify it, including a $465 application fee. There's also a promise by the union to assist workers in filling out the paperwork for free.

Jose Aguilar, a union representative for the RWDSU South Council, is the point man on the project.

Originally from Honduras, Aguilar has lived in the United States for 15 years. A native of San Pedro Sula, Aguilar is working in the U.S. as a documented refugee after Hurricane Mitch smashed his home in 1998.

He had nowhere to go so he stayed here and began working in the chicken plants. Aguilar speaks English and Spanish and is an invaluable resource for the union.

Undocumented immigrants, he says, are in a tough position in the non-union poultry factories. They need the work, but lack the collective voice to argue for better conditions.

"They know they're illegal and they can't work anywhere else," Aguilar said. "A company says 'you have two choices: do you want to bring your union here, or do you want to keep your job?"

Randy Hadley, RWDSU South Council organizing director, said the union - which represents more than 10,000 poultry workers nationwide - said that unionized plants agreed to help enroll eligible undocumented workers under Obama's immigration law.

"We have said we have a concern that there might be some undocumented workers that came through the cracks," Hadley said. "If so, once these people come out of the shadows, we don't want them to be terminated."

Employers have told the union that if undocumented workers "come up from the shadows" to apply for work permits, they will not be fired, Hadley said.

After all, the chicken industry needs labor to keep its plants online. And poultry is big business in Alabama, accounting for $3.6 billion in revenue each year as Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia combine to produce 40 percent of the nation's chicken.

When I come home, I'm very tired. My hands hurt, my back hurts, and it continues day after day

A spokesman for the National Chicken Council, a Washington D.C. based lobbying group, was hopeful that Obama's order would lead to greater immigration reform.

"One of the challenges we face is that employer needs in our industry are permanent in nature, not seasonal or temporary," said Tom Super, the group's vice president of communications. "Our plants operate year round so we need a steady workforce. "

Moreover, the plants need workers that are willing to withstand grueling, monotonous labor.

Luciana Ortiz, of Guerrero, Mexico, has cut chicken inside an Alabama plants for seven years.

"When I come home, I'm very tired," she said, adding that she earns $7.25 an hour. "My hands hurt, my back hurts, and it continues day after day."

When Alabama passed a set of laws in 2011 targeting undocumented immigrants, tomato farmers tried to replace immigrant laborers with the unemployed. The experiment was a failure. Most quit on the first day.

One immigrant's dream
Juliza Torres has her dream on the rural outskirts of Albertvillle, past the downtown district and far from the poultry factories that have shaped her life in the United States.
Torres, 43, bought her own home nine years ago for $35,000.

She has since added a kitchen and living room to the home and paid down her mortgage in full.

She lives there with her boyfriend, her two daughters, 17 and 9, and her two grandchildren from a third daughter that died.

Torres made the money to buy the home working as an inspector inside a plant in Guntersville, where she makes $12.75 an hour.

When she was a 24-year-old single mother of two, Torres fled Honduras. She placed her daughters in the care of a family member and traveled to the border, where she used a coyote to cross into Texas.

At first, good work was hard to find. Hard work, on the other hand, was plentiful. In 85-90 degree weather, she picked blueberries in New York for .50 a box, or about $30 a day. In Florida, she worked in the fields, picking potatoes and bok choy.

The government granted her refugee status following Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and she brought her two daughters to the states in 2003.

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A worker removes the uniform he wears to work in the chicken plants in Albertville, Ala. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

"I couldn't believe it," Torres said. "I never wanted to separate from them again."

Her youngest daughter welcomed Torres' return to her life while the older one was "rebellious and resentful." She thought her mother had abandoned her.

"Now they know I wanted to give them a better life," Torres said.

Government papers allowed her to get a driver's license and seek a higher paying job. Torres got a job in a milk packing factory for $6 an hour and moved to Albertville to be with the father of her two daughters, who has since been deported.

She went from deboning chickens to inspecting them. The work is demanding, but less than before.

Both her children and grandchildren speak English. Torres says that she follows American customs and enjoys taking her children to the beach in South Alabama in the summertime.

"In this this country, I feel safe," Torres said. "I feel a little bit of both, American and Honduran."

Note: Names of the immigrants (but not the union employee) were changed to ensure safety and anonymity

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/201...ration_ob.html

Quote:

---

Five days a week, the undocumented Honduran immigrant hunches over his workspace in an Albertville processing plant and slices about 840 pounds of raw poultry into chicken strips.

He wears goggles to protect his eyes from chicken fat and oil, winter gloves to keep his fingers warm in bone-chilling factory temperatures, rubber boots to keep his feet dry, and a clear blue rain slicker to shield his body from the chicken fluids.

All told, it's a good job. Garcia puts in 40-hour workweeks, makes $8.50 per hour, and takes in enough cash to provide for his wife and their two young sons.

---

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe American workers used to do these exact same jobs for around $15.00 an hour with benefits. Make no mistake about it, we are subsidizing this cheap labor by paying for their medical care, food stamps for their U.S. born children, WIC, free school lunches for their school age children, etc., etc. Okay, now let's see if ICE will raid these poultry plants after seeing this article. Oh, and please don't hold your breath while waiting for that or any other such action to happen because it would mean certain death! :mad:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MW

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe American workers used to do these exact same jobs for around $15.00 an hour with benefits. Make no mistake about it, we are subsidizing this cheap labor by paying for their medical care, food stamps for their U.S. born children, WIC, free school lunches for their school age children, etc., etc. Okay, now let's see if ICE will raid these poultry plants after seeing this article. Oh, and please don't hold your breath while waiting for that or any other such action to happen because it would mean certain death! :mad:

---

No, Americans did these jobs for $8 and $9 an hour all over the country. My hometown had a chicken processing plant, Americans drove from a 40 mile radius to work there, and at the time it closed a few years ago, the average wage was $9 an hour with some benefits, and entry level was around $7. As they trained and gained speed and accuracy, they received a raise. 300 Americans worked in that plant. And I'm sure this was the same throughout the small towns of the midwest and south where most of them are. The reason it closed was because it was bought up by another company in Arkansas and they folded this work into that plant with an expansion, because that location was closer to the chicken growers and with high hauling costs due to the rising cost of fuel at that time, it could have been an appropriate decision. Now, the question is were Americans hired to work in that expansion plant or did they hire illegal aliens and immigrants? I was never able to verify one way or another.

What you may be thinking of were the slaughterhouse workers, who handled large products like beef and pork. Those guys through the Black Meatpackers Union earned around $16 an hour, the highest manufacturing and processing wage of the times. But the industry busted their unions by relocating all their plants from the major metropolitan areas to these remote rural areas and hired illegal aliens to work in the facilities. It was a terrible blow to these city workers and a huge violation of their civil rights.

As to the chicken processing plants, I know a few years ago Tyson and Perdue chicken processing plants were charged in a lawsuit for hiring illegal aliens. Whether they have stopped those practices or not I don't know, but they did close several plants because of it and fired a bunch of managers. Whether they reopened them with American workers or legal immigrants or some combination of the two, I don't know. The whole ugly scene makes me want to be a vegetarian, but then a lot of the vegetable jobs are going to illegal aliens and immigrants, so that's not the answer either.

The answer is to force Congress to stop it!

1. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs - Businessweek
   
   www.bloomberg.com/.../why-americans-wont-do-dirty-j...
   
   Bloomberg L.P.
   
   Nov 9, 2011 - In the wake of an immigrant exodus, Alabama has jobs. ... For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits. ... dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have ...

Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs

By Elizabeth Dwoskin November 09, 2011

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Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.

Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.

Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”

SLIDESHOW: Slide Show: The Jobs Americans Won't Do

His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.

In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and unmade beds. “Somebody has to figure this out. The immigrants aren’t coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,” Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs, and I need to give them to somebody.”

There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.

PODCAST: Podcast: Behind the Story

At a moment when the country is relentless focused on unemployment, there are still jobs that often go unfilled. These are difficult, dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for Americans.

For decades many of Alabama’s industries have benefited from a compliant foreign workforce and a state government that largely looked the other way on wages, working conditions, and immigration status. With so many foreign workers now effectively banished from the work pool and jobs sitting empty, businesses must contend with American workers who have higher expectations for themselves and their employers—even in a terrible economy where work is hard to find. “I don’t consider this a labor shortage,” says Tom Surtees, Alabama’s director of industrial relations, himself the possessor of a job few would want: calming business owners who have seen their employees vanish. “We’re transitioning from a business model.

Whether an employer in agriculture used migrant workers, or whether it’s another industry that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that business model is going to have to change.”

On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.

Castro, 34, says he crossed the border on foot illegally 19 years ago and has three American-born children. He describes the mood in the fields since the law passed as tense and fearful.

Gesturing around him, Castro says that not long ago the fields were filled with Hispanic laborers. Now he and his crew are the only ones left. “Many of our friends left us or got deported,” he says. “The only reason that we can stand it is for our children.”


He wipes sweat from beneath his fluorescent orange baseball cap, given to him by a timber company in Mississippi, where he works part of the year cutting pine. Castro says picking tomatoes in the Alabama heat isn’t easy, but he counts himself lucky. He has never passed out on the job, as many others have, though he does have a chronic pinched nerve in his neck from bending over for hours on end. The experiment taking place in Alabama makes no sense to him. Why try to make Americans do this work when they clearly don’t want it? “They come one day, and don’t show up the next,” Castro says.

It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. A few miles down the road, Chad Smith and a few other farmers sit on chairs outside J&J Farms, venting about their changed fortunes. Smith, 22, says his 85 acres of tomatoes are only partly picked because 30 of the 35 migrant workers who had been with him for years left when the law went into effect. The state’s efforts to help him and other farmers attract Americans are a joke, as far as he is concerned. “Oh, I tried to hire them,” Smith says. “I put a radio ad out—out of Birmingham. About 15 to 20 people showed up, and most of them quit. They couldn’t work fast enough to make the money they thought they could make, so they just quit.”

Joey Bearden, who owns a 30-acre farm nearby, waits for his turn to speak. “The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants to put people back to work—they’re not coming!” says Bearden. “I’ve been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.”

It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse. Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient.

Tom Surtees is tired of hearing employers grouse about their lazy countrymen. “Don’t tell me an Alabamian can’t work out in the field picking produce because it’s hot and labor intensive,” he says. “Go into a steel mill. Go into a foundry. Go into numerous other occupations and tell them Alabamians don’t like this work because it’s hot and it requires manual labor.” The difference being, jobs in Alabama’s foundries and steel mills pay better wages—with benefits. “If you’re trying to justify paying someone below whatever an appropriate wage level is so you can bring your product, I don’t think that’s a valid argument,” Surtees says.

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

Yet after three weeks in the fields, he is frustrated. His crew of seven has dropped down to two. “A lot of people look at this as slave work. I say, you do what you have to do,” Durr says. “My mission is to finish these acres. As long as I’m here, I’m striving for something.” In a neighboring field, Cedric Rayford is working a row. The 28-year-old came up with two friends from Gadsden, Ala., after hearing on the radio that farmers were hiring. The work is halfway complete when one member of their crew decides to quit. Rayford and crewmate Marvin Turner try to persuade their friend to stay and finish the job.

Otherwise, no one will get paid. Turner even offers $20 out of his own pocket as a sweetener to no effect. “When a man’s mind is made up, there’s about nothing you can do,” he says.


The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could just work at McDonald’s (MCD),” he says.

Turner, who usually works as a landscaper, agrees the pay is too low. At $75 in gas for the three days, he figures he won’t even break even. The men finish their cigarettes. Turner glances up the hill at Castro’s work crew. “Look,” he says. “You got immigrants doing more than what blacks or whites will.

Look at them, they just work and work all day. They don’t look at it like it’s a hard job. They don’t take breaks!”

The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma.”

Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the job itself,” he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, “auto manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States, it’s a native category.”

In Alabama, the transition to immigrant labor happened slowly. Although migrant workers have picked fruit and processed food in Alabama for four decades, in 1990 only 1.1 percent of the state’s total population was foreign-born. That year the U.S. Census put the combined Latin American and North American foreign-born population at 8,072 people. By 2000 there were 75,830 Hispanics recorded on the Census; by 2010 that number had more than doubled, and Hispanics are now nearly 4 percent of the population.

That first rush of Hispanic immigrants was initiated by the state’s $2.4 billion poultry and egg industry. Alabama’s largest agricultural export commodity went through a major expansion in the mid-’90s, thanks in part to new markets in the former Soviet Union. Companies such as Tyson Foods (TSN) found the state’s climate, plentiful water supply, light regulation, and anti-union policies to be ideal. At the time, better-educated American workers in cities such as Decatur and Athens were either moving into the state’s burgeoning aerospace and service industries or following the trend of leaving Alabama and heading north or west, where they found office jobs or work in manufacturing with set hours, higher pay, and safer conditions—things most Americans take for granted. In just over a decade, school districts in once-white towns such as Albertville, in the northeastern corner of the state, became 34 percent Hispanic. By the 2000s, Hispanic immigrants had moved across the state, following the construction boom in the cities, in the growing plant nurseries in the south, and on the catfish farms west of Montgomery. It wasn’t until anti-immigration sentiment spread across the country, as the recession took hold and didn’t let go, that the Republican legislators who run Alabama began to regard the immigrants they once courted as the enemy.

A large white banner hangs on the chain-link fence outside the Harvest Select plant: “Now Hiring: Filleters/Trimmers. Stop Here To Apply.” Randy Rhodes unfurled it the day after the law took effect. “We’re getting applications, but you have to weed through those three and four times,” says Amy Hart, the company’s human resources manager. A job fair she held attracted 50 people, and Hart offered positions to 13 of them.

Two failed the drug test. One applicant asked her out on a date during the interview. “People reapply who have been terminated for stealing, for fighting, for drugs,” she says.

“Nope, not that desperate yet!”

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club(WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

When the immigration law passed in late September, John McMillan’s phone lines were deluged. People wanted McMillan, the state’s agriculture commissioner, to tell them whether they’d be in business next year. “Like, what are we going to do? Do we need to be ordering strawberry plants for next season? Do we need to be ordering fertilizer?” McMillan recalls. “And of course, we don’t have the answers, either.”

His buddy Tom Surtees, the industrial relations director, faces the same problem on a larger scale. Where McMillan only has to worry about agriculture, other industries, from construction to hospitality, are reporting worker shortages. His ultimate responsibility is to generate the results that Governor Bentley has claimed the legislation will produce—lots of jobs for Alabamians. That means he cannot allow for the possibility that the law will fail.

“If those Alabamians on unemployment continue to not apply for jobs in construction and poultry, then [Republican politicians] are going to have to help us continue to find immigrant workers,” says Jay Reed, who heads the Alabama Associated Builders & Contractors. “And those immigrant workers are gone.”

Business owners are furious not only that they have lost so many workers but that everyone in the state seemed to see it coming except Bentley, who failed to heed warnings from leaders in neighboring Georgia who said they had experienced a similar flight of immigrants after passing their own immigration law. Bentley declined to be interviewed for this story.

McMillan and Surtees spend their days playing matchmaker with anxious employers, urging them to post job openings on the state’s employment website so they can hook up with unemployed Alabamians. McMillan is asking Baptist ministers to tell their flocks that jobs are available. He wants businesses to rethink the way they run their operations to make them more attractive. On a road trip through the state, he met an apple farmer who told him he had started paying workers by the hour instead of by how much they picked. The apples get bruised and damaged when people are picking for speed. “Our farmers are very innovative and are used to dealing with challenges,” McMillan says. “You know, they can come up with all kinds of things. Something I’ve thought about is, maybe we should go to four-hour shifts instead of eight-hour shifts. Or maybe two six-hour shifts.”

McMillan acknowledges that even if some of these efforts are successful, they are unlikely to fill the labor void left by the immigrants’ disappearance. Some growers, he says, might have to go back to traditional mechanized row crops such as corn and soybeans. The smaller farmers might have to decrease volumes to the point where they are no longer commercially viable. “I don’t know,” says McMillan. “I just don’t know, but we’ve got to try to think of everything we possibly can.”

Since late September, McMillan’s staff has been attending meetings with farmers throughout the state. They are supposed to be Q&A sessions about how to comply with the new law.

Some have devolved into shouting matches about how much they hate the statute. A few weeks ago, Smith, the tomato farmer whose workers fled Alabama, confronted state Senator Scott Beason, the Republican who introduced the immigration law. Beason had come out to talk to farmers, and Smith shoved an empty tomato bucket into his chest. “You pick!” he told him.

“He didn’t even put his hands on the bucket,” Smith recalls.

“He didn’t even try.” Says Beason: “My picking tomatoes would not change or prove anything.”

While the politicians and business owners argue, others see opportunity. Michael Maldonado, 19, wakes up at 4:30 each morning in a trailer in Tuscaloosa, about an hour from Harvest Select, where he works as a fish processor. Maldonado, who grew up in an earthen-floor shack in Guatemala, says he likes working at the plant. “One hundred dollars here is 700 quetzals,” he says. “The managers say I am a good worker.”

After three years, though, the long hours and scant pay are starting to wear on him. With the business in desperate need of every available hand, it’s not a bad time to test just how much the bosses value his labor. Next week he plans to ask his supervisor for a raise. “I will say to them, ‘If you pay me a little more—just a little more—I will stay working here,’ ” he says.

“Otherwise, I will leave. I will go to work in another state.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine...-11092011.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

1. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs - Businessweek
   
   www.bloomberg.com/.../why-americans-wont-do-dirty-j...
   
   Bloomberg L.P.
   
   Nov 9, 2011 - In the wake of an immigrant exodus, Alabama has jobs. ... For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits. ... dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have ...

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That's a lie. Why are you posting lies about American Workers?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs

By Elizabeth Dwoskin November 09, 2011

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Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.

Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.

Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”

SLIDESHOW: Slide Show: The Jobs Americans Won't Do

His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.

In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and unmade beds. “Somebody has to figure this out. The immigrants aren’t coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,” Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs, and I need to give them to somebody.”

There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.

PODCAST: Podcast: Behind the Story

At a moment when the country is relentless focused on unemployment, there are still jobs that often go unfilled. These are difficult, dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for Americans.

For decades many of Alabama’s industries have benefited from a compliant foreign workforce and a state government that largely looked the other way on wages, working conditions, and immigration status. With so many foreign workers now effectively banished from the work pool and jobs sitting empty, businesses must contend with American workers who have higher expectations for themselves and their employers—even in a terrible economy where work is hard to find. “I don’t consider this a labor shortage,” says Tom Surtees, Alabama’s director of industrial relations, himself the possessor of a job few would want: calming business owners who have seen their employees vanish. “We’re transitioning from a business model.

Whether an employer in agriculture used migrant workers, or whether it’s another industry that used illegal immigrants, they had a business model and that business model is going to have to change.”

On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.

Castro, 34, says he crossed the border on foot illegally 19 years ago and has three American-born children. He describes the mood in the fields since the law passed as tense and fearful.

Gesturing around him, Castro says that not long ago the fields were filled with Hispanic laborers. Now he and his crew are the only ones left. “Many of our friends left us or got deported,” he says. “The only reason that we can stand it is for our children.”


He wipes sweat from beneath his fluorescent orange baseball cap, given to him by a timber company in Mississippi, where he works part of the year cutting pine. Castro says picking tomatoes in the Alabama heat isn’t easy, but he counts himself lucky. He has never passed out on the job, as many others have, though he does have a chronic pinched nerve in his neck from bending over for hours on end. The experiment taking place in Alabama makes no sense to him. Why try to make Americans do this work when they clearly don’t want it? “They come one day, and don’t show up the next,” Castro says.

It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. A few miles down the road, Chad Smith and a few other farmers sit on chairs outside J&J Farms, venting about their changed fortunes. Smith, 22, says his 85 acres of tomatoes are only partly picked because 30 of the 35 migrant workers who had been with him for years left when the law went into effect. The state’s efforts to help him and other farmers attract Americans are a joke, as far as he is concerned. “Oh, I tried to hire them,” Smith says. “I put a radio ad out—out of Birmingham. About 15 to 20 people showed up, and most of them quit. They couldn’t work fast enough to make the money they thought they could make, so they just quit.”

Joey Bearden, who owns a 30-acre farm nearby, waits for his turn to speak. “The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants to put people back to work—they’re not coming!” says Bearden. “I’ve been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.”

It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse. Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient.

Tom Surtees is tired of hearing employers grouse about their lazy countrymen. “Don’t tell me an Alabamian can’t work out in the field picking produce because it’s hot and labor intensive,” he says. “Go into a steel mill. Go into a foundry. Go into numerous other occupations and tell them Alabamians don’t like this work because it’s hot and it requires manual labor.” The difference being, jobs in Alabama’s foundries and steel mills pay better wages—with benefits. “If you’re trying to justify paying someone below whatever an appropriate wage level is so you can bring your product, I don’t think that’s a valid argument,” Surtees says.

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

Yet after three weeks in the fields, he is frustrated. His crew of seven has dropped down to two. “A lot of people look at this as slave work. I say, you do what you have to do,” Durr says. “My mission is to finish these acres. As long as I’m here, I’m striving for something.” In a neighboring field, Cedric Rayford is working a row. The 28-year-old came up with two friends from Gadsden, Ala., after hearing on the radio that farmers were hiring. The work is halfway complete when one member of their crew decides to quit. Rayford and crewmate Marvin Turner try to persuade their friend to stay and finish the job.

Otherwise, no one will get paid. Turner even offers $20 out of his own pocket as a sweetener to no effect. “When a man’s mind is made up, there’s about nothing you can do,” he says.


The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could just work at McDonald’s (MCD),” he says.

Turner, who usually works as a landscaper, agrees the pay is too low. At $75 in gas for the three days, he figures he won’t even break even. The men finish their cigarettes. Turner glances up the hill at Castro’s work crew. “Look,” he says. “You got immigrants doing more than what blacks or whites will.

Look at them, they just work and work all day. They don’t look at it like it’s a hard job. They don’t take breaks!”

The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma.”

Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the job itself,” he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, “auto manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States, it’s a native category.”

In Alabama, the transition to immigrant labor happened slowly. Although migrant workers have picked fruit and processed food in Alabama for four decades, in 1990 only 1.1 percent of the state’s total population was foreign-born. That year the U.S. Census put the combined Latin American and North American foreign-born population at 8,072 people. By 2000 there were 75,830 Hispanics recorded on the Census; by 2010 that number had more than doubled, and Hispanics are now nearly 4 percent of the population.

That first rush of Hispanic immigrants was initiated by the state’s $2.4 billion poultry and egg industry. Alabama’s largest agricultural export commodity went through a major expansion in the mid-’90s, thanks in part to new markets in the former Soviet Union. Companies such as Tyson Foods (TSN) found the state’s climate, plentiful water supply, light regulation, and anti-union policies to be ideal. At the time, better-educated American workers in cities such as Decatur and Athens were either moving into the state’s burgeoning aerospace and service industries or following the trend of leaving Alabama and heading north or west, where they found office jobs or work in manufacturing with set hours, higher pay, and safer conditions—things most Americans take for granted. In just over a decade, school districts in once-white towns such as Albertville, in the northeastern corner of the state, became 34 percent Hispanic. By the 2000s, Hispanic immigrants had moved across the state, following the construction boom in the cities, in the growing plant nurseries in the south, and on the catfish farms west of Montgomery. It wasn’t until anti-immigration sentiment spread across the country, as the recession took hold and didn’t let go, that the Republican legislators who run Alabama began to regard the immigrants they once courted as the enemy.

A large white banner hangs on the chain-link fence outside the Harvest Select plant: “Now Hiring: Filleters/Trimmers. Stop Here To Apply.” Randy Rhodes unfurled it the day after the law took effect. “We’re getting applications, but you have to weed through those three and four times,” says Amy Hart, the company’s human resources manager. A job fair she held attracted 50 people, and Hart offered positions to 13 of them.

Two failed the drug test. One applicant asked her out on a date during the interview. “People reapply who have been terminated for stealing, for fighting, for drugs,” she says.

“Nope, not that desperate yet!”

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club(WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

When the immigration law passed in late September, John McMillan’s phone lines were deluged. People wanted McMillan, the state’s agriculture commissioner, to tell them whether they’d be in business next year. “Like, what are we going to do? Do we need to be ordering strawberry plants for next season? Do we need to be ordering fertilizer?” McMillan recalls. “And of course, we don’t have the answers, either.”

His buddy Tom Surtees, the industrial relations director, faces the same problem on a larger scale. Where McMillan only has to worry about agriculture, other industries, from construction to hospitality, are reporting worker shortages. His ultimate responsibility is to generate the results that Governor Bentley has claimed the legislation will produce—lots of jobs for Alabamians. That means he cannot allow for the possibility that the law will fail.

“If those Alabamians on unemployment continue to not apply for jobs in construction and poultry, then [Republican politicians] are going to have to help us continue to find immigrant workers,” says Jay Reed, who heads the Alabama Associated Builders & Contractors. “And those immigrant workers are gone.”

Business owners are furious not only that they have lost so many workers but that everyone in the state seemed to see it coming except Bentley, who failed to heed warnings from leaders in neighboring Georgia who said they had experienced a similar flight of immigrants after passing their own immigration law. Bentley declined to be interviewed for this story.

McMillan and Surtees spend their days playing matchmaker with anxious employers, urging them to post job openings on the state’s employment website so they can hook up with unemployed Alabamians. McMillan is asking Baptist ministers to tell their flocks that jobs are available. He wants businesses to rethink the way they run their operations to make them more attractive. On a road trip through the state, he met an apple farmer who told him he had started paying workers by the hour instead of by how much they picked. The apples get bruised and damaged when people are picking for speed. “Our farmers are very innovative and are used to dealing with challenges,” McMillan says. “You know, they can come up with all kinds of things. Something I’ve thought about is, maybe we should go to four-hour shifts instead of eight-hour shifts. Or maybe two six-hour shifts.”

McMillan acknowledges that even if some of these efforts are successful, they are unlikely to fill the labor void left by the immigrants’ disappearance. Some growers, he says, might have to go back to traditional mechanized row crops such as corn and soybeans. The smaller farmers might have to decrease volumes to the point where they are no longer commercially viable. “I don’t know,” says McMillan. “I just don’t know, but we’ve got to try to think of everything we possibly can.”

Since late September, McMillan’s staff has been attending meetings with farmers throughout the state. They are supposed to be Q&A sessions about how to comply with the new law.

Some have devolved into shouting matches about how much they hate the statute. A few weeks ago, Smith, the tomato farmer whose workers fled Alabama, confronted state Senator Scott Beason, the Republican who introduced the immigration law. Beason had come out to talk to farmers, and Smith shoved an empty tomato bucket into his chest. “You pick!” he told him.

“He didn’t even put his hands on the bucket,” Smith recalls.

“He didn’t even try.” Says Beason: “My picking tomatoes would not change or prove anything.”

While the politicians and business owners argue, others see opportunity. Michael Maldonado, 19, wakes up at 4:30 each morning in a trailer in Tuscaloosa, about an hour from Harvest Select, where he works as a fish processor. Maldonado, who grew up in an earthen-floor shack in Guatemala, says he likes working at the plant. “One hundred dollars here is 700 quetzals,” he says. “The managers say I am a good worker.”

After three years, though, the long hours and scant pay are starting to wear on him. With the business in desperate need of every available hand, it’s not a bad time to test just how much the bosses value his labor. Next week he plans to ask his supervisor for a raise. “I will say to them, ‘If you pay me a little more—just a little more—I will stay working here,’ ” he says.

“Otherwise, I will leave. I will go to work in another state.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine...-11092011.html

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This is a lie. Why are you posting lies written by and for Pro-Amnesty Pro-illegal Immigration advocates who plant these stories?

Quote:

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Some have devolved into shouting matches about how much they hate the statute. A few weeks ago, Smith, the tomato farmer whose workers fled Alabama, confronted state Senator Scott Beason, the Republican who introduced the immigration law. Beason had come out to talk to farmers, and Smith shoved an empty tomato bucket into his chest. “You pick!” he told him.

“He didn’t even put his hands on the bucket,” Smith recalls.

“He didn’t even try.” Says Beason: “My picking tomatoes would not change or prove anything.”

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If I were Beason, I would have handed the bucket back to Smith, and said "they're your tomatoes, you pick 'em, or pay an American a high enough wage so they'll pick 'em for you. That's our system, that's our way, and that's the way it's gonna stay."

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Judy

That's a lie. Why are you posting lies about American Workers?

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Most Americans will not work 10 hours a day for minimum wage with no benefits, so that is NOT a lie.

I do not know one person, American or not, who would stand up for 10 or more hours a day, day in and day out, in a cold damp room cutting up chickens for minimum wage. And I'll swear to that in a court of law.

Judy wrote:

Quote:

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What you may be thinking of were the slaughterhouse workers, who handled large products like beef and pork. Those guys through the Black Meatpackers Union earned around $16 an hour, the highest manufacturing and processing wage of the times.

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You may be right, I may be thinking about meat packing plants. However, that still doesn't change the fact that we're subsidizing their cheap labor. We have a program (H-2A) designed especially for the farmers but many of them refuse to use the program because they cry that the process is to costly and cumbersome.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Most Americans will not work 10 hours a day for minimum wage with no benefits, so that is NOT a lie.

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They work 10 hour days for minimum wage with no or few benefits all over the country. Many of them work 12 hour shifts, hold 2 and 3 jobs, to get 40 to 60 hours a week of their minimum wages.

You obviously don't know anything about American workers who do this hard work and have always done this hard work. Please don't show such disconnect and ignorance of our work force on this forum.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

I do not know one person, American or not, who would stand up for 10 or more hours a day, day in and day out, in a cold damp room cutting up chickens for minimum wage. And I'll swear to that in a court of law.

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Then either you're ready to commit perjury under oath or your background and lifestyle are so disconnected from the people of this country, that you don't know the Americans who are doing this work every single day in chicken plants all over the United States. There were 300 in my hometown, all Americans, who worked in that chicken plant for 15 years for less than $9 an hour experienced, and $7 entry level who were devastated when the plant closed. They'd worked so hard in that environment that a lot of them with years at it developed a painful carpel tunnel syndrome that required surgery to get back on the job. One of our largest employers here in my town where I live now is Smithfield Farms, a pork slaughterhouse and processing facility. All American workers. Hard difficult work, and they've been doing it for years.

So please don't promise to swear to what you know or don't know when your knowledge of a subject is irrelevant because of your lack of knowledge about it. This forum is not to be used to perpetuate lies about American Workers to feed the troughs of pro-immigration and illegal immigration advocates. So please stop.

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As I stated:

I do NOT personally know any person who would work 10 hours a day for minimum wage.
(Everyone I know gets more than minimum wage for anything they do.)

So I can truthfully state that as fact in court or elsewhere.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MW

Judy wrote:



You may be right, I may be thinking about meat packing plants. However, that still doesn't change the fact that we're subsidizing their cheap labor. We have a program (H-2A) designed especially for the farmers but many of them refuse to use the program because they cry that the process is to costly and cumbersome.

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Probably so, the Black Meatpacker's Union was famous, they worked so hard to make many labor advances. They not only fought for their own wages, benefits and rights, they also worked for better practices that improved food quality and safety for the customers. They were a legendary union. They later merged with the White Meatpacker's Union.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

As I stated:

I do NOT personally know any person who would work 10 hours a day for minimum wage.
(Everyone I know gets more than minimum wage for anything they do.)

So I can truthfully state that as fact in court or elsewhere.

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That's fine, but this is a perfect example of someone using their own small world with such limited exposure and knowledge judging others and arriving at totally erroneous conclusions, while ignoring the vast truth. When you don't personally know anything about a subject, and refuse to acknowledge facts readily available, then it's best not to comment on it as if you do or post propaganda stories that are lies about the American Work Force.

By the way, your propaganda is 4 years old. Alabama's immigration law has worked out fine for Alabama farmers. They were just whining about losing their illegals much the way their great grandpappies whined about losing their slaves.

Apparently we have some disagreements on this thread. The subject of American workers is a serious one and can cause passions to flare but sometimes we have to just agree to disagree. We all come from different life experiences and thus sometimes disagree on some issues. Please remember we are united here for a common purpose....illegal immigration. Thank you for your understanding.

According to the current laws of the United States, Americans are not required to work 10 hour shifts without being offered compensatory overtime pay correct? The demand for people to work 10 hour shifts in hostile conditions without adequate pay is the kind of free roaming slavery the elites are manufacturing these days instead of the intent of our current laws correct?

W

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ALIPAC

According to the current laws of the United States, Americans are not required to work 10 hour shifts without being offered compensatory overtime pay correct? The demand for people to work 10 hour shifts in hostile conditions without adequate pay is the kind of free roaming slavery the elites are manufacturing these days instead of the intent of our current laws correct?

W

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That's what I'm saying.
No one I know would work 10 hour, or more, for minimum wage with few or no benefits.
American workers are smarter than that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ALIPAC

According to the current laws of the United States, Americans are not required to work 10 hour shifts without being offered compensatory overtime pay correct? The demand for people to work 10 hour shifts in hostile conditions without adequate pay is the kind of free roaming slavery the elites are manufacturing these days instead of the intent of our current laws correct?

W

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Federal overtime pay laws are based on weekly 40 hour weeks. There is no federal restriction on the amount of hours per day. Employers can schedule 4 ten hour days, or 3 twelve hour days, and many operations that run 7 days a week have to do this. California is the only state that has a state overtime pay law that restricts daily shifts to 8 hours per day before overtime pay is required under state law. There are no federally required meal or rest breaks either, only that if an employee needs to use the restroom, and if they take less than so many minutes, like 10 minutes, they won't be docked on their pay, and if they eat their lunch while working, they also can't be docked on their pay. A handful of states have some state laws that require some breaks. Most Americans have always worked under these conditions and tens of millions of Americans still are. Many companies go beyond the requirements of the law and have breaks but they are not required by federal or most state laws to do so.

I live in Alabama and I know what the economy is like in my area. . Many manufacturing plants that supplied jobs have moved to Mexico and there are empty facilities everywhere. People have perpetual garages sales and second hand stores on every corner. Master plumbers are getting as low as $15.00 and hour and feel lucky to get that to feed their families. Welfare for US citizens is harder to get than it is for illegals it seems.

The illegals work at the chicken plants,in construction and mostly roofers for cash while momma sits at home and has kids on welfare claiming to be a single parent so they are usually dual income families. Go to any Walmart on a saturday and the large happy families are buying the place out with their cash and EBT cards. I noticed one of these families a couple of weeks ago. They were Guatemalan and had 5 kids that looked maybe a year apart. I was in line behind them and she whipped out the EBT card and they all crawled into a fairly new dual cab pick-up.