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  1. #1
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    Behind the Postville slaughterhouse raid

    Behind the Postville slaughterhouse raid
    COMMENTARY | May 18, 2008
    A federal immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in northeast Iowa on May 12 was the largest such operation in U.S. history, with nearly 400 people arrested.

    The following Q and A with Stephen G. Bloom first appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Bloom is the author of "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," and of an earlier report on Postville that ran in NiemanWatchdog.

    Q: For five years in the 1990s, you researched the Agriprocessors plant in Postville and told the complicated story of how the success of this kosher slaughterhouse transformed a small Iowa town. How do the events of the past week fit into that story?

    A: The Postville saga continues. In the late 1990s while researching the book, I quickly learned there were many undocumented workers at Agriprocessors. I learned of guns being bought and sold on the kill floor. Drugs were not uncommon, either. The sanitary conditions were appalling. All four of these same issues were alleged in the government's affidavit, which resulted in Monday's raid. An additional element I learned while researching the book was that female workers said they often were victims of sexual harassment.
    The central reason for Monday's raid, though – that undocumented workers were being employed at Agriprocessors – has been one of the worst kept secrets in Iowa for years.

    Q: How do the conditions at the Agriprocessors plant compare to slaughterhouses in other rural communities?

    A: I only researched Agriprocessors, so I can't tell you how the plant compares to other slaughterhouses. I can tell you, though, that anyone who knocked on Agriprocessors' employment window with a minimum of documentation (which could be bought on the local black market) would be on the kill floor within 24 hours.
    Something else that's important to note is that today's hiring of undocumented workers is the inevitable conclusion of the historic decision to move slaughterhouses from big cities to small rural communities.

    Q: What do you mean by "inevitable"?

    A: Let's look at the raid with some historic perspective. Agriprocessors started in 1987 in a defunct slaughterhouse. Before Aaron Rubashkin bought the plant, the only animals inside were the squirrels and raccoons that had made it their home.

    Postville had a population of about 1,400 back then. As the slaughterhouse started to flourish, almost a thousand workers eventually were hired. No way could Agriprocessors pull all of its labor force from Postville. The locals didn't want to do such backbreaking work for minimum wage and few, if any, benefits.

    Q: But why was it "inevitable" to turn to undocumented workers?

    A: Forty years ago, many slaughterhouses were located in or near cities like Chicago, Fort Worth, Omaha, where there was abundant labor. At about that time, someone made the observation that it made great economic sense to move slaughterhouses closer to the corn-fed, rich Midwestern beef – fewer unions, cheaper land, less transportation costs, less government oversight. The very essence of rural America is sparse population, so the decision completely changed the economics of meat slaughtering. There's another issue, too, and that's how the meat-slaughtering shifted from requiring high-paid, highly skilled butchers to what it's become – a mechanized disassembly line that calls for unskilled workers.

    The Hasidim, at first, hired a few locals. But the majority of people who took jobs were Eastern Europeans. This was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, so there were Russians and Ukrainians looking for opportunities. They were refugees. Some came to America legally; some came illegally.

    But those who worked at the slaughterhouse didn't work one day longer than they had to. That's the American Dream: Coming and taking the lowest job on the economic ladder, and then working your way up.

    It was only after the Eastern European labor market dried up that there was a shift to hiring Latinos. There was no shortage of Mexicans and Central Americans who would gladly work in the slaughterhouse.

    Q: After having personally witnessed incidents of labor abuse and unsanitary conditions in the Postville plant, are you surprised that it took the government so long to respond?

    A: Yes and no. Everyone knew what was happening in the plant. PETA had been in the slaughterhouse and produced a video documenting abuses. The U.S. Department of Labor had fined the company for repeated workplace safety issues. The EPA was involved because the company had discharged pollutants. The USDA mandated recalls because of unsanitary conditions.

    We need to consider the owners' possible viewpoint here – that perhaps hiring undocumented workers is simply the cost of doing business for slaughterhouses in rural America. It's akin to driving 90 mph on the Interstate because you want to get somewhere fast. You could drive 90 mph for three weeks without any problem, and then one day a trooper stops you. For three weeks you've had the benefit of arriving where you needed to go much faster. Maybe the cost of the ticket was worth it.

    Q: How are the labor and health issues complicated by the overt religious identity of the owners of the company?

    A: Agriprocessors is a privately run company. In a matter of 10 years, it went from a start-up meat-packing plant to the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world.

    I think it's a fallacy to believe that, because the slaughterhouse is being run by Hasidic Jews who view piety as a premiere ethic, the owners' religious values somehow change their business practices. I think the owners likely compartmentalize their business decisions from their own personal and religious ethics.

    Q: Do the events of this week make you want to write a sequel to "Postville"?

    A: No. It was a painful process to report and write this book. When the book came out, I was assailed by many conservative and Orthodox Jews as a turncoat. The Hasidim publicly urged me to convert to Lutheranism.

    They said I was a disgrace to Jews worldwide.

    But the book has held up. The facts exposed were shocking then and they're shocking today. So there's a continuum – what began in 1995 extends to 2008.

    Q: So the saga doesn't stop?

    A: I've been told that the slaughterhouse owners are almost doubling wages to anyone documented who will work at Agriprocessors today. But I think that is short-term. The nature of the problem isn't going away. Few U.S. workers want to work in a slaughterhouse for even these moderately higher wages. It's one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

    One final point worth making: While the arrested Agriprocessors workers broke the law by buying Social Security cards and by entering the United States illegally, they came to the U.S. for all the right reasons. They took jobs that Americans wouldn't take. They wouldn't have come to Postville unless jobs were readily available. These workers made the slaughterhouse hum. Now they're the ones suffering the most.

    [And click here for a Washington Post article on the Postville slaughterhouse and raid, written as part of a Post series, “The Immigration Debate.â€
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    Senior Member tencz57's Avatar
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    A very honest article . the journalist had no axe to grind . this statement really tells the truth of this business do to lack of enforcement imo .

    A: I've been told that the slaughterhouse owners are almost doubling wages to anyone documented who will work at Agriprocessors today. But I think that is short-term. The nature of the problem isn't going away. Few U.S. workers want to work in a slaughterhouse for even these moderately higher wages. It's one of the most dangerous jobs in America
    Nam vet 1967/1970 Skull & Bones can KMA .Bless our Brothers that gave their all ..It also gives me the right to Vote for Chuck Baldwin 2008 POTUS . NOW or never*
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    New faces endure same struggle

    New faces endure same struggle
    By TONY LEYS • tleys@dmreg.com • May 18, 2008

    Postville, Ia. - This time, when authorities raided a meatpacking plant, they found mostly Guatemalans working the production lines.

    If they'd gone into a packing plant 10 years ago, they probably would have found more Mexicans or Bosnians. Thirty years ago, they probably would have found Vietnamese and Laotians. A century ago, it would have been Lithuanians and Poles.

    Why?

    Listen to Erik Sarazua explain an immigrant's thoughts on the industry.


    Sarazua, 30, came to the United States because he wanted to escape grinding poverty in Guatemala. He came to Postville because an uncle told him jobs were plentiful at the Agriprocessors Inc. packing plant.

    Sarazua said he spent long days slicing and packaging beef at Agriprocessors, starting at $6.25 an hour and working his way up to $7.75 after seven years. It was hard, unpleasant work, but it became a routine and it was the best he could find without proper immigration papers. He said he appreciates the foothold the company gave him in America.

    But he and other Guatemalan parents are determined that their children never will follow them into a packing plant.

    "With all the suffering we do to work there, we wouldn't want them to suffer like that," he said in Spanish. Another Guatemalan father, standing nearby, nodded in agreement.

    Plant's workers once mostly Mexican

    Experts who follow the meatpacking industry say that is a classic attitude, and it is a major reason why the plants cycle through new immigrant groups.

    Sarazua spoke last week outside St. Bridget's Catholic Church, where a few hundred immigrants sought refuge after Monday's raid at Agriprocessors. Authorities said 295 of the 389 workers they arrested were from Guatemala. The people who later gathered at the church avoided the dragnet, but many remained afraid that they would be swept up.

    Paul Rael, who runs a Hispanic ministry for the Dubuque Catholic Archdiocese, said the plant's work force has changed from a few years ago, when it was overwhelmingly Mexican.

    "It's not that the Mexicans have left here," he said. "They've just moved on to better jobs."

    Those jobs, including construction and farm work, tend to pay more and have more pleasant conditions, he said.

    Rael said the Guatemalan immigrants apparently heard about Postville from relatives or friends. He said he's seen no evidence of an organized effort by Agriprocessors to recruit workers in Central America.

    A union leader and critic of the company said first-generation immigrants have historically filled the needs of low-wage plants.

    "They always land in the slaughterhouses. It's always been that way," said Mark Lauritsen, a vice president for the United Food and Commercial Workers.

    Lauritsen pointed to Upton Sinclair's 1906 book "The Jungle," which shocked Americans by describing conditions inside a Chicago packing plant. "That meatpacker was exploiting Lithuanians," Lauritsen said. "This meatpacker is exploiting Guatemalans."

    The UFCW is trying to organize workers at the Postville plant, and Lauritsen said some companies have improved conditions to the point where they no longer have to cycle through waves of new immigrants. But he said bad companies will continue to rely on the world's most desperate people.

    Agriprocessors President Sholom Rubashkin declined an interview request.

    Donald Stull, a University of Kansas anthropology professor who has studied the meatpacking industry, noted that some plants now employ large numbers of African refugees, from war-ravaged countries such as Somalia and Sudan.

    "Packers look for populations that will serve their needs, and they look for reservoirs of unemployment to help fill those needs," he said.

    Guatemala fits the bill.

    Still recovering from civil war

    The country, which is the most populous in Central America, is a mountainous place where only 13 percent of land is fit for agriculture, according to statistics kept by the U.S. government.

    Guatemala is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Average income there is only 12 percent of income in the United States, and 43 percent of the average income in neighboring Mexico. Income inequality is starker in Guatemala, with the richest 10 percent of people controlling 43 percent of the wealth, compared with 37 percent in Mexico and 30 percent in the United States.

    That is why so many poor Guatemalans risk robbery, arrest and heat exhaustion to make the trek to the United States.

    Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked at the Postville plant, made the journey last winter.

    Monzon is the daughter of a farmhand in rural Guatemala. She is a soft-spoken woman who wears braces and looks younger than her 21 years. She sat at a picnic table outside the Postville church on Friday and described her homeland and her life.

    She said her hometown is a place of tiny wooden houses with metal roofs and dirt floors. Food costs are rising, she said, and jobs are scarce. Violence, which is tied to the drug trade, keeps getting worse.

    Monzon's family borrowed money so she could try to make it to the United States. She took a bus for nearly a thousand miles from her hometown in southern Guatemala to the U.S. border. Most of the trip was through Mexico, where she saw people with nicer clothes and better houses than most Guatemalans she knew. The roads were in much better condition, she said, and more people had cars.

    Despite being better off than Guatemala, Mexico is a poor place with few opportunities. So after reaching northern Mexico, Monzon walked across a desert border area with four other people and made it into the United States. Then she took buses for more than 1,300 miles to Postville, where she joined her brother. The total journey took 27 days.

    12-hour shift, 30-minute break

    Monzon said she had no trouble landing a job at Agriprocessors, where she worked from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch. She spent her nights in a cold, refrigerated room, always rushing to cut feathers off chickens and slap labels on them. She said the work was more grueling than she expected, but it was the only job available.

    She hoped to save her $7.50-per-hour wages to start a hair and nail salon in Guatemala. She said she sees no future at the plant, and her parents want her to return home. She probably will go, she said.

    Consuelo Lux, 33, and her husband, Julio Ravaric, 38, emigrated from Guatemala last year. They left their three children, ages 9 to 15, with her sister.

    The couple said that in Guatemala, up to a dozen people live in a house the size of a U.S. garage. Their home is near a volcano, and the soil is sandy. They struggled to raise one crop of corn per year. It wasn't enough to support their family, they said, so they had to find another way to earn a living. When they left, they said goodbye to relatives as if they might never return, because the trip is so dangerous.

    The couple said they borrowed about $6,000 each to pay for the journey, which was accomplished on foot, by bus and by car. Like Monzon, they walked across the desert to cross the U.S. border. Then they went to Postville, which Ravaric's brother had told them was a good, safe place.

    Before the raid, they had decided to return home by the end of the year because their children miss them, Lux said. Now, they are unsure what they will do.

    Even those who want to go home said they would not volunteer to be deported, because the deportation would remain on their records and could harm them in the future.

    Erik Sarazua, who was one of the first Guatemalans in Postville when he arrived seven years ago, said his wife and their two young children probably will go live with relatives in Guatemala. But he cannot afford to go with them, he said, because there is little work there. The best job he could hope to find in Guatemala would pay about $45 a week, which is not enough to support a family, he said.

    He probably will leave Postville and look for a job elsewhere in the United States.

    Sarazua said he feels sorriest for many recent immigrants who were swept up in last week's raid and now face probable deportation. He said most of those people borrowed thousands of dollars to pay for their trips north. Many put up houses or land as collateral, which they now will lose because they have no way of repaying the loans.

    Raid hurts families in Guatemala

    The raid also will devastate hundred of families back home who were supported by wages their relatives made at Agriprocessors, Sarazua said. Workers would pick up their weekly paychecks, then line up at Postville's Western Union office, where they could send money to Guatemala.

    "People back home are expecting that money every Friday," he said.

    According to the Inter-American Development Bank, Guatemalan workers in the United States sent $3.6 billion home in 2006. The bank estimates that 600,000 Guatemalans are working out of the country, mainly in the United States. The money they send home accounts for 9 percent of Guatemala's economy.

    In Iowa, the bank estimated that immigrant workers from all Latin American countries are sending home $167 million per year.

    The Guatemalans outside the Postville church shook their heads when told some Iowans predict that any Agriprocessors workers who are deported will be back in a few weeks.

    "That's crazy," Ravaric said in Spanish. The journey is much too expensive and dangerous to be undertaken lightly, he said.

    Caitlin Didier, an anthropologist from Ohio who has studied the situation in Postville, returned last week to help the people sheltered in the church. Didier said she expected many of the immigrants to return to Guatemala and stay there.

    "It's a long way home, and it's not a very nice place to live," she said. "But a lot of them are saying they'd rather live there than live in fear here."

    http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/p ... /805180339

    Also at the same webpage:

    What they're saying in Guatemala
    How did Guatemalans react to the raid at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville? Here are some comments, edited and translated, that were originally posted at the Guatemalan news site lahora.com.gt:

    "It is sad what is happening in the United States. Our people live in fear. Where are the results of the reunion with Bush and (Guatemalan President Alvaro) Colom?"
    - Erick Pinales

    "USA is a gold mine. Do not leave because you were grabbed by the INS. Guatemala is another prison, but not of gold."
    - Arturo Mejia

    "How would the gringos react, if ... Guatemala would exploit its commodities - bananas, oil and other riches?"
    - Giovanni Navichoc

    "Without wanting to err on the side of being a little nationalist ... the Americans can do whatever they want within their territory as the authorities here do or should do with all those who are undocumented, while working and other crime. Many who are (in the U.S.) were fleeing during the (Guatemalan) armed conflict. Now, they can return to live here and they will not live being persecuted."
    - Carlos Caceres


    (If they don't want their children working in meat plants why were 12 minors--the youngest age 13--arrested working at the plant during the raid? Were any of these minors, parents themselves?)
    "Distrust and caution are the parents of security."
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  4. #4
    Senior Member crazybird's Avatar
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    "It's not that the Mexicans have left here," he said. "They've just moved on to better jobs."
    Even the jobs Americans supposidly won't do, now they won't either. Which is why it was a crock to say we needed
    ALL these people to begin with. Many of these jobs people can't do for a lifetime either so it's not a matter of being "lazy". Guess all the nastyness spewed during the marches still gets to me.......not all that long till they get "lazy" and "too good" to do the jobs as well.

    I've never been in a meat packing plant but my husband went and applied at one. He didn't get the job because of his shoulder, but he was ready to walk as he was waiting because of some pretty serious injuries that passed through his area on the way to the hospital.....things that looked like permenant injury type things.....for 6.25 an hour? If it's that difficult you would think smarter minds would get in there and figure out something to make the conditions safer and better if they want to keep employing people at all.......maybe that's why they go for the illegals and refugees....... so no-one knows what it's really like in there.
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