Processor's hiring not so kosher
By Al Lewis
Dow Jones Newswires
Article Last Updated: 09/13/2008 04:14:15 PM MDT

The allegations sound alarming: Thirty-two kids whirling blades at Agriprocessors Inc., a kosher meat packer in tiny Postville, Iowa.

"These children . . . were employed in the operation of . . . power-driven machinery, including . . . meat grinders, circular saws, power washers and power shears," according to an affidavit filed by the Iowa Attorney General's Office on Tuesday. And "were exposed to dangerous and/or poisonous chemicals."

The Iowa AG slapped the company, its primary owner Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, his son Sholom, and three other executives with 9,311 child labor violations.

The company's official response was, more or less, this: Oh, yeah? Prove it!

"In order to convict, the state is going to have to prove that the defendants willfully violated the child labor laws," said company spokesman Chaim Abrahams in a statement.

"That means that the state, as to every one of the alleged violations, is going to have to prove that each defendant knew that the employee was underage on the day in question, and knew that it was against the law for the person to be employed in the manner alleged," the statement said.

The AG's office says it can do just that: "All of the named individual defendants possessed shared knowledge that Agriprocessors employed undocumented aliens," the AG's affidavit said, alluding to a federal raid on the plant in May that netted 400 illegal workers. "It was likewise shared knowledge . . . that many of those workers were minors."

(Warning! If you are a liquor-store owner and face sanctions for selling booze to minors, do not try this at home.)

"All of the minors at issue lied about their age," Abrahams' statement said. "At the time of hiring, all of the minors, like all job applicants, presented and signed documents stating that they were over 18. They knew that, if they told the truth about their age, they would not be hired."

The Orthodox Union has threatened to suspend its kosher certification of Agriprocessors' products within two weeks unless it replaces its management. And the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which has been unsuccessful in organizing at Agriprocessors, is calling for new ownership. Additionally, presidential candidate Barack Obama has cited the incident in his own rhetoric about child labor.

The criminal charges, meanwhile, are just misdemeanors, though they each carry the potential for 30 days in jail and a fine of $65 to $625, and there are thousands of them.

Agriprocessors is hardly the only meatpacking plant that's been raided for illegal workers. In December 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided six Swift & Co. plants in Greeley, Worthington, Minn.; Grand Island, Neb.; Cactus, Texas; Hyrum, Utah; and Marshalltown, Iowa, detaining hundreds of illegal workers.

Cutting up cattle is nasty work. Who is going to do it? You?

Agriprocessors' founder, Rubashkin, is an Ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jew who first came to the then-declining farming town of Postville in 1987. He took over a plant that had been shuttered for years to provide beef for his kosher shop in Brooklyn.

Over time, the deeply religious, big-city people he brought to town were alternately rejected and accepted in what was a mostly white, Christian hamlet of 1,500 people.

The slaughterhouse created hundreds of jobs, boosted real-estate prices and attracted curious stories in newspapers across the country with headlines such as "Hasidism in the Heartland." There was even a 2001 book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America."

Today, Agriprocessors not only meets burgeoning demand for kosher meats, but supplies nonkosher products to major grocers, including Albertsons, Kroger, Shop Rite, Wal-Mart, Trader Joe's, Ralph's, Pathmark and H.E. Butt.

"They are not people who graduated from Harvard," said Levi Brackman, a rabbi in Evergreen, who recently published a book, "Jewish Wisdom for Business Success."

"They are simple butchers who ended up with an explosive business on their hands," Brackman said. "And they made mistakes."

Brackman said it's not for him to judge who should have known that hundreds of workers were illegals, or that 32 were under age 18. The indisputable fact is that these people were there.

"Somewhere in the company, they weren't careful enough," Brackman said. "And that comes about through arrogance. Arrogance always ends up leading to destruction."

And sometimes even some tasty hamburgers too.

Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_10451949