http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/business/16452630.htm

Posted on Sun, Jan. 14, 2007



Immigration raids highlight changes in meat industry
Streamlined processing forces down pay, while unions also lose hold
By Matt McKinney
McClatchy Newspapers

MINNEAPOLIS - It doesn't seem that long ago to Jack Cagle that he was working in Minnesota meatpacking plants with folks who were proud of their jobs, able to raise families on their salaries and were not eager, despite the danger, to give up the work to outsiders.

It was only 30 years ago, but it was another era.

When Cagle heard of workers led out of the plant in handcuffs last month during an immigration raid, he thought, not his company. But it was.

Cagle, 76, a retired meat inspector for Swift & Co., stopped punching the clock at the meat plant long before broad changes remade the nation's meatpacking industry.

Swept away in the intervening years were the relatively good-paying jobs of $15.67 an hour or more in today's dollars; left behind were jobs that pay 30 percent less, according to federal statistics.

A wave of automation in the 1970s cast off jobs such as skilled meat-cutting. That was followed by the crumbling of powerful unions in the 1980s -- not just in meat plants, but at air traffic control towers, auto plants and steel mills.

Minnesota was briefly a stage for the union battle: The National Guard descended on the Austin, Minn., Hormel plant for several tense weeks during the worst of the strikes there in 1985 and 1986.

In the two decades since, immigrants -- legal and illegal alike -- have filled the void as U.S. workers sought better-paying jobs. The meat industry now makes some of the cheapest food on the planet, with Americans spending less of their total incomes on food than those in almost any other country.

But the Dec. 12 immigration raids that nabbed 1,282 workers at six Swift & Co. plants nationwide have exposed the strains of the system, prompting a fresh round of finger-pointing. Who's to blame? Meat companies? Illegal workers? Or consumers?

It's nothing like what Jack Cagle knew.

The changes began in the late 1960s, with two farmers from northern Iowa who thought up a radical departure from the industry's standard behavior: They would butcher the animal at the meat processing plant, sending their product directly to supermarkets as boxed beef or pork rather than as a hanging carcass.

Shipping costs dropped. High-paying butcher jobs dried up. The meat plants were instead run as assembly lines, with one person making the same cut over and over as the animals moved down the line.

The company, Iowa Beef Processors Inc., later known as IBP, began putting its plants in rural areas away from the unionized work forces of the cities.

``They provided meat to the market much more cheaply,'' said Brian Buhr, a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota. The company was eventually bought out by Tyson, the nation's largest meatpacker, and its practices became the industry standard.

The mechanization of meat cutting and the tactics adopted by IBP led to one of the most contentious episodes in Minnesota's labor history, when in August 1985, 1,529 men and women walked off of their jobs at Geo. A. Hormel's plant in Austin. The strike would end in disarray 15 months later -- without the salary hikes the workers had sought.

The struggle of the small Hormel union, Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, drew national support, because it came to represent the larger battle among unions struggling to maintain middle-class wages. The fight was significant for another reason: Meatpackers across the country had once worked under a ``master contract'' that set wages at every plant for every company.

Ultimately, the company hired replacement workers in Austin at lower wages and resumed operations. The union never recovered: About 46 percent of meatpackers were unionized in 1980; by the end of the decade that had fallen to 21 percent, where it stands today.

A wage slide, already under way, worsened. Meatpacking wages once ran 14 to 18 percent above the average manufacturing wage, according to research by James Mintert, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. Today, it's 25 percent below the average manufacturing wage.

A 2005 study by the Pew Research Center estimated that about 27 percent of all butchers and food processing workers are illegal immigrants.