I am sorry if this has already been posted, didn't find it! This is terrible for Oklahoma, they are building it in a place with low population so they will have an excuse to bring in the illegals!
ttp://okiedoke.com/blog/index.php?p=1898
Feb 21
Will this count as jobs for Oklahomans?

Encouraging commercial development in rural Oklahoma is an important subject at the state Legislature every year. Small towns like Hooker are all but dying.

People started giving up on this place years ago.

The drugstore and five-and-dime closed. The Ford and Chevrolet dealerships left, too, along with the tractor-parts retailers.

Vacant brick storefronts with sheets of yellowed newspaper taped in the windows are reminders of what once was in this town in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

A couple months ago, the lumber store shut down. It was a last gasp.

“It’s a damn shame to see a town like this,” said Earl Meng, a City Council member who has lived here for 60 years.

Obviously, Hooker needs some jobs. And that’s just what they’re going to get.

Specifically, a Smithfield Beef processing plant to be built a few miles east of town, a $200 million project that would create as many as 3,000 jobs and put Hooker back on the map. Construction of the beef plant, the largest built in the United States in two decades, is scheduled to begin by late March.

Hooker residents can probably thank state tax incentives, minimal worker liabilities to employers, and right-to-work for their good fortune.

“It’s a hard and relatively low-paying job, but it’s the only opportunity that exists for many of these workers,” said Cornell University professor Lance Compa, an expert in labor law and international labor rights. “These companies take advantage of these groups; they get super-exploited.”

The good news is that it looks like few Oklahomans will be exploited by Smithfield.

The jobs are dirty, strenuous and sometimes dangerous, and attract a high number of immigrant laborers at plants across the U.S.
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Meat operations in nearby towns have attracted thousands of Mexican and Guatemalan laborers to the area in the past decade. Many already have settled in Hooker.

comments, please leave yours.

So let me get this straight:

1. Oklahoma loses good manufacturing jobs to Mexico for years.
2. Businesses demand, and receive, evermore incentives to create jobs in the state.
3. Many jobs created are ones done largely by immigrants, often illegal.
4. Corporate America says we need more immigrant labor to do jobs Americans won’t do.
5. Those who profit from this scheme extoll the virtues of corporate welfare, cheap immigrant labor, and tax breaks for the wealthy.

I’d say we got what we asked for.

* Editorials

— Mike @ 10:04 AM in 2007 | Link

2 Comments »

1.

As long as the ground beef remains cheap at Wal-Mart…everybody wins.

Comment by Dwight — Feb 21 @ 10:59 am
2.

Thanks for giving this issue some exposure. It seems many short sighted Okies can only envision a future for our state that is based on unsustainable practices and the wholesale mining of our quality of life.

In addition to increasing the amount of illegal workers that will flock to the area, the Hooker facility will bring an environmental scourge on the area that will destroy the area, rather than save it.

Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.

The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.