For anyone who's slept through the last couple weeks, let me call your attention to the fallout from the immigration raids at the former Monfort Meats (currently Swift, the Monforts having sold out many years ago) facility in Greeley.
Read this:
The Tribune -
Registration required, but if you google a few key words ("meatpacking" "Fort Collins Weekly" and "labor" worked for me) you can pull up a cached version.
It really is worth your time. Believe it or not, the local rag gets to the heart of the story, exposing deeper truths than the big media.
Key quotes:
Quote:
In the new rural slaughterhouse, turnover has become a strategy to be encouraged as opposed to a negative business expense. An ever-changing Hispanic workforce decreases the power of organized labor and eliminates a substantial portion of health-care costs for the company.
For example, in March 1980, Monfort closed its Greeley plant, citing cost efficiency.
It rehired and reopened two years later without a union contract using a high percentage of Hispanic workers. By closing its plant and reopening without the union, Monfort cut its labor costs by 25 percent.
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Quote:
Swift is Greeley's largest employer and as such it adds greatly to the city's economy.
But its insistence that it does not draw from an illegal work force rings more hollow with each passing year.
A review of the Greeley Tribune reports following the last immigration raid on the same plants when they were owned by Monfort in 1991 are more than a bit revealing. Company executives at the time claimed, "they had never knowingly hired illegal aliens." The company in 1991 claimed that it had been working cooperatively with the government and was stunned by the decision to raid the plants. It claimed to have requested and received the proper documentation for each employee it hired.
According to a Tribune article on Sept. 24, 1992, Dick Monfort, then head of Monfort meat packing operations, told the paper: "The INS agents abused the legal process to accomplish something they could not obtain by any other means. The raid by 200 armed agents from all over the United States, a helicopter and 80 vehicles was not only a blatant use of excess force and a waste of taxpayer money, but it humiliated over 1,900 of our employees."
According to news accounts at the time, the greatest concern was for the school children who had no one to pick them up and were likely traumatized by their parent's and relative's arrest and deportation.
In other words, nothing seems to have changed in 14 years.
But why would it have? As long as there is a need for cheap labor -- in a competitive industry like meatpacking, Swift can hardly be expected to raise its wages and benefits
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Just something to keep in mind the next time your homegrown, homespun, moralizing owners tell you they're finding it tough to compete against big city corporate-owned franchises who are willing to bring in any player, no matter what his behavior off the field, if it helps them win ...