Rural Laws: January, 2001 - Number #1

Vanguard. In 1999, the INS in Omaha subpoenaed records from 111 meatpacking plants in Nebraska, compared employee I-9 information against SSA and INS records, and told employers to ask employees who appeared to be unauthorized to clear up discrepancies in their records before the INS came to the plant to interview them. During the plant visits, the INS interviewed only workers already identified as potentially unauthorized.

This INS worksite inspection system, termed Operation Vanguard, was attacked by meatpackers, farmers and Hispanic groups. The Nebraska governor, Mike Johanns, appointed a task force to study the effects of immigration enforcement on the livestock slaughtering and manufacturing industries as well as the effect of immigration on Nebraska's education, housing and the justice systems. The task force issued 14 recommendations in October 2000, including a recommendation against a resumption of Vanguard and advocating an amnesty for unauthorized foreigners in the state.

Johanns rejected the amnesty recommendation and called for a new temporary worker program for the meatpacking industry. He also predicted higher wages and better conditions in meatpacking: "because of the labor shortage, we're going to see major companies doing everything they can to improve the situation."

Operation Vanguard remained on hold in Nebraska and Iowa in summer and fall 2000, waiting for INS headquarters to grant permission to continue and expand the practice of subpoenaing from employers the data provided by newly hired employees on I-9 forms, and then checking the employee-provided data against Social Security Administration and INS databases. INS District Director Jerry Heinauer said: "It's unfortunate that we're unable to go to a second and third phase of Vanguard - which would have had us going back to the plants on a couple of occasions."

On December 6, 2000, the INS arrested a vice president and five office workers at Nebraska Beef, as well as 212 of the 1,600 production workers, charging the managers with conspiring to smuggle illegal migrants into the US. The INS said that a recruiter for Nebraska Beef offered workers in El Paso, Texas $8-an-hour jobs, two free weeks of housing and a $100 cash advance; the recruiter also sold workers fraudulent Social Security numbers.

Between 1995 and 2000, some $115,000 in fines were paid by 13 Nebraska and Iowa businesses for immigration-related violations; there was one criminal case, in which potato-processor Frenchman Valley of Imperial, Nebraska paid $50,000 for knowingly hiring 41 undocumented workers.

The INS raid was widely condemned by Hispanic groups, with some complaining that the raid "split families and disrupted the community just before a presidential visit and Christmas." A local church organized donations for the families of those who had members arrested in the raid.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) is trying to organize workers at Nebraska Beef, and said that the raid hampered its organizing efforts: "You can't have an entire industry preying on an immigrant work force, then turn around and punish the workers, especially when the industry encourages workers to cross borders for employment in packing operations." Workers at a ConAgra Foods Inc. meatpacking plant in Omaha rejected the UFCW on a 238-150 vote in mid-November.

The world's largest pork processing plant, with 5,000 employees, is owned by Smithfield Packing Company and is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The UCFW has been trying to organize the plant without success. In December 2000, a National Labor Relations Board judge issued a 436-page order that concluded that Smithfield fired 11 workers in retaliation for their union activities, and that Smithfield's actions had a chilling effect on the UCFW organizing drive; the judge concluded that Smithfield unlawfully threatened workers by suggesting that the UCFW might report unauthorized workers to the INS.

The judge set aside a 1997 election, in which 63 percent of workers voted for no union, and said several company officials and lawyers lied under oath. Smithfield plans to appeal the judge's decision and not rehire any of the workers until there is a final judgement. The company said that, of the 16,000 workers who left the Tar Heel plant between 1993 through 1997, only 11 filed charges of unlawful termination.

Meatpacking wages were once on a par with auto and other mainline manufacturing wages, but fell sharply in the early 1980s, before the influx of immigrants, when the meatpacking industry consolidated. Many Midwestern towns and cities subsidized the reopening of closed meat plants, expecting to create jobs for local workers. Instead, local workers tended to avoid lower-wage meatpacking jobs, and immigrants were recruited, especially from south Texas. About 27 percent of meatpacking workers had injuries or illnesses in 2000, the highest rate of any US industry.

Meatpackers are sometimes criticized for not doing enough to help local communities affected by the influx of immigrants to work in their plants Seaboard Corp was denied permission to build a new pork processing plant in two communities before winning agreement to build in Elwood, Kansas. However, in Schuyler, Nebraska, a learning center sponsored by Excel and the Nebraska Department of Education's Migrant Worker Education Program opened in July 2000 to teach Spanish and English-as-a-second language to employees and their families.

Meat-Packing Industry. In January 2001, Tyson Foods, the poultry processor, agreed to acquire IBP Inc. for about $3.2 billion. Tyson thus bested Smithfield Foods Inc., a pork processor that offered to buy IBP Inc. for $2.7 billion in November 2000. About 450,000 hogs a day are processed in the US- Smithfield and IBP each account for about 18 percent. Smithfield, with 1999 sales of $5.2 billion, has more vertical integration than IBP, which had 1999 sales of $14 billion, raising many of its own hogs for processing.

Four companies control 80 percent of the US beef slaughter business and the top five pork processors- Smithfield, IBP, Conagra, 10 percent each; Cargill, nine percent; and Farmland, eight percent- control 63 percent of pork processing [Tyson Foods has a 25 percent share of poultry processing]. Pork processors say they have to grow larger and consolidate to maintain pace with rapidly consolidating retail chains. Hog farmers received about 25 percent of the average retail dollar spent on pork in 1999, while packers such as Smithfield received 16 percent.

USDA continues to report prices received by farmers who raise hogs and then sell them in open markets, but most cattle and hogs are raised under contract with a processor, and there are clauses in most of the grower-packer contracts that keep prices confidential. If farmers agree to raise hogs or cattle for a fixed price, then daily spot market prices are not relevant.

There is a fear of a shortage of slaughtering facilities toward the end of 2001, as farmers expand the number of pigs they buy; there was a similar slaughtering shortage in 1998-99. When questioned about the looming shortage, IBP said that "A limiting factor…is the lack of available labor. Meatpacking remains labor intensive and has a high sensitivity to available labor supplies." Seaboard is the only pork processor building new slaughtering plants for the expected 104 million hogs at the end of 2001, which would require a slaughter of two million a week. The record kill was 2.2 million hogs a week in the fourth quarter of 1998.

The meat-processing industry is developing a combination of breathable films and new sealants to give perishable meat products a three-week shelf life. A government agency, Meat New Zealand, has developed the world's first robotic technology for meat processing that combines manual operations with automated, robot-assisted sections and fully robotic operations, including a machine vision system that can locate large pieces of carcass, grasp individual pieces with a robot-mounted gripper, and move the pieces to the boning room for further processing.

Southeast. Four migrants were killed by robbers in Monterey, Tennessee, a town of 2,700 about 85 miles east of Nashville with a Perdue Farms Inc. plant- about 40 percent of the 1,600 employees in this chicken processing plant are Hispanic. According to the local sheriff, it was hard to identify the dead men, aged 25 to 35, because "every one of them has two or three identification cards." Migrants in small towns are often subject to robberies because many are reluctant to use banks and robbers suspect they are carrying cash.

The Cagle's-Keystone Foods chicken processing plant in Clinton County, Tennessee opened in November 1998, subsidized with more than $40 million in tax breaks and grants to create jobs. The plant is hiring immigrant workers, which has led to a backlash in the community as some workers drive to work without licenses or insurance.

In Kentucky, farmers and migrants are learning Spanish and English through Project PLOW: People Learning Others' Ways, a $200,000 project funded by USDA and administered in five western Kentucky communities by Western Kentucky University.

DeQueen, located in southwest Arkansas, saw its population almost double, from 4,600 to 8,500 between 1990 and 2000, as the percent of Hispanics among county residents reached 30 percent, most working in local poultry processing plants. The Washington Post on October 8, 2000 noted that many of the immigrants arriving to work in year-round meat and poultry processing jobs are settling in rural communities, and in some cases climbing the US economic ladder faster than the local Americans with whom they work in the plants.

Sevier County, where DeQueen is located, has two major processing plants: Pilgrim's Pride employs 1,500 workers and Tyson Foods has 1,300 employees to process three million chickens a week; wages are about $8 an hour. The mayor estimates that half of the 2,500 Hispanics in DeQueen are unauthorized, but Hispanics are nonetheless buying cars and homes and climbing the economic ladder, in part because many immigrant families include two or three poultry workers who are eager to work overtime. In the DeQueen County schools, the new kindergarten class in 2000-01 is 57 percent Hispanic.

Arkansas led the nation in Hispanic population growth in the 1990s- 170 percent- followed by North Carolina (pork processing), Nebraska (meatpacking) and Georgia (carpet manufacturing). Arkansas is home to Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest chicken producer.

Dalton, a city of 23,000 people in the northwestern part of the state, became the first city in Georgia in which Hispanics were a majority of K-12 students- some 2,750 were enrolled in Fall 2000. To help educate these children of Mexican immigrants, Dalton sends teachers to the University of Monterrey in Mexico for summer classes in language and culture. The Carpet Capital of the World produces 40 percent of the world's carpet.

Kevin Sack, "Judge Finds Labor Law Broken at Meat-Packing Plant," New York Times, January 4, 2001. Melinda Fulmer, "Beefs Abound Over Possible Meat Industry Deal," Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2000. Art Hovey, "Panel Calls For Changes In Ins Program," Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star, October 17, 2000. Anne Hull, "Ascent and Eclipse in a Small Town," Washington Post, October 8, 2000.