Mmmm I remember Swift doing this same thing in Iowa for years...but that's not the point here
Trump says American workers are hurt by immigration. But after ICE raided this Texas town, they never showed up.
Washington Post 14
CACTUS, Tex. — The DJs at the Spanish-language radio stations gave warnings whenever Immigration and Customs Enforcement came around. “Be careful out there,” they’d say. “The relatives are in town.” Not on the day of the Big Raid. Nothing leaked out. State police sealed off the highways in and out of town. ICE agents came with a fleet of empty buses and left with them full. Their target that day was the huge, steam-billowing beef plant here on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, owned then by meatpacking giant Swift & Co. “Everyone on the production floor was shouting, ‘La Migra! La Migra!’ ” Monica Loya, a former plant worker, recalled. “There were people hiding behind machinery, in boxes,
, even in the carcasses.”
Operation Wagon Train hit Swift & Co. plants in six states on Dec. 12, 2006, arresting nearly 1,300 workers. In tiny Cactus, 300 were taken into custody — about 10 percent of the town’s population. It was the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.
There are Burmese meat cutters a few years removed from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia. “Chuckers” from Sudan, tall and strong, who specialize in separating the spinal cord from a side of beef swinging on a moving chain. Somalis who showed up in such numbers that Moore County at one point had the fifth-highest per capita Muslim population in the United States,
according to religion survey data, though many of those workers have moved to join a larger community of their compatriots in Minnesota.
A decade after Operation Wagon Train, the Trump administration says it is preparing to crack down on employers who hire illegal workers and may revive enforcement tactics such as big roundups, which fell out of favor under President Barack Obama. But President Trump’s plans to intervene in the U.S. labor market are more ambitious than that.
Under Trump, the U.S. government is for the first time in decades seeking to sharply restrict legal immigration, particularly the entry of people with few job skills, saying they compete with American-born workers and drive down wages. By limiting immigration and tightening the labor pool, the administration argues, competition will increase among employers, forsing them to raise the wages of blue-collar American workers left behind in the dust of galloping global capitalism.
In deep-red Moore County, where Trump won 75 percent of the vote, the president’s rhetoric on immigration has emboldened some of his supporters to freely vent their frustrations at the meatpacking plant they blame for bringing crime, ******* and civic decline. Their corner of northern Texas has been culturally and economically transformed, and they had never had an American president say the transformation was a bad thing.
And yet, no one seemed to believe the Cactus plant would be filled anytime soon with American workers. People here were not even sure they were American jobs in the first place. At least not since the Vietnamese and Laotians showed up in the late 1970s, a few years after the plant opened.
“Cactus wouldn’t exist without the plant,” said the city manager, Aldo Gallegos, who grew up in the town after his parents moved from Arizona in 1992 to work for Swift. He estimates that about half of all floor workers are refugees and that half are Latino, mostly immigrants.
Workers who hang on at the unionized plant earn wages that average more than $17 an hour, in addition to health benefits and free language classes, making it one of the best-paying jobs in the United States for someone who speaks little or no English.
Cactus is not always a melting pot of meatpacking harmony. Workers of different ethnicities and languages struggle to communicate, and sometimes they clash. Turnover among new hires is high. The town’s streets are a jumble of windblown garbage and battered trailers, each one appendaged with dusty vehicles parked at odd angles, like fingers from a hand.
But there is relative prosperity here, too, especially in nearby Dumas, 13 miles south and a comfortable distance from the foul odors wafting around the plant. Busy fast-food restaurants line Dumas’s main drag, anchored by the only Walmart for miles.
Vast feedlots surround the plant, funneling as many as 5,000 cattle a day toward the “******* floor,” where workers with bolt guns begin the butchering. Temperatures there sometimes exceed 90 degrees. The production floor is a giant meat locker kept just above freezing. Cutters
slice off fat and hack at gristle with razor-sharp knives that occasionally flay hands and fingers, too.
The floors grow slick with ******* and beef fat throughout the day, until crews of Central Americans in full-body suits arrive at 11 p.m., working through the night to blast away the gore with high-pressure hoses and chemicals.
“We don’t really see American people in these jobs,” said Lian Sian Piang, 34, a meat quality inspector and ethnic Chin who ran away from conscription in the Burmese army as a young, living for years in a Malaysian refugee camp. During his 10 years at the Cactus plant, he said, he has seen only “two or three white guys” cutting meat.
“The work is very hard,” he said. “The chain moves so fast. Most people just can’t handle it.”
Valero oil refinery is Moore County’s other big employer, and its workers are mostly U.S.-born. Jobs there require significantly more skills, and fluent English. Asked what it would take for more local workers to take jobs in meatpacking, many here say JBS would have to pay as much as the refinery, where wages are $30 an hour or more.
American packing plants could pay that much, industry experts say. But that would mean much, much more expensive meat, and it would probably drive JBS out of Cactus.
Trouble filling jobs
The Trump administration already is putting its economic theories to the test, tightening immigration at a time of historically low unemployment. The number of refugees admitted into the United States has dropped by about
70 percent since Trump took office, and his administration is phasing out the provisional residency permits of more than 250,000 Haitians and Central Americans who have worked legally in the United States for years under
temporary protected status.
The U.S. meatpacking industry was in a labor squeeze before these measures, having opened new plants in recent years to keep pace with soaring export demands and annual U.S. sales approaching $100 billion. Many of the industry’s processing plants are located in remote, rural areas of Midwestern states where employers in nearly every industry are struggling to find qualified workers, especially job candidates who will not test “hot” for *******.
Because refugees have a reputation for lower levels of ******* use, they remain attractive job recruits.
Asked whether his labor shortages have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s immigration policies, JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett said the company was “proud to offer jobs to any qualified individual authorized to work in the United States.”
“The Administration has made a concerted effort to grow the economy and help businesses thrive through tax reform and a common-sense approach to regulation,” Bruett said in a statement. “We believe it will adopt a similarly pragmatic approach to workforce availability in agriculture and other labor-dependent sectors.”
It was an acknowledgment that a remedy for the labor shortage — “workforce availability” — would come from abroad.
Immigrants have been butchering American meat since the 19th century, when Germans, Irish and Eastern Europeans crammed the Chicago stockyards. Wages in the packing industry increased with unionization and remained high relative to other manufacturing jobs between the 1930s and 1970s, a period of relatively low levels of immigration.
But wages fell as companies began moving their plants out of urban areas and closer to feedlots, driving down union membership.
The changing composition of the workforce in Cactus mirrors
modern immigration to the United States. The Vietnamese and Laotian refugees who came to the plant were followed by a flood of Mexican workers, many of whom entered the county illegally, in the 1980s. Then came Central Americans, mostly from Guatemala, in the 1990s.
Swift, like other meat processors, was so hard-pressed to find workers that it offered $500 bonuses to those who could recruit newcomers, creating perverse incentives to falsify documents with borrowed or fake Social Security numbers.
Such offenses were no longer viewed lightly in the post-9/11 era. During President George W. Bush’s second term, ICE raided packing plants across the Midwest in a campaign culminating in
Operation Wagon Train.
Loya, the former plant worker, who now teaches English to refugees, remembers driving to the local elementary school that day, after schoolteachers called in a panic. There were children waiting to be picked up, but many of their parents were on buses heading to ICE detention centers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...e16362-1d65-11e8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html
years ago I had a friend who worked for them (American) and admitted they paid great and had decent benefits...but the problem was the way they treated you........you might be expected to work 10 hours a day...and you HAVE to keep up with the line....no bathroom break lucky if lunch break...it was push push push.....americans won't take that....they can intimidate illegals to do it because of the job and money!
at one time they were union in Des moines....then closed long enough to break the union....brought in illegals...there was an empty school blding next door it got raided when people saw lights on inside....hauled off I don't know how many illegals.......6months later right back at it and same thing....they closed and moved to a small town north of Des Moines...same thing
...
Carlos Ballesteros,Newsweek
