America's Peasant Class

The list of allegations against the Postville, Iowa, slaughterhouse recently raided by federal officials for its use of illegal immigrant workers reads like a story collectively written by Upton Sinclair, Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant, is at the center of page after page of sickening accusations. These are contained in an affidavit for a search warrant filed by a federal agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

• Undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico were paid as little as $5 per hour -- below minimum wage.

• A supervisor made a side business of selling the workers used vehicles, sometimes threatening them with loss of their job if they didn't purchase one.

• A supervisor duct-taped the eyes of an employee, who was then hit with a meat hook. The employee declined to report the incident for fear of being fired.

Then there are the safety issues that have dogged the operation. The Des Moines Register reviewed the latest available worker-injury reports. It found that in 2004 there were 120 injuries, such as workers suffering chemical burns and broken ribs. In 2005, there were 103 injuries that included hearing losses.

Also in 2005 there were three amputations by Agriprocessors machinery. The paper reported on Carlos Torrez, a father of four, who was working a 60-hour week when a mechanical saw used to cut up chicken parts took off a finger.

For these multiple amputations the company was fined $7,500 by state regulators.

Safety equipment was another way to extort money from workers. According to the Register, a memo from the company's vice president included an "equipment price list." Workers were charged $30 for pants and $30 for jackets if they wanted to protect themselves from the caustic chemicals they handled.

Women workers were particularly at risk. A Catholic nun reported that females were told that sexual favors were the barter for a promotion or shift change.

Company officials routinely refused to allow safety inspectors on the property without a court order.

Then, on May 12, an immigration raid occurred and more than a third of Agriprocessors' work force was detained as suspected illegal aliens. There are now some 270 workers, most from rural Guatemala, in federal prison on charges of using false identity documents.

Federal agents have also arrested two low-level supervisors, including one who is alleged to have charged workers $200 for new documents so they could continue working at the plant.

This is a start, but the arrests need to continue up the chain to the plant's top managers and owners. These overseers have been running a modern-day plantation or workhouse -- or whatever one might call today's hell-on-earth equivalent.

Their denials about knowing they were employing an illegal work force are implausible. For years Agriprocessors has been receiving letters from Social Security Administration telling the company of discrepancies between employee names and their stated Social Security numbers. In 2006 the plant was told that at least 500 workers had such discrepancies.

"Agriprocessors is a poster child for how to use a broken immigration system to exploit workers," notes Scott Frotman, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

Company officials were able to keep their work force helpless due to the undocumented status of so many. The result was inevitable: lousy pay, a disregard for safety, and workers cheated at every turn.

This is why I support the federal government's newfound vigor in investigating industries that rely on illegal alien labor. This is why we need to mandate that employers verify the legal status of their workers, with tough penalties attached for those found with undocumented employees.

Meatpacking at a unionized facility was at one time a ticket to a middle-class life. Today, thanks to absurdly lax enforcement of immigration laws, the same type of work buys a peasant's existence.

Illegal aliens are peasants-for-hire, and their exploitation is something too many companies relish when given the chance. We have to stop giving them that chance.

Originally published in the St. Petersburg Times

Comments

[tbone99]

Most of these workers were Guatemalans, of native descent. Their lands have been taken over by United Fruit ,lock , stock and barrel. A democratically elected president was overthrown by the U.S.under Eisenhower's command when land reform threated their dominance.We then proceeded to set up a military government that has starved killed, terrorized and stolen their children for several decades. Now that have come here to serve us directly as slaves, we are not happy either.

Obviously the U.S wants them to disappear from the face of the earth , just like they have tried to do to America's native peoples and have almost succeeded. Fortunately it looks like the white man will do his own self in first. The quicker the better.

[scooperss]

Those employers need to see a jail from the inside out, not just the overseers the company execs. No excuses from them, they take the credit when things go well, they also can take the blame and jail time plus LARGE fines.

[charon]

America was built on cheap exploited labor. Entrepeneurialism, yankee know-how, the Protestant work ethic, are all a crock of bull. Latino "illegals" are just the latest in the flow of underpaid workers that have made this country what it is, while the wealthy at the top reap the profits from their labor. It won't change until the wealthy are brought under control; they are the ones who should be arrested, they are the cause of the workers' unconscionable conditions. Their assets should be seized, then they would stop exploiting foreign workers.

[benedict15]

A terminological problem -- "peasant" has never meant "poor and downtrodden, but means independent, free, landowners (or leasors). The closest analogy in the U.S. are the entire class of independent farmers, grading into the rich independent land-owner "farmer." American peasants resent the lable, and prefer to be termed "farmers" who in England are tenant farmers, renting land from the landowners.
The poor people who cross the border and work in the meatpacking plants of the South and Midwest, mostly come from the large class of ejido holders who were created by the Mexican Revolution .

[noneIn2008]

You've described the working class American. But, Obama tells us that a good job is not a "higher calling", we should aspire to be volunteers? Don't buy their "Tax the rich", we know it means leave alone the trial lawyers, bankers, traders and tax the working class stiff - the guy or gal who draws a paycheck. The big money does not make taxable money, they have bankers and lawyers to hide it from the IRS.

[Henry]

Take a look at how the U.S. stacks up in the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

[BBackSoon]

That surely does not sound like a kosher environment.

If we really wanted to keep the Undocumented Immigrants out it would only take heafty fines that more than ate up any money saved by using the ‘cheep’ labor. But no they can save thousands a day paying under real wages and if cought they will only pay a few thousand once.

This is horrible.

[benedict15]

The surplus young people have to migrate to the city, but w/o enough education most of them cannot compete effectively for the good jobs. The village offers no future, so like millions of rural kids since the 18th centry they migrate to the places that offer jobs. These are the modern day workers analogous to the indentured servants in the U.S. in the 18th centruy who to accept servitude for passage money. Many of them were Scots-Irish or German (which accounts for the top choice for "Ancestry" as German, today. After completeling their indentured servitde the took up (free) royal landgrants (for protestants) in the Appalachians and the frontier backcountry of the East (Pa and NY and South). The Germans were despised becase of their refusal to learn English. Today the Mexicans and Central Americans are tranforming American, and making it by-lingual and by-iculutral. They are abused by almost everyone. When they try to form a union, the employer often rats them out to to the ICE (which usually doesn't act ("We are understaffed and incredibly lazy.") Payback to the businesses that have connived in their illegal immigration and employment. Too often the workers do cringe more than is necessary; they are scared and easily victimised , There are big American unions recruiting members, particlarly urabn servic e workers, which are converting some of the lowest wage and least respected jobs in the country into well-paid jobs with good fringe benefits.