The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 15           April 18, 2005  
 
 
Iowa bosses use ‘no match’ letters
to fire immigrant meat packers
(front page)
 
BY EDWIN FRUIT
AND KEVIN DWIRE
 
PERRY, Iowa—Working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the bosses at the Tyson slaughterhouse here fired or forced out some 40 workers during the last week of March. The company claimed that the Social Security numbers of the meat packers—mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America—could not be verified. Many have worked at the plant for years. Some have children in local schools and own homes in the area. Many also have families in their native countries that depend on the money these workers send home in order to survive.

Militant reporters interviewed a number of meat packers here April 2 who described the company attack.

José Vera, originally from Mexico, has worked in the United States for 10 years, about eight of them at the Perry plant. “Life here has gotten worse, much more difficult in recent years,” he said. “The company called me into the office and said, ‘Is this you?’ referring to the Social Security number they had on file for years. If you say ‘Yes,’ they ask for more identity proof such as a birth certificate or driver’s license. If you can’t produce this additional documentation, they say ‘We’re sorry, you are a good worker but you can’t work here anymore.’ They say the government is doing this—not them—because of ‘national security.’ For those with families here this is a real burden. I know of one couple where the company accepted the woman’s I.D. but fired her husband.”

“The company says ‘No papers, no work.’ But the government thought our I.D. was good enough to take out federal and Social Security taxes from us for years,” said Jorge Castillo, another meat packer who had worked at the Tyson plant for four years. “We are in a very hard situation.” Castillo said some of the fired workers would try to get jobs in other packing plants.

“It’s messed up what the company is doing,” said a U.S.-born worker with family in Mexico, who asked that his name not be used. “They do a check when you are hired in and that should be enough.”

“President Bush campaigned on a program for immigrants to have three-year work permits,” said Luis, who is from Central America. “He did this to get Latino votes and now he says ‘No way.’” He also said that because so many workers are missing from the kill floor, the remaining meat packers are being asked to do the work of two people to make up the difference.

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1149 organizes workers at the Perry Tyson plant and at the Swift plant in Marshalltown. Immigrant workers make up around 70 percent of the 900 workers at the Perry plant.

“The union position is that once someone is hired by the company, then the union will defend them regardless of who they are or where they are from,” Dave Edwards, Local 1149’s chief shop steward at Tyson told the Militant. He said accepting company claims about Social Security card problems would allow it to “just pick out any number of people and call them in as a way of weakening the union or getting rid of people they don’t want in the plant.”

Through accelerated immigration, impelled by grinding economic conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the working class in the United States and other imperialist countries is becoming more and more internationalized. These changes in composition not only break down national divisions, provincialism, and prejudices that sap the power of the labor movement, but also enrich the political and union experiences of the working class and broaden its historical and cultural horizons.

The ruling class is trying to counter this political trend and the resulting strengthening of the working class and its fighting potential by toughening immigration laws and their enforcement over the last decade. The aim of the bosses and the capitalist government is not to stop the flow of immigration but to keep a large section of the working class in a pariah status, so they can be super exploited, and weaken the ability of immigrant workers to fight as equals with the native born to organize and use union power to defend the working class as a whole.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed into law by President William Clinton in 1996, deepened government attacks on immigrant workers. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the federal government has used the specter of “terrorism” to further undermine democratic rights—including stepped-up factory raids, indefinite incarcerations of immigrants without charges, and deportations. Another 1996 law that undermined the rights of the foreign-born was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Workers at the Swift plant in Marshalltown told Militant reporters during an April 3 visit that similar identity checks and firings took place at the Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa. One worker who asked not to be identified said that a friend of hers had called to say 75 workers were dismissed, and that she didn’t make it to first break before she was called into the office and was fired. Rumors are spreading that identity checks will also be carried out in Marshalltown, she said.

These I.D. checks and firings have been concentrated in Perry and Waterloo. Workers throughout central Iowa, however, say they now fear these practices will spread.

For example, another Marshalltown worker said that after a police car was seen outside the Swift plant word spread on the shop floor that the hated la migra was coming into the plant. Scores of workers left the factory, with more calling in sick the next day. So many of the cafeteria staff left, he said, that food could not be served that day. Since that incident most workers have returned on the job, he added, but some are not waiting around for the identity checks and have quit.

Edwin Fruit is a member of UFCW Local 1149 in Perry, Iowa. Kevin Dwire is a packinghouse worker in Des Moines. Mary Martin contributed to this article.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home