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Vol. 72/No. 22      June 2, 2008

 
Iowa workers talk about
raid, plant conditions
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
POSTVILLE, Iowa—“It was a human-hunt,” said one woman at the trailer park near the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant here. Referring to the immigration raid at the plant two days earlier, she told the Militant that “they surrounded the plant and used helicopters. What they did was criminal.” Her son, an undocumented worker from Mexico, was arrested during the raid.

The U.S. government has brought criminal charges against 306 out of 389 workers arrested. Charges include: “misuse of Social Security number,” “aggravated identity theft,” and “possession of counterfeit identification.”

The May 12 raid was the biggest single-site immigration roundup in U.S. history. Agriprocessors is the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the country.

Sixty-two workers have been released on “humanitarian grounds,” such as having minor children. They must wear electronic ankle bracelets and are not allowed to leave the state while awaiting a court hearing.

The woman whose son was arrested had worked at the plant until a couple of weeks ago. She described the conditions there. Shifts of 12 or more hours a day were the norm, she said.

Starting wages were only recently raised to $7.25, and workers said that the highest wage for Latino production workers was $7.75 per hour, $5 per hour less then most packing plants in Iowa. Other employees were given the easiest jobs, more breaks, and were paid substantially more than Latino workers, who are mostly from Mexico or Guatemala.

At nearby St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, the hundreds of men, women, and children who sought refuge during the raid were still there two days later. By May 16, most had left the church, after fears of another roundup by ICE eased. Most of those at the church were second-shift workers, who stayed away from the plant during the first-shift raid. Others had successfully hidden or escaped during the raid, in some cases with the help of coworkers who are U.S. citizens.

Volunteers from many churches in the region provided three free meals a day to the raid refugees, along with toiletries and some clothing.

Although still in a state of shock because of the scope of the raid, many of the workers at the church wanted to talk about the horrendous conditions in the plant.

“Many people lost fingers and hands,” one worker said. “The line was so fast.”

“My job was to twist the necks of 100 chickens a minute,” said another worker.

Several said that the company fired workers with on-the-job injuries when they could no longer work on the production line.

When workers asked for pay raises the supervisors told them if they didn’t like it, “there’s the door.”

According to several workers interviewed, one of the bosses from Agriprocessors came by the church the day after the raid and asked employees to come back to work for $14 per hour.

According to the Waterloo Courier, 200 workers briefly walked off the job a year ago when the company announced it had received “no-match” letters from the Social Security Administration, alleging that some Agriprocessors employees did not have proper work documents. The United Food and Commercial Workers union publicized the walkout at the time.

At a convenience store and gas station on the outskirts of town, frequented by many area farmers, the cashier said, “To be honest, the raid sucks. They’re just tearing apart families for no good reason.”

In what the Des Moines Register termed an “unusual agreement,” federal authorities will allow detained workers who are not criminally charged to stay in Iowa for several more months. After the December 2006 raid at Swift & Co., which included the plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, immigrants who were arrested were rapidly shipped out to detention centers around the country and deprived of the ability to meet with their lawyers or see their families.

A lawsuit filed May 15 by lawyers for three of the detained workers charged the U.S. government with violating Fifth Amendment due process rights by imposing “prolonged and indefinite detention” and hampering access to lawyers. The lawsuit also charges that Agriprocessors withheld pay for “immigration fees,” denied compensation for overtime, and refused to let employees use the restroom during work shifts.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers in Iowa march against ICE factory raid
Socialist candidate joins protests in Iowa against raid  
 
 
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