The Militant - April 13, 2009 -- Iowa meat bosses paid disabled workers subminimum wages

Vol. 73/No. 14 April 13, 2009

Iowa meat bosses paid disabled
workers subminimum wages

BY JACQUIE HENDERSON
HOUSTON—For more than 30 years Texas and Iowa state governments, using the legal cover of federal labor laws, collaborated with a Texas company that earned tens of thousands of dollars a month by paying “handicapped wages” to disabled workers contracted to an Iowa meatpacking plant, reported the Houston Chronicle.

The men received $60.03 a month in wages for long hours of backbreaking work processing turkeys at West Liberty Foods. Henry’s Turkey Service, a division of Hill Country Farms, in Goldthwaite, Texas, received the rest of their wages and also had their federal disability checks signed over to them, according to the Chronicle report.

The company paid the city of Atalissa $600 a month for the 106-year-old former school building where the men were padlocked into dormitory-style housing, lacking adequate heat, water, or sanitation. Twenty-one of these workers were removed as Iowa marshals closed the building February 7, citing safety concerns with the converted school building.

The men were paid a “handicap wage”—a subminimum wage legally authorized by the U.S. Department of Labor for companies that hire handicapped workers, reported the Des Moines Register.

Robert Berry, corporate secretary at Hill Country Farms, told the Register that the company, which once ran labor camps in at least six states, has scaled back its operations in recent years and that all of the Atalissa workers are in the process of being “retired.” He stated, “So, most of the boys—well, we call them ‘boys,’ but they are men with mental health issues—who have been up there for 30 or so years, they’ve mostly been placed out to other facilities.” The contract with Henry’s Turkey Service expired March 8.

Beginning in the mid-1960s the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation struck a deal with Hill Country Farms as with other companies to save the state money while increasing corporate profits. Mentally disabled men would be sent to work for room and board at the company’s turkey farm. Later the arrangement was extended to workers hired out to companies in other states.

“I want these people prosecuted,” said Sherri Brown, whose brother Henry was one of the men removed from the bunkhouse. She told the press that her brother has only $87.96 in his bank account to show for working for Henry’s for 30 years.

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