BOTTOM FEEDERS – the meatpacking industry’s history of superexploiting immigrant labor

from the DES MOINES REGISTER:

New faces endure same struggle
By TONY LEYS • tleys@dmreg.com • May 18, 2008

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Postville, Ia. – This time, when authorities raided a meatpacking plant, they found mostly Guatemalans working the production lines.

If they’d gone into a packing plant 10 years ago, they probably would have found more Mexicans or Bosnians. Thirty years ago, they probably would have found Vietnamese and Laotians. A century ago, it would have been Lithuanians and Poles.

Why?

Listen to Erik Sarazua explain an immigrant’s thoughts on the industry.

Sarazua, 30, came to the United States because he wanted to escape grinding poverty in Guatemala. He came to Postville because an uncle told him jobs were plentiful at the Agriprocessors Inc. packing plant.

Sarazua said he spent long days slicing and packaging beef at Agriprocessors, starting at $6.25 an hour and working his way up to $7.75 after seven years. It was hard, unpleasant work, but it became a routine and it was the best he could find without proper immigration papers. He said he appreciates the foothold the company gave him in America.

But he and other Guatemalan parents are determined that their children never will follow them into a packing plant.

“With all the suffering we do to work there, we wouldn’t want them to suffer like that,” he said in Spanish. Another Guatemalan father, standing nearby, nodded in agreement.

Plant’s workers once mostly Mexican

Experts who follow the meatpacking industry say that is a classic attitude, and it is a major reason why the plants cycle through new immigrant groups.

Sarazua spoke last week outside St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, where a few hundred immigrants sought refuge after Monday’s raid at Agriprocessors. Authorities said 295 of the 389 workers they arrested were from Guatemala. The people who later gathered at the church avoided the dragnet, but many remained afraid that they would be swept up.

Paul Rael, who runs a Hispanic ministry for the Dubuque Catholic Archdiocese, said the plant’s work force has changed from a few years ago, when it was overwhelmingly Mexican.

“It’s not that the Mexicans have left here,” he said. “They’ve just moved on to better jobs.”

Those jobs, including construction and farm work, tend to pay more and have more pleasant conditions, he said.

Rael said the Guatemalan immigrants apparently heard about Postville from relatives or friends. He said he’s seen no evidence of an organized effort by Agriprocessors to recruit workers in Central America.

A union leader and critic of the company said first-generation immigrants have historically filled the needs of low-wage plants.

“They always land in the slaughterhouses. It’s always been that way,” said Mark Lauritsen, a vice president for the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Lauritsen pointed to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book “The Jungle,” which shocked Americans by describing conditions inside a Chicago packing plant. “That meatpacker was exploiting Lithuanians,” Lauritsen said. “This meatpacker is exploiting Guatemalans.”

The UFCW is trying to organize workers at the Postville plant, and Lauritsen said some companies have improved conditions to the point where they no longer have to cycle through waves of new immigrants. But he said bad companies will continue to rely on the world’s most desperate people.

Agriprocessors President Sholom Rubashkin declined an interview request.

Donald Stull, a University of Kansas anthropology professor who has studied the meatpacking industry, noted that some plants now employ large numbers of African refugees, from war-ravaged countries such as Somalia and Sudan.

“Packers look for populations that will serve their needs, and they look for reservoirs of unemployment to help fill those needs,” he said.

Guatemala fits the bill.

Still recovering from civil war

The country, which is the most populous in Central America, is a mountainous place where only 13 percent of land is fit for agriculture, according to statistics kept by the U.S. government.

Guatemala is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Average income there is only 12 percent of income in the United States, and 43 percent of the average income in neighboring Mexico. Income inequality is starker in Guatemala, with the richest 10 percent of people controlling 43 percent of the wealth, compared with 37 percent in Mexico and 30 percent in the United States.

That is why so many poor Guatemalans risk robbery, arrest and heat exhaustion to make the trek to the United States.

Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked at the Postville plant, made the journey last winter.

Monzon is the daughter of a farmhand in rural Guatemala. She is a soft-spoken woman who wears braces and looks younger than her 21 years. She sat at a picnic table outside the Postville church on Friday and described her homeland and her life.

She said her hometown is a place of tiny wooden houses with metal roofs and dirt floors. Food costs are rising, she said, and jobs are scarce. Violence, which is tied to the drug trade, keeps getting worse.

Monzon’s family borrowed money so she could try to make it to the United States. She took a bus for nearly a thousand miles from her hometown in southern Guatemala to the U.S. border. Most of the trip was through Mexico, where she saw people with nicer clothes and better houses than most Guatemalans she knew. The roads were in much better condition, she said, and more people had cars.

Despite being better off than Guatemala, Mexico is a poor place with few opportunities. So after reaching northern Mexico, Monzon walked across a desert border area with four other people and made it into the United States. Then she took buses for more than 1,300 miles to Postville, where she joined her brother. The total journey took 27 days.

12-hour shift, 30-minute break

Monzon said she had no trouble landing a job at Agriprocessors, where she worked from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch. She spent her nights in a cold, refrigerated room, always rushing to cut feathers off chickens and slap labels on them. She said the work was more grueling than she expected, but it was the only job available.

She hoped to save her $7.50-per-hour wages to start a hair and nail salon in Guatemala. She said she sees no future at the plant, and her parents want her to return home. She probably will go, she said.

Consuelo Lux, 33, and her husband, Julio Ravaric, 38, emigrated from Guatemala last year. They left their three children, ages 9 to 15, with her sister.

The couple said that in Guatemala, up to a dozen people live in a house the size of a U.S. garage. Their home is near a volcano, and the soil is sandy. They struggled to raise one crop of corn per year. It wasn’t enough to support their family, they said, so they had to find another way to earn a living. When they left, they said goodbye to relatives as if they might never return, because the trip is so dangerous.

The couple said they borrowed about $6,000 each to pay for the journey, which was accomplished on foot, by bus and by car. Like Monzon, they walked across the desert to cross the U.S. border. Then they went to Postville, which Ravaric’s brother had told them was a good, safe place.

Before the raid, they had decided to return home by the end of the year because their children miss them, Lux said. Now, they are unsure what they will do.

Even those who want to go home said they would not volunteer to be deported, because the deportation would remain on their records and could harm them in the future.

Erik Sarazua, who was one of the first Guatemalans in Postville when he arrived seven years ago, said his wife and their two young children probably will go live with relatives in Guatemala. But he cannot afford to go with them, he said, because there is little work there. The best job he could hope to find in Guatemala would pay about $45 a week, which is not enough to support a family, he said.

He probably will leave Postville and look for a job elsewhere in the United States.

Sarazua said he feels sorriest for many recent immigrants who were swept up in last week’s raid and now face probable deportation. He said most of those people borrowed thousands of dollars to pay for their trips north. Many put up houses or land as collateral, which they now will lose because they have no way of repaying the loans.

Raid hurts families in Guatemala

The raid also will devastate hundred of families back home who were supported by wages their relatives made at Agriprocessors, Sarazua said. Workers would pick up their weekly paychecks, then line up at Postville’s Western Union office, where they could send money to Guatemala.

“People back home are expecting that money every Friday,” he said.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank, Guatemalan workers in the United States sent $3.6 billion home in 2006. The bank estimates that 600,000 Guatemalans are working out of the country, mainly in the United States. The money they send home accounts for 9 percent of Guatemala’s economy.

In Iowa, the bank estimated that immigrant workers from all Latin American countries are sending home $167 million per year.

The Guatemalans outside the Postville church shook their heads when told some Iowans predict that any Agriprocessors workers who are deported will be back in a few weeks.

“That’s crazy,” Ravaric said in Spanish. The journey is much too expensive and dangerous to be undertaken lightly, he said.

Caitlin Didier, an anthropologist from Ohio who has studied the situation in Postville, returned last week to help the people sheltered in the church. Didier said she expected many of the immigrants to return to Guatemala and stay there.

“It’s a long way home, and it’s not a very nice place to live,” she said. “But a lot of them are saying they’d rather live there than live in fear here.”