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Newspaper Series Uncovers Exploitation of Immigrant Workers at Poultry Plants |
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In a revealing six-part series that began yesterday, the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer takes an up-close look at working conditions in the poultry industry. Reporters spent 22 months investigating working conditions at House of Raeford, a chicken- and turkey-processing company based in eastern North Carolina. The company, with annual sales of nearly $900 million, employs 6,000 people at eight plants in three states and processes 29 million pounds of meat a week.
The workers, who are mostly immigrants, must endure long hours, painful injuries and outright oppression.
In a column, editor Rick Thames, lays it on the line:
… the neglect of these workers exposes an ugly dimension to a new subclass in our society. A disturbing subclass of compliant workers with few, if any, rights.
Same as slaves and sharecroppers, same as the cotton mill workers derisively termed “lintheads,” this subclass is now a scorned bunch.
And yet they help power our economy. We live in houses they built. We drive on highways they paved. We eat the chicken and turkey they prepared.
Illegal immigrants often take the least desirable jobs, earning low wages, because those jobs lift them and their families from the poverty they left behind in their homelands.
The series looks at safety conditions in the plants, exposes how companies take advantage of immigrants and discusses what ought to be done to correct the abuses.
To read the full series, click here.
In an editorial, the Observer lays the issue right on the doorstep of our nation’s political leaders:
[Immigrant workers] are being exploited, abused, then thrown away when they are injured or when they speak up. Companies can get away with it, in part, because politicians in Washington don’t have the conscience or will to fix failed immigration policies.
Politicians in Washington have put rigid ideological views and emotional demagoguery above reasoned compromise. The U.S. needs sensible reform that secures borders…and provides a path to legal status for illegal workers already here.
The Observer series backs up what the AFL-CIO, unions, human rights and workers’ rights advocates have been saying for years: The nation needs comprehensive immigration reform that ensures immigrant workers’ rights are respected and provides relief to the growing number of undocumented workers in our country by offering them a path to citizenship.
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For everyone of these illegal immigrants employed there is a US citizen trying to pay their bills with money they can’t earn at this processing plant.Because the federal government has failed to enforce laws already on the books.Why is ICE not their arresting the people that employ these workers.There would be no one to exploit if they had never been hired in the first place.Don’t tell me the employer does not know.I’m retired now but for several years in the building trades I had to prove I was a citizen of this country before being hired,and submit to drug testing and a background check.If it’s good enough for legal citizens it’s good enough for illegals.I for one have no sympathy for them.
Sometimes I wonder what side the afl/cio is on in the illegal immigration debate. I also am a retired member of the Mich. Bldg. Trades, and my IA constitution mandated that I obey all laws of the U.S.A. Our social programs are under attack by illegal aliens, union shops cannot compete with companies hiring illegal aliens and paying them substandard wages. Until this country realizes that we are living in our country and deport illegal aliens, this country will be milked dry. Let Mexico provide for their people, instead of asking America to do it for them.
Are we really talking about immigrants here or are we talking about ILLEGALS? They are NOT the same thing. Immigrants have done the paperwork, paid the fees and waited their turn to come to this country. ILLEGALS have come in illegally (hence the title illegals) then proceeded to march in our streets carrying the flag of their native country and demanding to be allowed to stay. Sorry, no sympathy here. Don’t like being exploited? Here illegally? Then I suggest you go home, file the paperwork, pay the fees and WAIT YOUR TURN!
The AFL-CIO, like a stopped clock, isn’t always wrong. You have it right when you say “The nation needs comprehensive immigration reform that ensures immigrant workers’ rights are respected and provides relief to the growing number of undocumented workers in our country by offering them a path to citizenship.”
The immigrants, whether legal or illegal, add to the wealth of this country through what they produce by their work. Some people complain that they don’t pay taxes, but they are wrong. They pay sales taxes like everybody else, gasoline taxes, etc. When they pay rent on the apartment where they live, they are paying the property tax that their landlord passes on to the local government for schools and police and street maintenance, etc. They pay Social Security taxes even when they present a false SS number - there is some $360 BILLION of SS tax receipts that has accumulated at the SS Administration’s coffers that can’t be attributed to anybody’s account and that they will never collect on, but it is being paid out to current SS recipients and thus keeping the SS tax down for all workers. Finally, people complain that they don’t pay income taxes - but they do, indirectly, by accepting a lower wage than income-tax payers will. The goods and services they produce at lower cost to their employer provides for lower prices that benefit all of us.
AS to native-born Americans who complain that they “can’t compete” with the immigrants, shame on them if that’s true! The immigrants come to this country without even knowing our language, yet they manage to make it. Unless you’re mentally handicapped, such complaints are nothing but whining.
MHinnov:
You obviously don’t know the definition of ILLEGAL so I”ll give it to you.
definition / illegal: : not according to or authorized by law : UNLAWFUL , ILLICIT
I and others are NOT WHINING!
These people are breaking the law to get into this country and breaking the law once they are here with their forged documents, driving without a license, obtaining social services under false pretenses, breaking occupancy laws, etc. etc.
Why should these (mostly Hispanic) illegal immigrants be deserving of special treatment?
It’s very doubtful you would support your elected officials in illegally obtaining your property through some sort of phony imminent domain; your boss in firing you for some trumped up reason; your neighbor in defacing or destroying your home, vehicle, pet, etc. How ’bout if the AFL-CIO / your Union started assessing just you some special charge? — I bet you’d be quick to rely on the legality of the laws that are on the books.
Without laws there is no society only chaos. Powerbrokers suppressing the weak. Animalistic survival of the fittest. Chaos.
What makes MHnnov think that most of these people are paying anything?They will work for a few bucks a day paid in cash at the end of the day.They also use up more in social services than they pay in.They are parisites nothing more nothing less.If we dry up the jobs that lure them here they will leave.To do that you must enforce our laws.Starting with the employer.Let them march in the streets of their home country.
Reply to Grace:
I am not arguing that the illegal immigrants are not acting illegally. I’m arguing that their work in this country nevertheless benefits the vast majority of the people (though not necessarily all the people) in this country. Let’s not hurt our country and ourselves by trying to throw the “rascals” out; let’s make it easy for them to come out of the shadows and start acting legally.
No human being is illegal! The people blaming undocumented workers for the economic mess and loss of jobs are buying into the lies of the corporate media and corporate political parties who gave us job killing deals like NAFTA. The US is responsible for conditions in Latin America that force people to migrate north - the loss of agricultural jobs in Mexico because of NAFTA, the displacement of people because of dirty wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, horrific working conditions and environmental destruction because of ‘free trade,’ etc.
International working class solidarity and open borders is the solution to the problem of exploitation of workers and the loss of American jobs. The corporate class is laughing all the way to the bank (offshore) while they pit workers against each other. Which side are you on? Progress and human rights or racist fear? If capital can cross borders why not labor?