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Smithfield Foods: Coming Soon

Smithfield Foods, known in Iowa for successfully fighting Iowa’s packer ban anti-trust laws and increasing their presence in Iowa’s meat packing industry is in the news for employing illegal tatics to fight unionization in Smithfield processing plants.

There is something that struck me as related to our recent illegal immigration debates – Smithfield hiring illegal workers, then threatening them if they dare to organize or protest working conditions:

“They would always tell us don’t get mixed up in this stuff about the union, if you talk about the union they will fire you, (and) having the Hispanics think they’ll bring in INS if they try to vote for a union,” he said.

This is something I’ve never heard in the midst of all of the rhetoric coming from Washington: while we focus on walls and technology and deportation – what is to be done to employers that break the law to employ a virtual slave labor force?

The answer is evidently “nothing”.

Links:
Confined Space: Treating Workers Like Hogs

SmithfieldJustice.com

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 5:52 am and is filed under General, Politics, Iowa, Activism, Corporations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Smithfield Foods: Coming Soon”

  1. pdx Says:
    June 22nd, 2006 at 7:18 am

    ... what is to be done to employers that break the law to employ a virtual slave labor force?

    This is the beauty of BushCo’s temporary worker program. It legalizes a permanent, cheap labor force (appeasing Bush’s corporate overlords) while not guaranteeing full-fledged citizenship – and in fact incentivizes returns to Mexico.

    What’s interesting to me is the profoundly disingenuous ‘logic’ Bush uses in explaining the program – you can read more on that here.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.

    Third, we should not give unfair rewards to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process or disadvantage those who came here lawfully, or hope to do so.

    Fourth, new laws should provide incentives for temporary, foreign workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired.

    I haven’t looked at the nitty-gritty legal language of this program – but would Bush have us believe that he’s going to codify a principle that American corporations MUST do everything in their power to hire an American citizen FIRST - before employing immigrant labor? If I start thinking about that too hard, I may break out into convulsive laughter…

    You’ll notice his 4th point, however. This program isn’t a gateway to citizenship. What it provides for is a rotating population of permanently cheap labor. A permanent slave-class – in other words, not afforded the rights of a normal ‘citizen’.

    BushCo. is disgusting. And that’s just me trying to avoid expletives for a day or two…

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