I had a very interesting job interview on Thursday

[jmowreader]

Cargill is a agribusiness company specializing in bulk commodities. They run a soybean oil/soybean meal plant on the outskirts of Fayetteville. I did an application for a "soybean processor" job a few weeks ago. On Thursday I went to an interview.

It's also a pretty decent-looking company and nearly liberal in their approach to business, even though it's fucking huge--around 150,000 workers and the company is one of the biggest privately-held (Wikipedia says it is THE biggest privately-held company) in the United States. (If it was public it would be very close to the top of the Fortune 100--worldwide revenue $75.8 billion, which is more than the assholes I work for now.) They're pushing for increased trade with Cuba, for instance. The Human Rights Campaign has given Cargill a 100-percent rating on its Corporate Equality Index. They're a huge producer of biodiesel. And from what I can tell, when they fuck up and get caught, they get their act together: if you google you can find some references to a soybean processing plant Cargill built in Brazil. Apparently some of the farmers who were supplying the plant were practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. Greenpeace nailed Cargill on this, and now they're one of the signatories on a rule calling for a two-year moratorium on buying soybeans from deforested land. The company has some union plants (this one isn't--unionization doesn't work in a Right To Work state), but the pay and benefits they offer are similar to completely unionized companies.

Of course, I don't think I can get much worse than where I am now--you remember those guys in the orange box that is one of the worst malefactors when it comes to encouraging outsourcing.

And they want to double their size in the next five years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
http://www.cargill.com

First, the job: It's called "bean unloader." They get their soybeans by truck and by rail. The bean unloader removes the beans from the vehicle that brought them, and also puts the finished product into vehicles for transport--refined oil is always shipped on railcars, meal leaves either in hopper cars on on trucks. You use a forklift, a telehandler and a Caterpillar 966 front-end loader to perform this job--and, if this becomes totally boring in a couple of years (or I'm still out unloading beans instead of processing them, although I should get promoted to a processing job within a few months), Cat 966 drivers make a hell of a lot of money. Then again, for Fayetteville bean unloaders make a hell of a lot of money. $13.50 per hour doesn't sound like much in a lot of places--doesn't McDonald's of New York City pay that?--but it's way more than I'm making now, and it's a lot more than most other places in town pay. Plus they have full benefits, and the holiday pay is interesting: if you work on one of the 10 holidays they pay for, you receive straight time for 12 hours PLUS overtime pay for 12 hours--or, as the crush supervisor put it, you work 12 hours and we pay you for 30 of them. This will greatly improve our standard of living. And once I go into the factory to work, the pay will get better.

Now for the interview: You actually sit through two interviews in your first session. They bring in a section chief--there are three sections out there, Crush, Refinery and Maintenance--and one of his people and they just shoot the shit with you for 45 minutes. After this, the two teams get together, decide who they want to re-interview, and call those people back for another 45-minute bull session and a tour of the plant. (One of the most important questions they ask is, "can you deal with cat-size rats?" Unfortunately, they don't let you have a gun. Fortunately, they don't mind if you run them over with the 966 so long as you're not running down rats when you should be doing actual work.)

I asked about Roundup Ready soy--whether they were seeing any of it. The young guy (he'd been with the company six months, and he was interviewing job applicants) hadn't heard of it. The supervisor did. He explained to the other guy, and to me too, exactly how Roundup Ready works--the modified gene puts kind of a coating on the exposed surface of the plant, which keeps the Roundup from getting in. Then he kinda shrugged his shoulders and admitted "yeah, we get some. There's a few guys around here grow it, but it's not too popular." The guy lives on a road that has soy farms alongside it, and farmers put out little signs announcing the seed they use. Then he chuckled a bit and said something to the effect of, "as thrifty as people in this area are, there's no way seed that not only is the most expensive kind but that can't be saved is going to gain a big foothold."

Cross your fingers. This could be fun.

[Nikia]

1. It will probably be stable work

You probably won't lose your job do to outsourcing and there will always be demand. That is what is good about the food processing industry. Another thing that I like about it is wearing hairnets because I've always thought that I have bad hair. You might not be wearing hairnets for your job though.
I haven't worked for Cargill or interviewed with them so I cannot offer any help there.
Personally, it seems that there is something flawed about the food processing industry, but there might be good companies and Cargill might be one of them.

[datasuspect]

2. hope you get the job

i'd take it.

tremendously large outfit with many, many opportunities.

[sbj405]

3. Good luck with the job interview

If you want to read more about Cargill http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/profile.cfm?id=200

[wildhorses]

4. good luck--

*fingers crossed*

[rug]

5. Fascinating description.

Seems industrial agriculture is replacing industrial assembly.