Feds crack down on immigrant labor organizers

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=19&ItemID=12860

Feds crack down on immigrant labor organizers
by David Bacon

May 19, 2007
The American Prospect
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Red Springs, North Carolina (5/10/07) -- To organizer Eduardo Peña, "the raid was like a nuclear bomb" - more precisely, a neutron bomb, that ingenious weapon of the cold war whose radiation was meant to kill a city's residents, but leave its buildings standing. After the immigration raid of January 24 at the Smithfield pork slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the factory was still intact. The machinery of the production lines was fully functional, ready to clank and clatter into its normal motion. But many workers were gone, and much of the plant lay still.

That day the migra picked up 21 people, while trying not to alert the rest of the plant's laborers. One by one, supervisors went to Mexicans on the line. You're needed in the front office, they'd say. The workers would put down their knives, take off their gloves, and walk through the cavernous building to the human resources department. There ICE agents took them into custody, put them in handcuffs, and locked them up in a temporary detention area. Later, they were taken out in vans and sent to immigration jails as far away as Georgia.

"To keep people from guessing what was up," says Keith Ludlum, one of the few white workers on the production floor, "they also called up African Americans and whites, and told them they had to take drug tests. If they'd only called Latinos, people would have known what was happening." If word had gotten out, hundreds of workers would undoubtedly have run from the lines. Valuable meat would have been left to spoil - a day's production lost. In a plant where 5500 people slaughter and cut apart 32,000 hogs a day, that's a lot of money. Keeping the raid secret meant workers worked to the end of their shift and Smithfield got its product out.

Eventually the truth came out, however. Parents didn't show up to collect their kids. "A friend called me at nine or ten that night, and told me someone from my town hadn't come home," recalls Pedro Mendez. "That's when we knew what had happened. I couldn't sleep that night, knowing my friends had been picked up. I worried about my own family."

While Mendez laid awake, word spread to employees of QSI, the company Smithfield contracts to clean the blood and gore off the machinery after midnight. Afraid the migra might still be in the plant, the cleaning crew didn't show up for their shift. US Department of Agriculture inspectors won't allow the lines to start in the morning if they haven't been hosed down the night before, so the few production workers who came to work the next day saw the kill floor taped off with yellow plastic barriers. With no freshly killed hogs on the hooks, the rest of the plant had nothing to do.

The raid's shockwaves swept outwards from the factory through the barrios of the small Southern towns around it, leaving behind children missing mothers or fathers. Parents were afraid to go to work or send their kids to school. The terror it inspired dealt a body blow to the plant's organizing drive as well, just when it was making real progress. Overcoming ten years of lost elections and Smithfield's hardball anti-union campaigns, workers were just beginning to lose their fear. Fired employees had been rehired after years of court appeals. Union supporters were discovering that collective action on the line was not only possible, but could actually make conditions better.


FULL article at link.

[annabanana]

1. I understand that these raids have been repeated across

the country. This is a huge, huge disgrace that hasn't received any coverage.

[primative1]

2. Many Things In This Country Are A Disgrace ...

Hard to pick just one but its kind of easy to spot the common denominator

[Peace Patriot]

3. This just makes me want to cry. How have we allowed these heartless bastards

to gain power in our country? What sort of shitheads are they, that they would do this to children and struggling families?

Well, I know the answers. Diebold/ES&S is the answer to the first. Bushite sort of shitheads is the answer to the second. I just had to say it. The answers are staring us in the face. Yet, it's still a puzzle to me. The Nazification of America. A puzzle and a sorrow, and also a great injustice. Because I strongly believe in the great progressive American majority. I think we are a generous and just people, on the whole. And that great progressive American majority has been critically wounded--demoralized, disenfranchised--and can't seem to stop these shithead Bushite fascist policies--in Iraq and other places, and here at home, with the murderous neglect we saw in Katrina, and now this.

The consequences of our disenfranchisement are brutal. And there is nothing we can do about it until we restore vote counting that everyone can see and understand.

We vote to end the war--and 75% of the American people want it ended--and what do they do? They ESCALATE it! That's the situation.

We overwhelmingly desire that all people be treated humanely and fairly and decently. And what do they do? Torture prisoners, and slaughter over half a million people to get their oil, and send a poor Mexican father away from his children to indefinite detention in another state--merely for working, for supporting them, for doing the right thing.

There would be little or no "illegal immigration" if U.S.-based global corporate predators hadn't decimated the bottom two-thirds of the Mexican and other central and south American economies, if labor and environmental protections, and fairness, prevailed in international trade. Instead, gross unfairness prevails, sending millions of people into migration from bankrupt small farms and stolen farm lands to urban shanties, and thus farther afield yet, looking for jobs, looking to feed their children and improve their lives. These Corporate SOBs outsource OUR jobs to Mexico, and when Mexican workers get "uppity" and demand $3/hr instead of $2/hr, they outsource to Cambodia, where they can pay 25 cents/hr. Total bastards, total shitheads, total monsters, who are writing our laws and running our government. And then their puppets in the White House have the nerve to play the race card, and pick on these poor struggling people, to score points with their bigoted "base" and shore up their failed and criminal regime.

The immigration cops ought to be ashamed to follow these orders! They ought to revolt! And we ought to heap them with shame and scorn until they do. What disgraceful service! Bush toadies! Bigots! Some "family values" you guys have! You are helping these bastards kill America's soul! The "nation of immigrants" becomes a sour, selfish, heartless nation of prisons and the pigsty rich. I hope some of you read this, and get a conscience.

[unlawflcombatnt]

4. Hate to burst your bubble, but Bush is for Amnesty & Open Borders

just like you. Bush is more concerned that Corporate America continues to have a cheap illegal labor supply, than he is about the American workers who've lost their jobs, or had their wages undercut by law-breaking illegal immigrant workers.

Bush, McCain, and all the cheap-labor NeoCons are on your side on this one.

Meanwhile, few of our representatives give a rat's ass about American workers and American wages.

[Peace Patriot]

5. I totally oppose pitting one work force against another, but harming poor people

like this is NOT the way to go about rectifying the situation. I agree that Bushites and their corporate puppetmasters want slave labor. But do you punish the slaves?! First rectify the trade deals and other corporate predator policies that have impoverished half of Mexico--and also central and south America--and made it impossible for the poor to make a living and have hope of betterment. Then create a legal migrant worker program, where everybody gets a fair wage and everyone has union rights, both migrant and US citizen. You are absolutely right that the illegal situation creates ripe conditions for abuse of migrant workers, as well as for further erosion of US labor rights. But it is absolutely wrong to take this out on the WORKERS, who have no resources, who can't afford lawyers, who live in terror of immigration cops and are often mistreated by them.

And have some compassion for the dangers and hardships "illegals" have endured to get here. To arrest them like this, leaving kids stranded, and spouses and other family members not knowing if they are dead or alive, and to treat law-abiding poor people like dirt, just because they're not "Americans," is not right. It is cruel. And I think you had better ask yourself about your use of the word "American." Are these folks not "American"? Since when does "American" only mean "USA"? And I'll bet they have more indigenous blood in them than you or I do! Whose forebears have been in "America" longer--yours and mine, or theirs? My blood goes back pretty far, to the earliest French fur trappers, and includes a small strain of Native American. But I recognize that we mostly European folks are usurpers here, and land thieves. The poorest Mexicans and central/south Americans--the ones who migrate for work--are often the indigenous, or largely indigenous, who have suffered severe discrimination in their countries at the hands of other Europeans (the colonial Spanish), just as Native Americans and Afro-Americans have here. That is why they are poor. I do not feel allegiance strictly to the USA, and especially not to its greedy, vicious corporate elite. I am an American! I feel allegiance to this hemisphere, and to the traditions of democracy in both north and south America--for instance, to the revolution started by Simon Bolivar (who freed most of South America from colonial rule, freed the slaves and dreamed of a "United States of South America"). I also grew up in Our Lady of Guadeloupe parish in southern California. I am a "trans-American." I have sympathies with both cultures. I also love Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, and many wonderful things about US history and ideals.

As a consequence, I perhaps feel stronger resistance to efforts to divide our two American cultures, and to view one as alien. To me, it feels the most natural thing in the world for Mexicans to come and go, to straddle the two countries. It is IMMATERIAL to me whether someone is "legal" or not. And I think that these strong family and village cultures that Mexicans bring here are a very positive social thing. We should all be so loving and caring about our families! We alienated, half-crazy, corporatized North Americans have much to learn from them.

One other thing. The poor who come here illegally often would prefer to be in their native villages. Their thoughts are of home. They are homebodies and family people. But their lives have been made unviable there. They send money home. They keep close contact with family members. And when they die they ask that their bodies be shipped back to their native village. Some want to immigrate and become permanent residents here and US citizens--and are prevented from doing so legally by very anti-poor, anti-Mexican immigration restrictions. Many do not want this. They just want to be able to feed their families. They do not endure these long difficult journeys--with perils all along the way, and perils every day that they live here--and separations from their families, by choice. They come here because they have no choices.

Again, I don't approve of unfair and anti-labor rights policies for ANY group, migrant or US citizen. But we do need to view the larger picture, and we need to resist--in ourselves--the urge to blame and scapegoat others, especially other poor people and workers, for conditions that they cannot help. We are ALL victims of Corporate Rule. And we need to band together for our common welfare.

And just to be clear, I do NOT support any amalgamation of countries, such as Bush and Cabal may have in mind. Their purpose would be to create such a large entity that the distance between citizen and government would be unbridgeable. Small is beautiful, when it comes to democracy. We are already much too unwieldy in size, as a country, for democracy to work well. But I do support open borders with both our neighbors. Why keep people out? Why not have a free exchange? This border fence they're building is an abomination. It is very unamerican. And the bullying and mistreatment of "illegals" is disgusting. Legal or illegal work is another issue, that needs to be worked out to the mutual benefit of both labor forces, by parties--hopefully our governments--that are sympathetic to labor, and that view the Corporations as the alien beings--which they truly are. Mexicans are my brothers and sisters. It is the Bush Cartel and their ilk that I wish would be gone.

[VP505]

6. Well said,

and one fact that keeps getting overlooked, those workers are in that position because of THEIR own bad decision, its a self created situation.