Newspaper Series Uncovers Exploitation of Immigrant Workers at Poultry Plants

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/02/12/newspaper-series-uncovers-exploitation-of-immigrant-workers-at-poultry-plants/

by James Parks, Feb 12, 2008

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.

FULL story at link.

[Bobbieo]

1. This practice has been going on for many, many years. My son, at 21,

worked at a poultry plant in Colorado in 1981. The managers were obviously paying someone to tell them when Immigration was going to make a raid as the illegals always took off before the officers arrived. He also said the illegals were back to work within days after the raid.

It was a big joke!!!