More
than a century ago, when Upton Sinclair wrote The
Jungle,
the workers in American meatpacking plants were recent immigrants,
largely from eastern Europe. Sinclair eloquently depicted the routine
mistreatment of these poor workers. They were employed for long hours
at low wages, exposed to dangerous working conditions, sexually
abused, injured on the job, and fired after getting hurt. In the
novel, the slaughterhouses of Chicago serve as a metaphor for the
ruthless greed of America in the age of the robber barons, of a
society ruled by the law of the jungle.
According
to a
recent study
by
the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, “The
industrial produce and animal production and processing systems in
the U.S. would collapse without the immigrant and migratory
workforce.” The handful of multinational companies that dominate
our food system have for many years embraced the opportunity to
exploit them for profit. The immigrant workers arrested in
Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour. Adjusted
for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking
workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour.
The
immigration raid symbolised how an industry with a long history of
defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto
workers. 680 immigrant workers—almost all Latino, many of them
women—to waiting buses with their hands zip-tied behind their
backs. One worker, an American citizen, was shot with a Taser for
resisting arrest. Children gathered outside the poultry plants crying
as their parents were taken away and sent to private prisons. No
senior executive of a major food processing company was arrested for
violating immigration, worker-safety, food-safety, antitrust, or
environmental laws.
FastFood Nation,
by Eric Schlosser The
Chain,
by Ted Genoways and Scratching
Out a Living,
by Angela Stuesse have concluded: What is described as an immigrant
“invasion” is actually a corporate recruitment drive for poor,
vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers who have used them
to break unions and to cut wages by as much as 50 percent. With out
unions to defend them workers faced line speeds being increased,
government oversight gettingreduced, and health and safety standards
compromised where injured workers were once again forced to remain on
the job or get fired.
One
of the poultry plants raided last week. B. C. Rogers, launched a
hiring drive in 1994 called “The Hispanic Project.” Its goal was
to replace African American workers, who were seeking a union, with
immigrant workers who’d be more pliant. It placed ads in Miami
newspapers, arranged transportation for immigrants, and charged them
for housing in dilapidated trailers. Within four years, it had
brought roughly 5,000 mainly Latino workers to Mississippi. The
poultry industry expanded throughout the rural South during the
1990s, drawn by theabsence of labor unions.
Today
countless farmworkers and meat-packing workers who entered the United
States without proper documentation are the bedrock of the American
food system.
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