| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
|
 Posted: Tue May 09, 2017 11:42 pm Post subject: Immigration reform |
 |
|
Some on the right, NW for one, have accused liberals in general of favoring open borders. Evidence is not needed for such wild claims--but this article provides the tawdry side of how conservatives and businesses have used undocumented workers to undermine worker safety and pay.
E | Quote: | XPLOITATION AND ABUSE AT THE CHICKEN PLANT
Case Farms built its business by recruiting immigrant workers from Guatemala, who endure conditions few Americans would put up with.
By Michael Grabell
By late afternoon, the smell from the Case Farms chicken plant in Canton, Ohio, is like a pungent fog, drifting over a highway lined with dollar stores and auto-parts shops. When the stink is at its ripest, it means that the day’s hundred and eighty thousand chickens have been slaughtered, drained of blood, stripped of feathers, and carved into pieces—and it’s time for workers like Osiel López Pérez to clean up. On April 7, 2015, Osiel put on bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, and trained a pressurized hose on the plant’s stainless-steel machines, blasting off the leftover grease, meat, and blood.
A Guatemalan immigrant, Osiel was just weeks past his seventeenth birthday, too young by law to work in a factory. A year earlier, after gang members shot his mother and tried to kidnap his sisters, he left his home, in the mountainous village of Tectitán, and sought asylum in the United States. He got the job at Case Farms with a driver’s license that said his name was Francisco Sepulveda, age twenty-eight. The photograph on the I.D. was of his older brother, who looked nothing like him, but nobody asked any questions.
Osiel sanitized the liver-giblet chiller, a tublike contraption that cools chicken innards by cycling them through a near-freezing bath, then looked for a ladder, so that he could turn off the water valve above the machine. As usual, he said, there weren’t enough ladders to go around, so he did as a supervisor had shown him: he climbed up the machine, onto the edge of the tank, and reached for the valve. His foot slipped; the machine automatically kicked on. Its paddles grabbed his left leg, pulling and twisting until it snapped at the knee and rotating it a hundred and eighty degrees, so that his toes rested on his pelvis. The machine “literally ripped off his left leg,” medical reports said, leaving it hanging by a frayed ligament and a five-inch flap of skin. Osiel was rushed to Mercy Medical Center, where surgeons amputated his lower leg.
Back at the plant, Osiel’s supervisors hurriedly demanded workers’ identification papers. Technically, Osiel worked for Case Farms’ closely affiliated sanitation contractor, and suddenly the bosses seemed to care about immigration status. Within days, Osiel and several others—all underage and undocumented—were fired.
Though Case Farms isn’t a household name, you’ve probably eaten its chicken. Each year, it produces nearly a billion pounds for customers such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, and Taco Bell. Boar’s Head sells its chicken as deli meat in supermarkets. Since 2011, the U.S. government has purchased nearly seventeen million dollars’ worth of Case Farms chicken, mostly for the federal school-lunch program.
Case Farms plants are among the most dangerous workplaces in America. In 2015 alone, federal workplace-safety inspectors fined the company nearly two million dollars, and in the past seven years it has been cited for two hundred and forty violations. That’s more than any other company in the poultry industry except Tyson Foods, which has more than thirty times as many employees. David Michaels, the former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha), called Case Farms “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” Four years before Osiel lost his leg, Michaels’s inspectors had seen Case Farms employees standing on top of machines to sanitize them and warned the company that someone would get hurt. Just a week before Osiel’s accident, an inspector noted in a report that Case Farms had repeatedly taken advantage of loopholes in the law and given the agency false information. “The company has a twenty-five-year track record of failing to comply with federal workplace-safety standards,” Michaels said.
Case Farms has built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who endure harsh and at times illegal conditions that few Americans would put up with. When these workers have fought for higher pay and better conditions, the company has used their immigration status to get rid of vocal workers, avoid paying for injuries, and quash dissent. Thirty years ago, Congress passed an immigration law mandating fines and even jail time for employers who hire unauthorized workers, but trivial penalties and weak enforcement have allowed employers to evade responsibility. Under President Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed not to investigate workers during labor disputes. Advocates worry that President Trump, whose Administration has targeted unauthorized immigrants, will scrap those agreements, emboldening employers to simply call ice anytime workers complain.
While the President stirs up fears about Latino immigrants and refugees, he ignores the role that companies, particularly in the poultry and meatpacking industry, have played in bringing those immigrants to the Midwest and the Southeast. The newcomers’ arrival in small, mostly white cities experiencing industrial decline in turn helped foment the economic and ethnic anxieties that brought Trump to office. Osiel ended up in Ohio by following a generation of indigenous Guatemalans, who have been the backbone of Case Farms’ workforce since 1989, when a manager drove a van down to the orange groves and tomato fields around Indiantown, Florida, and came back with the company’s first load of Mayan refugees.
|
Read the rest at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/08/exploitation-and-abuse-at-the-chicken-plant |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
nw30
Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 12:05 am Post subject: Re: Immigration reform |
|
|
| mac wrote: | Some on the right, NW for one, have accused liberals in general of favoring open borders. Evidence is not needed for such wild claims--but this article provides the tawdry side of how conservatives and businesses have used undocumented workers to undermine worker safety and pay.
|
Wow, for you to say that, must mean you are for boarder control, beings that you are a proud self-proclaimed liberal.
BTW,"Open boarders" is a contradiction in terms, "open" means no boarders, "boarders" means some sort of control at a specific point.
Also, "conservatives and businesses"? No liberals? They have just as many business that are doing the same damn thing, and it needs to stop. It's already against the law, so not sure why your thread title.
But back to you, so you are really for boarder control? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 12:20 am Post subject: |
|
|
Did you read the article? Did you mean border? What high school did you not learn to spell at?
Don't put words in my mouth. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
nw30
Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 1:34 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Typical liberal obfuscator, I guess the questions were too hard. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9299
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 2:01 am Post subject: |
|
|
| I'm getting bored er with this attack on common sense. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9120
Location: at a computer
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 8:59 am Post subject: Re: Immigration reform |
|
|
| nw30 wrote: | | mac wrote: | Some on the right, NW for one, have accused liberals in general of favoring open borders. Evidence is not needed for such wild claims--but this article provides the tawdry side of how conservatives and businesses have used undocumented workers to undermine worker safety and pay.
|
Wow, for you to say that, must mean you are for boarder control, beings that you are a proud self-proclaimed liberal.
BTW,"Open boarders" is a contradiction in terms, "open" means no boarders, "boarders" means some sort of control at a specific point.
Also, "conservatives and businesses"? No liberals? They have just as many business that are doing the same damn thing, and it needs to stop. It's already against the law, so not sure why your thread title.
But back to you, so you are really for boarder control? |
dude, when you use the word "boarder" five times , I must assume you are referring to one who wants to stay and eat at your house? Or are we referring to a fun activity at Squaw Valley? please clear up your message. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 9:53 am Post subject: |
|
|
Kiters and windsurfers are boarders. Some folks board up their doors (and minds) so nothing new will get in.
NW's lack of response was typical. The article makes the point that the meat industry has deliberately hired undocumented workers so they can pay them poorly, ignore dangerous working conditions, and fire them if they try to organize unions. The same was true about factory farms when Ronnie Reagan's folks made sure the last immigration bill protected those practices.
Several on the left, including me, have supported enforcement against firms who hire undocumented workers. And firms that ignore safety protections for their workers. In the article, those unsafe working conditions ripped off the leg of a worker--who was promptly fired--and now lives in Guatemala. All ignored by the nearly illiterate NW. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14874
Location: on earth
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 10:36 am Post subject: |
|
|
I have said many times I am in favor of a national ID that can be picked up at any US post office. You go in and apply and you immediately get a temp ID while a official one from one location is made and sent to that or any post office for you to pick up. Democrats have tried to pass it several times and right wingers block it.
It is free and you submit possible two biometrics to get it, ir fingerprint and eye. If you lose it in one year you pay a fee to replace it. It is not a required ID, if you do not want one you do not need one but if an employer hires you without one they are legally and criminally liable if you are found to be undocumented.
If you are hired with one of these cards and you picture matches the employer is not ever legally liable for hiring an undocumented.
right wingers do not like it... why because it would be proof of citizenship that can not be denied for voting and very convenient to get. and free. and second those who hire undocumented workers do not like it and fight it.
_________________
when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
nw30
Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 11:38 am Post subject: |
|
|
Grab an out where ever you can boys, aren't you lucky you found a simple spelling error so you can feel you don't have to answer some simple questions, which will shine some light on what you really feel. Can't have that.
Scared? Apparently so.  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9120
Location: at a computer
|
| Posted: Wed May 10, 2017 12:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| once is a spelling mistake, 5 times....maybe not... Sure NW, what are the questions? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
|
Search
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Register
