Exploiting Immigrant Labor

The farmed-animal industry deliberately recruits immigrants because they will accept low wages and can be easily manipulated for fear of losing their jobs. Some meatpacking giants have even been charged with smuggling undocumented workers into the States. Far away from their homes with no support network, many of these migrant workers are treated like slaves by the farmed-animal industry. In some slaughterhouses, two-thirds of the workers are immigrants who cannot speak English.

Lured to the States

Tempted by promises of a steady income, many workers are lured to the States to work in slaughterhouses. Slaughterhouses in the U.S. run radio advertisements in countries in Latin America to recruit workers, and the animal-processing giant IBP has a labor office in Mexico City. Some companies even bus workers from their homes south of the border to the slaughterhouses where they will work—GFI America, Inc., an animal-processing corporation that makes hamburger patties for chain restaurants—even bussed workers from the Mexican border to a homeless shelter in Minnesota. The company had told the immigrants that they would be given apartments, and it tried to make peace with officials at the homeless shelter by offering to donate some hamburgers to the shelter’s cafeteria. Understandably outraged, one county official said, “Our job is not to provide subsidies to corporations that are importing low-cost labor.”

Meat industry giants have also been charged with smuggling undocumented workers into the U.S. to work at their killing plants. In 2001, Tyson, the world’s largest meat producer, was indicted for human trafficking following a lengthy undercover investigation that found that Tyson slaughterhouse managers plotted to bring undocumented workers into the States to work for low wages in its animal-processing plants.

No Way Out

Immigrant workers are easy prey for the meat industry. After they are brought to the U.S., they’re often so desperate to make money to send to their families back home that they’ll take any job without complaint. If they’re being treated unfairly, they don’t have any choice but to continue working for the farmed-animal industry, and if they become injured and can no longer work, they are often stuck in the U.S. with no job and no money to buy a bus ticket home.

Immigrant workers are often illiterate and unable to speak English, which makes it more difficult for them to learn about their rights and to organize a union. They are easy to manipulate because they are terrified of being fired or deported. Some plant managers have been accused of knowingly hiring undocumented workers and then threatening to fire them unless they buy fake social security numbers from the managers for hundreds of dollars.56 One undocumented worker who used to work at a chicken slaughterhouse in Shelbyville, Tennessee, told Fortune magazine, “Supervisors knew who had green cards and who didn’t. And they used it against us. If we didn’t do what they wanted, they would threaten to call immigration.”

The farmed-animal industry’s drive to hire immigrants has meant lower wages for meat industry employees across the board because immigrants will accept lower wages than other workers will. In one slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, real wages are 30 to 40 percent lower today than what they were when the plant opened its doors in 1961.58 Immigrant workers are also cheaper to keep on payroll because they are often reluctant to demand benefits like health-care coverage, even though they are working in a dangerous environment where they will likely be injured. By the time immigrant workers realize the importance of having good health care or workers comp plans, it is often too late.

‘They Always Cheated Us’

“Elena Cardona” is just one of the countless immigrants who have been exploited and then tossed aside by the farmed-animal industry. Tempted by the promise of a steady job with good wages, she left her children with her mother in Honduras to travel to North Carolina and work in a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse. She says, “I worked at least 10 hours a day, into the early morning hours. They give you only three minutes to go to the bathroom and hardly 10 to eat. They used to take advantage of us because we did not have work permits, and they always cheated us. Sometimes they’d only pay us half of our wage.”

The Smithfield slaughterhouse where she worked kills 36,000 pigs a day, or more than 2,000 an hour. More than half of the slaughterhouse’s workers are Hispanic immigrants. Cardona was forced to leave her job after 20 months because she was hurt while trying to lift a large load, and like many meat-industry immigrant workers, she suddenly found herself injured, far from home, and without a job or workers’ compensation.

Julio Arturo Sepulveda, an immigrant factory-farm worker, sums up how immigrant workers are treated by the industry they toil for: “We’re disposable to them. We’re like a machine. I don’t think they see us as real people,” he says. “I need this job. I feed my family with this job, but it’s not right.”
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*See the movie, Fast Food Nation for more

*Go to: www.goveg.com