The heartland's raw deal: how meatpacking is creating a new immigrant underclass.(Cover Story)

Tens of thousands of workers from developing countries have been moving to the Midwest to work in that area's meatpacking plants. The meatpacking companies have been luring such workers to their dangerous industry with the promise of $6-an-hour jobs, and illness and injury rates are high.

STORM LAKE, IOWA

Thirty-year-old Lauro Ibarro left his wife and daughter behind in Reynosa, Mexico, and dodged the traps of U.S. Immigration to make a better life for them all by slaughtering pigs in the mammoth plant that defines life in this northwest Iowa town of 10,000 Instead, a few days before Christmas, he met a horrible death. Awakened in the middle of the night by flames and smoke inside the small uninsulated trailer that he shared with his sister and her family, Lauro ran instinctively out into the foot of snow piled on the ground. Realizing that his two nieces, 5- year-old Karent Luna and 3-year-old Crystal Luna, were still inside, Lauro dove back into the blaze to rescue them. But neither he nor the two little girls escaped. A police report identified a malfunctioning kerosene space heater as the culprit-the same device that so many Latino working families have here as their only feeble defense against Iowa's five long months of winter.

At the wake the next evening, dusted by snow and dressed in jeans, parkas and workboots, some 200 or more of Lauro Ibarro's neighbors-- all Latinos overflowed the Sliefert Mortuary in a rare exercise of public, collective grief Sometimes only a tragedy of such proportions is sufficient to overcome the inertia imposed by the routine disappointments of everyday life lived out so far from what was once home.

The death of these three was a reminder of the precarious, undignified life shared not only by the mourners at the wake but by the 600 or more Mexican and Central American workers and their families who have come to live here in Storm Lake. Alongside 1,500 Laotians, these immigrant workers are now the majority of the work force at the world's second-largest pork factory, operated by Iowa Beef Processors (I.B.P.). And it's not just here in Storm Lake. In a sweeping regional arc from the Dakotas through Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa, and down through Kansas into northern Texas and the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks, dozens of once lily-white heartland meatpacking communities have become the new homes to tens of thousands of impoverished Third World workers.

Putting the lie to the conventional wisdom undergirding our immigration policy, the arrival of these workers en masse is neither serendipitous nor the product of cunning smugglers. Rather, it is the direct result of a conscious survival strategy undertaken by a key U.S. industry. a plan developed and fully implemented only in the past few years.

Beef, pork and poultry packers have been aggressively recruiting the most vulnerable of foreign workers to relocate to the U.S. plains in exchange for $6- an-hour jobs in the country's most dangerous industry. Since permanence is hardly a requirement for these jobs, the concepts of promotion and significant salary increase have as much as disappeared. That as many as half of these new immigrants lack legal residence seems no obstacle to an industry now thriving on a docile, disempowered work force with an astronomical turnover.

Staggering illness and injury rates--36 per 100 workers in meat--and stress caused by difficult, repetitive work often means employment for just a few months before a worker quits or the company forces him/her off the job. (Government safety inspections have dropped 43 percent overall since 1994, because of budget cuts and an increasingly pro-business slant at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.) When disabled workers and their families remain in their new homes, the social cost of their survival is then passed by the company to the public.

Moreover, this radical restructuring of food processing could be carried out only with the acquiescence of local and state governments, which have showered the meatpacking giants with millions in tax rebates and subsidies, and only with the hypocrisy of our immigration policy-makers, who abhor illegal aliens except when they're desperate enough to accept underpaid jobs under the most adverse conditions. "The entire debate over whether or not immigrants are of economic benefit is disingenuous," says University of Northern Iowa anthropologist Mark Grey, an expert on the restructured packing industry. "No one wants to state the truth--that food processing in America today would collapse were it not for immigrant labor."

As an added insult, these new immigrants are being left even more vulnerable by the Clinton Administration's new welfare and immigration reforms, which have a direct and devastating impact on their already fragile existence. Taken together, these economic and political factors have converged in the heartland to lay the foundations for a new rural underclass. Welcome to Mexico on the Missouri.

Bringing the War Back Home

Twenty-five years ago, when the population of this town--which bills itself as The City Beautiful--was sitting at 8,400, the government counted twenty-two minority residents, mostly students at the small Buena Vista University. Today, nearly half of Storm Lake's kindergarten class is nonwhite. With nearly everyone in town working at either I.B.P. or at Sara Lee's Bil-Mar turkey plant, unemployment here is about 2 percent. But the prevailing low wage insured that one in four families was the recipient of some sort of public or private charity this past year. Over the past decade the county hospital has seen its unpaid costs zoom ffom $129,000 a year to $3 million. In 1996 three cases of full-blown TB, the classic disease of poverty, were reported, and another 380 residents were treated for TB infection.

"Living here is like living on the moon," says the Rev. Tom Lo Van, a pudgy 34- year-old Laotian Lutheran with an infectious laugh. "Our people don't know the law, their rights or where to go when they are sick. We work, we pay taxes and we have problems like everyone else. But there isn't a single person in the government who speaks our language."

Reverend Tom is about as unlikely a candidate for social agitator as you could find. He was born in the U.S. Embassy in Laos, and his father was the U.S. mission's cook after serving fifteen years with the C.I.A.'s favorite cut-out, Air America. The only professional-class Laotian in town, the Reverend is his community's most forceful--some would say lone-- public advocate.

In the mid-seventies Iowa Republican politicians seeded Storm Lake with twenty-four Laotian refugee families, most of them headed by veterans of the Royal Laotian Army, allies of the U.S. forces in Vietnam. A half-dozen years later, when I.B.P. came to town, it hired some of the local Laotians and offered them $150 bounties to recruit relatives to come to Storm Lake. The company itself sent out head-hunting teams to other Laotian settlements in the United States, causing the Laotian population to swell to 1,500 or more--almost all of them of the Taiwan ethnic minority.

Reverend Tom takes me on a daylong tour of his flock, an itinerary with no geographical or community anchor. Despite their strong presence, the Lao have no newspaper or radio in town, no Lao "district" per se. On the edge of town two Lao-run convenience markets selling sticky rice and magazines imported from Thailand serve as the unofficial gathering and gossip point. "No one wants to rent to us," says the Reverend. "We get what nobody else will take."

Less than fifty yards from I.B.P.'s shipping depot, we visit Lao women living in a series of railroad shacks in conditions so bad that they remind me of the scavengers I once saw living in wooden huts in Seoul. Their small rooms are overwhelmed with the medicinal reek of Ben-Gay and Tiger Balm, used in industrial quantities to quench the fire in fingers and elbows pushed to their limit by work on the slaughterhouse floor.

In a walk-up apartment with a surplus army cot for a bed and discarded patio lounge as a couch, one male worker, Symery, greets us with what seems to be a permanently crooked wrist. After being recruited by friends in 1992 to work at I.B.P., he took a job cutting the meat off backbones. In his fifth month on the job, thirty days before the company begins granting its limited health care package, he slashed his palm open. He paid for the medical care himself, with the company discounting his weekly check. A second accident this past July left him disabled, he says. But I.B.P. recognizes only the reports of its own contract doctors, and they certified Symery as fit to work. The result: He has had no income since the summer. "I.B.P. isn't humane," he says. "No one worked like I did. No one could do boning like me."

Another Lao worker, identified as on, who prides himself on having worked with U.S. troops to block the Ho Chi Minh trail, is now in the same sort of predicament. Injured and out of work, with two rooms full of kids to support, he finally got his first $352 Supplemental Security Income disability check on December 1. "He has gotten it just in time to lose it again," says Reverend Tom, referring to the Clinton welfare bill provision that cuts off S.S.I. to legal resident aliens. "When the face of the poor was white, America didn't have the stomach to cut welfare. Now if you want to help, you are called a wimp, a fool. The only hope these people have is to become U.S. citizens. We're doing what we can. But many only have a third-grade education. How are they going to learn enough English?"

But Tom's greatest lament is reserved for the Laotian youth. He sees little evidence that the current plight of his people is just the newest chapter in the U.S. immigration story, where the first generation suffers but its children prosper. "This new generation is worse off," he says. "Our kids have no self- identity, no sense of belonging. They see no way out only picking up at I.B.P. when their parents leave off. No role models. Eighty percent of our kids drop out of high school."

Life Underground

At least the Storm Lake Lao have Reverend Tom. The more transient Latino community, bunkered mostly into two dilapidated trailer parks known as Little Mexico, has produced no visible community leaders. The handful of clergy and social workers who are this group's only advocates insist on remaining anonymous and low profile. This is, after all, a company town, and paranoia runs deep.

And rightfully so. Unlike the Lao, who are all legal residents, something like half the Latino workers and their families here are undocumented. Several workers tell me that valid Social Security cards--that belong to others--can be purchased for $300 to $500 and that the company does no checking. Other workers contend that I.B.P. management personnel moonlight in document-trafficking. That's a story the company denies.

I.B.P. openly admits that many of these Latinos-legal residents and otherwise- have come here recruited by the company, which has consistently used labor brokers to comb the border areas in south Texas and California to shuttle up new recruits at as much as $300 a head. A cursory look at a birth certificate or Social Security card was enough to satisfy the broker and the personnel department that the labor draftees were legal.

"The company loves to work with illegals," says 45-year-old Heriberto from inside his trailer, a few yards away from the scene of the December fire. "When you are illegal you can't talk back," he adds. Heriberto brings home $300 for a six- day, forty-eight-hour week. One paycheck goes for trailer rent. Another is sent back to relatives in Mexico. "You keep your head down and follow orders. We say you can't do nothing." Switching to Spanish, he says, "Dices nada porque la planta es del gobierno" (You say nothing because the plant is the government). Indeed. Though Latinos make up about a quarter of the I.B.P. work force and have the most dangerous jobs, Latino surnames show up on less than 5 percent of the worker comp claims filed between 1987 and 1995.

But as inhospitable as work is at Storm Lake, the average wage of about $7 an hour still trumps Mexico's $4-a-day minimum wage. Now that a migrant trail is firmly in place, the company has been able to scale back but not eliminate its overt recruitment and rely on word of mouth. As many as 150 Mexican workers in Storm Lake, for example, come ffom the same small village of Santa Rita in the state of Jalisco. There's a constant commerce of workers, relatives and friends between Storm Lake and Santa Rita. This human conveyor belt is powered by the grueling work regimen, which generates an astonishing worker turnover rate of more than 80 percent a year-a rate common to the entire industry. "Perfect for the company," says Heriberto. "Most workers leave before six months is up and the company has to start paying health insurance."

Meanwhile, in 1995 I.B.P. stripped off a juicy $257 million in profits on sales of $12 billion. Its C.E.O., Robert Peterson, made $1 million in salary and $5.2 million in bonuses that year. Storm Lake shows none of the blight that metastasized through the region after the eighties farm collapse. Its small and tidy downtown has no board-ups or vacancies. Four locally owned banks are thriving. The housing market is corset-tight. "You can't even rent," says Mayor Sandra Madsen. "We have two big payrolls, a stable downtown. Five years ffom now I think this town will realize we are all better off for the change we have gone through."

Perhaps. But for the moment, the dominant atmosphere is one of apartheid. "Race determines everything here," says an outreach worker to the Latino community. "Where you live, where you work, how much you earn, where you worship, even where you shop." Latinos and Laos simply steer clear of the all- white downtown area "that even I don't feel welcome in," says Reverend Tom. The immigrant workers restrict their shopping to the more anonymous Wal-Mart and the cavernous Hy-Vee supermarket on the town outskirts. When I stop to make a phone call from the local Conoco station, two locals overhear me speaking in Spanish. "Fuckin' Mexican should learn English," one says loudly to the other. The editor of the forward-looking Storm Lake Times, which has been a "pro- diversity" voice, jokes that the local good old boys like to call his paper "The Gook Times."

A lot of the local xenophobes had their big moment last May, when on a Friday afternoon seventeen armed Border Patrol officers-backed by agents ffom the Immigration and Naturalization Service, units ffom local law enforcement and surveillance planes circling over the I.B.P. plant-staged an almost tragicomic raid on Storm Lake. In what amounted to a military occupation, agents spent two days going door to door in Little Mexico, setting up roadblocks and rousting suspects off the street in a sweep for illegals. A publicity-seeking U.S. Attorney even showed up to take credit for an operation he had little to do with. Prodded into action by the local police chief, who along with the I.N.S. had built up a database of some 600 suspected illegal aliens in town, the federal agents eventually arrested and deported a total of seventy-eight Latinos.

But when hundreds of other fearful workers-likely all undocumented or with false ID-failed to show up for work the next Monday and the pork began to spoil, I.B.P. management panicked. In a story corroborated by several sources, executives started calling community workers who have the confidence of their Latino clients. "I.B.P. told us to tell everyone to come back to work that afternoon," says a social worker. "It was O.K. now. The I.N.S. was gone and nobody was going to check anything."

Within a few weeks, say several workers, even some of those deported to Mexico were back on the job. "They just got some new ID," says one worker. "And the same gringos who turned them in hired them back like nothing had happened." After the raid was over an I.N.S. official met with the press and said I.B.P. had cooperated in the raid and would face no employer sanctions or fines.

`Your Tired, Your Poor. . .'

I.B.P. doesn't like chatting with the press. But Roberto Trevino, the 29-year- old personnel director at the Heartland Company, a turkey processing plant, gave me a gracious tour of his facility a few hours up the road in Marshall, Minnesota. Five hundred workers-70 percent of them Latinos and Asians, and some Somalis, all in white smocks and caps and under the stress of constantly clanging machinery and chilly temperatures- slaughter, carve, trim and package 32,000 gobblers a day and then ship them throughout America under more than sixty different brand names, including Manor House and Janet Lee.

The college-educated son of Chicano farm workers, Trevino sees his work at least in part as philanthropic. "This is about the whole American immigrant experience. We are providing a stepping stone," he says. "We go to areas of unemployment to recruit. To South Texas: Eagle Pass, El Paso, Brownsville. If you are new in this country you are not going to be a doctor. Instead you take the jobs Americans don't want and you may not get ahead. But you do it for your kids." Yet even Trevino indirectly admits that in the restructured, low-pay workplace, there is little of the stability that we have come to associate with earlier waves of immigration. His turnover hovers at 100 percent. One of five workers is a "re-hire."

"With our workers coming ffom Texas and Mexico we realize this is not home," he says, contradicting his earlier notion of facilitating assimilation. "This is where you work."

That's not true for the 150 or so Somalis who live and work in Marshall. They can't go back. Some were in a Kenyan refugee camp on a Friday only to find themselves by the next Monday resettled in Minnesota and slashing away at turkeys. In the early nineties other Somalis had poured into Marshall ffom San Diego, where work had become scarce. But that inflow has now slowed. "A few years back there was a misunderstanding in our plant over rest periods and there was a Somali strike," says Trevino with a chuckle. "The first in the U.S. We fired them all. About eighty workers. Let me tell you, the word got out on the Somali grapevine fast. And now when they come to work here they understand what American work standards are. No labor trouble since then."

Trevino's hard-line attitude is emblematic of an industry that has reinvented itself over the past fifteen years. The bitter strike at Hormel's Austin, Minnesota, plant in 1985-86 (the subject of Barbara Kopple's Academy Award- winning documentary, American Dream) was the signal event in a labor counterrevolution that has convulsed and redrawn the face of U.S. meatpacking. And if you could boil that counterrevolution down into one slogan it would be: Death to Middle-Class Meatpackers!

Prior to the Reagan era, that's exactly what the meatpackers in Storm Lake were. The space now occupied by I.B.P. was the old Hygrade plant. The work force, unionized and virtually all white, was averaging $30,000 a year or more-- some $51,000 in today's dollars. Refusing to reach agreement with its unions, Hygrade closed down in 1981.

After being enticed with $10 million in local tax subsidies, I.B.P. re-opened the plant a year later, offering $6 an hour. The pattern of de-unionization and ruralization was regional. One after another, meatpacking plants moved ffom the big cities, where they were close to labor, into the countryside, where they were near the animals and could save on transport costs. As supermarkets took on more specialty butchers, the processing plants needed more, but less- skilled, workers. Unions became anathema. The industry's hourly pay, including benefits, peaked at $19 in 1980. By 1992 it was below sixties levels at $12 an hour, and it has continued to fall. By 1995 unionization was half of what it was in 1963.

Where the new plants opened, labor was in relatively short supply. And even in Storm Lake, where hundreds of former Hygrade workers re-applied for the new jobs, I.B.P. hired back only thirty. "The company wanted to bar union- experienced workers ffom the shop floor," says Mark Grey. With just a few companies--I.B.P., Cargill, Con-Agra--dominating the field, competition was, no pun intended, cutthroat. Production lines were sped up; injury rates climbed. What was once a stable work force became frenetically mobile.

And so it has been primarily over the past five to eight years that the industry has implemented a strategy of targeted recruitment and begun to employ methods of labor control that one group of researchers says "recall systems of peonage."

"The best hope these new communities have is that they become unionized someday," says Joe Amato, director of regional studies at Southwest State University in Marshall. "But how? How can transitory, invisible communities articulate what they want, let alone achieve it?"

With a Wink and a Handcuff

Since 1992 the I.N.S. has arrested more than 1,000 meatpacking workers in the Midwest. This past summer, as part of a six-week regional sweep ordered by the Clinton Administration,209 undocumented workers were detained in Iowa. The average pay for those arrested was $6.02 an hour. Now the four biggest meatpackers, including I.B.P. and Swift, have agreed to participate in an I.N.S. program that will use computers to check IDs.

Local Latino workers laugh it all off. "Everyone knows the company and the I.N.S. are in together on all this. They never make the company pay a fine, do they?" says Javier, an I.B.P. worker in Storm Lake who works under the ID he purchased in the name of a legal resident. "Everyone knows they are never going to arrest all of us. Who would do this shitty work for them? We know that every now and then the migra will come in and take a few away to keep the politicians happy. And then we won't see them again for another two years. That's how it works."

For more than a century now there's been a pattern of U.S. industries--one after another--actively recruiting Mexican labor while the rest of society turned a blind eye, says Fred Krissman, anthropologist at Washington State University. "You can go back to the 1920s and find all sorts of academic research in that period referring to Mexicans who could be brought here to work and then sent back home like homing pigeons to procreate." And there's always been that cognitive dissonance between the reality and the policy. "In 1954 during what was called Operation Wetback, a million Mexicans were randomly rounded up in the United States and deported," says Krissman. "At the same time we were bringing in 300,000 Mexicans in the Bracero program. We had trains running both ways on public money!"

The solution, he argues, is to dump current immigration policy and opt for the model of the European Union. When you have a system that frees the flow of capital across borders, you should move toward a transnationalization of labor, too. If you work in the United States you should have legal papers in the United States, and all such workers should be protected by serious enforcement of health and safety regulations on the books. This doesn't mean immigrant workers would suddenly make middleclass wages, but it would be the first step toward eliminating the employer abuses rained down on people with no legal standing. Most important, it would be a radical leap toward stabilizing these now-underground communities. At best, unions would have a better shot at organizing; at a minimum, individual workers would stand a better chance of raising their wages.

This is not a likely option when politicians from both parties struggle to outdo each other in cracking down on illegal aliens. Here in Iowa, where a steady stream of Mexican workers is keeping his state's industries humming, the very liberal Senator Tom Harkin has been barnstorming--even after the election--promising he will bring more I.N.S. agents into the state.

There's that great line in the movie Burn when Marlon Brando, portraying a rogue Marxist in the employ of the fictitious Royal Sugar Company as a counter insurgency adviser and warning the local plantation's overseers of trouble ahead, says something like: In times of great social crisis,the contradictions of an entire century can come to bear in a single week.

And apparently, so can social consciousness expand when put under enough stress. That's the thought that keeps running through my mind as I sit and talk with Mark Prosser, the beefy, blond, self-described "very conservative" police chief Storm Lake. I ask him how, if at all, he's changed since the influx of immigrants. "We are all prejudiced" he says, "but I really had to face and confront my biases. I don't think the people I used to work with in East St. Louis where I worked on the [police] force would even recognize me today."

Prosser proceeds to tell me that it was only because of his persistent prodding over more than a year's time that the Border Patrol finally staged its Storm Lake raid last May. With so many local residents with so much false ID it was becoming impossible to carry out even routine policing. "But you know," the chief continues, "the problem wasn't solved by the raid. In retrospect, I don't think the taxpayers' money was well spent, given the number of illegals who were here."

"You don't think enough were arrested?" I ask.

"No, that's not it," the chief answers. "I've come to a conclusion. The emphasis has to be on legalization, not arrests. There's just got to be a better way. We have to get these people into the system and get them legalized. You know, I really admire these people. Really. I doubt seriously I would ever invite a federal agency to come in again."

I leave Chief Prosser's office and pick up the paper on the corner. A headline says that the day before, in nearby Omaha, I.N.S. agents raided a city- contracted garbage hauler and arrested more than seventy illegals--about half the company work force. One shot was fired at an escaping alien.

Marc Cooper is host and executive producer of RadioNation. He wishes to thank Professor Mark Grey of the University of Northern Iowa for sharing his invaluable research.