Ft. Morgan Meatpacker recalls 66.3 tons of beef after E-coli outbreak kills one, injures 17

Yes, dear readers, this is the same Cargill meatpacker that paid Somali workers $1.5 million over an Islamic prayer break dispute (reported here just last week!).

 

Cargill plant
The Cargill plant sits right at the edge of town

 

Here is the story at the Denver Post:

Cargill Meat Solutions of Fort Morgan is recalling 66.3 tons of ground beef products following an outbreak of one death and 17 illnesses that were reported due to E. coli contamination.

[….]

Food investigators determined that everyone sickened had purchased raw meat at grocery stores supplied by Cargill, Machuca said.

The identity of the deceased person has not been released.

[….]

In a statement on Thursday, Cargill said all of the affected products have been removed from supermarkets. Food safety teams are reviewing the Fort Morgan facility and others “to ensure we continue to deliver safe food,” the statement said.

“We were distressed to learn a fatality may be related to an E.coli contamination of one of our products,” it said. “Our hearts go out to the families and individuals affected by this issue.”

A little more here for those of you who might want to check the meat you bought earlier this summer that might still be in your freezer.

A personal note:

In the summer of 2016, I visited Ft. Morgan to see what the situation was there relating to the influx of Somali refugee workers for Cargill.

I haven’t bought beef since, and here is why.

I’m an animal lover, and we raised beef cattle for 20 years.  We loved our cattle and treated them humanely, but they did become someone’s dinner.  However, when I saw the miles and miles of feedlots with thousands of beef cattle standing in those hot feedlots going in to Ft. Morgan I was appalled.  No cover from the summer sun and waiting to be slaughtered by Cargill, I was finished.

If you love eating beef, find a reputable producer near where you live and buy directly from that farmer or rancher.

The meatpackers are changing America with their desire for cheap immigrant labor, don’t send them your money!

 

Colorado: Meatpacker agrees to pay Somalis $1.5 million in prayer break dispute

I have no sympathy for giant globalist meatpackers because they brought this on themselves when they actively sought out (with the help of federal refugee contractors like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service) Somali refugee workers.

However, what we increasingly see is an accommodation of Islamic religious practices in the workplace with this settlement and others like it.  CAIR is very happy!

Big Meat! Changing America, one meatpacking town at a time!

 

 

Ft. Morgan Somalis Islamic center
Ft. Morgan has a mosque now.    https://www.denverpost.com/2016/03/19/somalis-struggle-to-make-new-home-in-colorado/

 

From the Greeley Tribune:

DENVER — A big U.S. meatpacker has agreed to pay $1.5 million to 138 Somali-American Muslim workers who were fired from their jobs at a Colorado plant after they were refused prayer breaks, a federal anti-discrimination agency said Friday.

Cargill Meat Solutions, a division of Minnesota-based agribusiness company Cargill Corp., also agreed to train managers and hourly workers in accommodating Muslim employees’ prayer breaks at its Fort Morgan beef processing plant, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said.

Wichita, Kansas-based Cargill denies wrongdoing but agreed to settle to avoid further litigation, the federal agency said. The dispute dates back to the firings of the workers in late 2016 after management rescinded policies allowing Muslim employees to take short breaks for prayer.

In 2017, the agency found that the workers had been harassed and discriminated against for protesting the unannounced policy change that denied them opportunities for obligatory prayer. Hundreds of Somali-Americans work at the plant in Fort Morgan, about 50 miles southeast of Greeley.

The Teamsters union also agreed to pay them, an admission that they too were not happy with the Somali workers and their religious demands.

In a related announcement, a Teamsters union local that was supposed to represent the workers will pay them $153,000 to settle discrimination complaints.

The federal agency said it determined that Teamsters Local Union No. 455, based in Denver and in Fort Morgan, failed to advocate for the Muslim workers in their dispute with Cargill and even harassed them because of their race, religion and national origin. The workers were dues-paying union members.

Union officials denied wrongdoing, but the local unit agreed to pay the workers, undergo training in handling grievances, and publicize employee rights to be free of discrimination based on race or national origin.

[….]

Like other U.S. firms that employ Muslim line workers at meatpacking and processing plants, Cargill managers must balance religious accommodations with demands of processing meat in an operation that frequently runs 24 hours.

Managing possible disruptions not only slow production but can create safety issues for line workers.

Here comes CAIR:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, and Qusair Mohamedbhai, a Denver attorney who represented the workers praised the settlement.

Much more here.

See my Fort Morgan file here.  I visited that small city on my tour of midwestern and western towns and cities disrupted by an influx of refugee workers. I spoke with residents who told me that at one time Cargill paid very good wages, but then discovered the ‘benefits’ of immigrants and refugees who would work for less.

You might want to search RRW for the word ‘meatpackers’ because I have dozens and dozens of posts going back ten years about how BIG MEAT is changing America.

Here is just one post you should see. It isn’t just meatpackers, but others in the food industry, the hospitality industry and other manufacturing companies that drive the US Refugee Admissions Program.

This post is filed in my category ‘Stealth jihad’ for obvious reasons.

Somalis in Ft. Morgan, CO say they can't assimilate without a mosque

Huh?
(Why what Donald Trump says is resonating with voters!)
This is just one more story about Ft. Morgan, Colorado (we have been following their experiment with a growing Somali population for years, click here for our Ft. Morgan archive).  See also Leo Hohmann at WND on Friday—why are we still taking Somali refugees after three decades?

Cargill in Ft. Morgan
Cargill Inc. in Ft. Morgan is responsible for the influx of an estimated 1,200 Muslim Somalis to the small city in the northeast corner of Colorado. Photo: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/6/colorado-it-takesavillagetosettleimmigrantsfromafrica.html

Ft. Morgan has Somalis because it is a meatpacking town.  If they had no meat packer, there would be no Somalis clamoring for a mosque.
BIG Meat is changing the face of the American heartland!
From AP at the Santa Fe New Mexican:

FORT MORGAN, Colo. — For the last decade, Somali refugees have flocked to this conservative farm town on Colorado’s eastern plains. They’ve started a small halal mini-market and a restaurant, sent their children to the schools and worked at a meat processing plant run by Cargill Inc.

As much as Fort Morgan’s small town feel reminds many of their rural villages back home, some say they will feel like outsiders until they get what has so far eluded them: a permanent mosque. They are renting two small rooms for a makeshift version, for now.

They say they’ve tried to buy property to build a mosque but believe no one wants to sell to them.

“If we can own a mosque here, we will be more a part of the community,” said Abdinasser Ahmed, a local Somali leader and public schools teacher who fled war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2003, arrived in Fort Morgan in 2009 to work at the plant and is now a U.S. citizen.

Some longtime residents say they don’t want one in their city of 12,000, a step too far especially at a time when fears of terrorism have grown following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

Putting a mosque “right in the center of town” would be a symbol “as if to claim the town,” said Candace Loomis, who runs a coffee shop and whose grandparents settled this country of sweeping horizons in a two-room sod house.  [Loomis is right, the mosque will mark their Islamic territory.  That is what mosques are!—ed]

Continue reading here.  Montanans and Wyomingites pay attention!
If anyone was really serious about assimilation, it would require a moratorium on mass migration to America right now. Just as in the 1930s when America wisely closed the spigot to allow the masses already here to assimilate, we should be doing the same now (if anyone in leadership positions had guts).
In fact, if Republican leaders had ten years ago worked to close, or at least slow, immigration, instead of following the likes of Senator John McCain off a cliff, there would be no Donald Trump in 2016.

Meatpackers and Somali workers (again) disrupt small town life in America

This time it is the New York Times doing the story, but it is not new for us.  We told you about problems in Ft. Morgan, Colorado way back beginning in 2008, see our huge archive on Ft. Morgan by clicking here.

Editor’s note: There is so much going on these days and life has been interrupting my writing time, please follow my tweets (right hand side bar here at RRW) because when I do get time at the computer, I do try to keep up with the news by tweeting.  This NYT story is from a couple of days ago (I did tweet it then).

Cargill Somalis
http://coloradopols.com/diary/79378/fort-morgans-cargill-plant-fires-190-muslim-employees-in-prayer-dispute#sthash.DvrQ1LOw.dpbs

Back to Ft. Morgan…. 
I can’t resist repeating this little bit from a post I wrote on September 30, 2008 about the Ft. Morgan Times editorial excitedly inviting Somalis to town and calling out this blog!
Here is what I said:

Today [9/30/08] the Ft. Morgan Times has an editorial [original editorial is gone, so it’s a good thing I got it at the time! Found by reader Jeff, here—ed] entitled, “Refugees taking root in Ft. Morgan.”   I have read a lot of politically correct, diversity is beautiful, let’s all sing ‘kumbaya’ articles, but this one I’m going to print out and hang by my computer and wait for the day when something happens in Ft. Morgan, CO and I can refer to it again. [Needless to say much happened in Ft. Morgan, even an honor killing, since then!—ed]

Here is what the editor said about RRW (who else could it be!)

Of course, if it were up to some people, Somali refugees would not have a chance to resettle anywhere in the U.S. There is even a Web site devoted to teaching Americans how to chase refugees of various sorts out of town.

I’m going to encourage you to read the whole NYT story, click here, about the prayer break dispute at Cargill and the Somalis now packing up and leaving town.  This is the takeaway for you:

As the demographics of small-town America shift and more Muslim immigrants move in, it is a dynamic that is likely to play out again and again.

Why is the US still taking Somalis after three decades?

The US State Department and its contractors like the Lutherans in Colorado Springs, Greeley and Ft. Morgan, Colorado are still bringing Somalis to the US by the thousands. Exactly why they are still colonizing your towns with Somalis isn’t exactly clear.
Since Obama was elected to office, the US admitted 45,718 Somalis. Many of those came from refugee camps in Kenya, but we picked up thousands of others around the world (screening?).  Data here.
In that time frame (of the 45,718 admitted), Colorado got 1,412 of them while Minnesota got 6,037!  But, Somali refugees were resettled all over American and often move (they call it secondary migration) to be with THEIR people in other seed communities.
In the first five months of this fiscal year (2016) we have admitted 3,107 new Somalis.
This isn’t about humanitarianism, it’s about large global corporations wanting cheap immigrant labor and the US State Department and ‘religious’ groups like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service acting as their head hunters.

Ft. Morgan: Cargill caves to CAIR, will allow Somali workers to reapply for jobs in 30 days

Update!  A reader suggests you contact Cargill and complain about their accommodation of Islamic demands.  Tell them to hire Americans while you are at it!  http://www.cargill.com/contact-us/
 
It all boils down to the fact that ‘Big Meat’ doesn’t want to pay higher wages and so they have become completely dependent on refugee labor.  In the meantime, they are changing the face of rural America.

Cargill workers
Fired Somali workers could soon be back on the Job as CAIR has Cargill by the short hairs.

We reported the Ft. Morgan Cargill plant’s woes here as Somalis walked off the job with demands for special accommodation for prayer breaks.
Now here is the news that Cargill has changed its re-hiring policy to get many of those fired Somalis back to work. (While having given CAIR an opportunity to press for sharia workplace compliance!).
From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Cargill will change its hiring policy — allowing employees to be potentially rehired 30 days after termination, not 180 days — in response to a walkout by Somali workers in Colorado.

After a dispute over Muslim prayer time, about 150 employees at Cargill’s sprawling Fort Morgan, Colo., plant didn’t show up for work for three days — grounds for termination. They were fired. Some of those workers claimed they weren’t allowed to take prayer breaks, while Cargill claimed that it was still following its policy allowing the breaks.

Minnetonka-based Cargill said in a statement Friday that it will change the hiring policy at all of its North American beef plants, allowing former employees terminated for “attendance violation or job abandonment” to be considered for rehiring 30 days after being fired. The workers would have to reapply for their jobs.

“We believe the change in our beef business policy related to how quickly a former employee may be eligible to reapply for positions at our beef plants is a reasonable update to something that’s been in place for quite a few years,” Cargill Beef President John Keating said in a statement.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been representing many terminated Somali workers, said it welcomed Cargill’s change in hiring policy, though it criticized Cargill’s prayer break policy as ambiguous.

Now see at the very end, the admission that ‘Big Meat’ is changing America by changing the people.

They can get away with cheap wages as long as the federal government (and their resettlement contractors) continue to bring them fresh refugee laborers every year.   While they get away with paying low wages, you supplement the refugee family’s income with welfare payments!  What a business model for the meatpacking industry.

Over the past few decades, U.S. meatpacking plants — including in Minnesota — have increasingly relied on immigrant communities for labor. About one-third of Cargill’s workers at Fort Morgan are immigrants, or come from immigrant families from Africa, and are predominantly Muslim. Much of the rest of the workforce there is of Hispanic descent.

Read it all here.
Here is an interesting map showing Cargill meatpacking and other facilities in North America.
To learn more about how refugees have changed Fort Morgan, click here where we have an extensive archive going back several years.