Category: Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy

The right to choose: Somalis move from packing plant to packing plant

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is just another update from the Greeley Tribune about the Somalis fired at the Swift meatpacking plant last fall during a dispute over prayer breaks. (Hat tip:  Blulitespecial)  If you are a new reader, we have a whole category on this long and convoluted subject here.

As we mentioned previously, workers who walked off the job at Swift after being denied the exact times they wanted to pray were given an opportunity to return to work, some did, some didn’t.    Those who did not, were fired.   Some of the fired workers are looking for a monetary settlement according to their lawyer.

At least 90 of the fired workers are seeking an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission review of claims of harassment and discrimination at JBS Swift. They have retained Denver attorney Diane King to file the complaints.

“This is a particularly vulnerable population,” she said. “They’re recent immigrants. They don’t speak the language. They look different, and they don’t have a religion that’s a mainstream religion in this country. So, they’re particularly vulnerable.”

King said she’s not sure how long it will take the EEOC to make a ruling. She believes her Greeley clients have a good case and should be entitled to a “some monetary compensation” for lost wages after being fired.

One worker, happily settled down the road apiece, says he prefers Cargill to Swift.  When I saw this information that some Muslims stayed at Swift, I wondered what that says for their legal case.   Obviously the Swift plant is not discriminating since some Muslims are staying there.

Haji (Abdikarim, the subject of this article) bears no grudge against Muslims who chose to stay at the Greeley plant. He’s not going out of his way to try to recruit East Africans in Greeley to Fort Morgan.

“Everybody has their own mind and belief,” Haji said. “If they ask me, yeah (he’ll speak positively of Cargill). If they don’t, I’m not going to brag about it. It depends on the people. Some people might think Swift is good for them. Some might think Cargill is good for them. Everybody has an option.”

Yup, that’s America, everybody does have an option!

By the way, I was interested to see mention in this article that Haji arrived in Greeley and was hired by Swift  just weeks before the big walkout.   Notice that so did Somali community organizer Graen Isse; now isn’t that a coincidence?

The flow of Somali refugees into the US has been slowed dramatically by the suspension of the family reunification program (P-3) of the US State Department after the Department learned that Africans were commiting immigration fraud on a large scale.   The Tribune does its readers a disservice by continuing to print that all Somalis arrived in the US legally.

Update: Greeley, CO gets a Somali community organizing group

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to try to not be so cynical and give you the straight news as I report on the latest from the Greeley Tribune. 

Graen Isse, unemployed Somali meatpacker has started an East African Community center in Greeley so the local folks can better understand their new neighbors.  You can read more and follow links to Graen Isse in this post a couple of weeks ago.  

A group of East Africans recently opened a community center in Greeley, which they hope will ease the integration of refugees and other newcomers to the city.

Isse is the one who told the Arab press that the Hispanics were to blame for the conflict at the Swift plant, so much for integrating into the community.

This little group of  Somalis want to get 501(c)3 status so they can get in on some lucrative government grants (oh gosh, I am already slipping into cynicism).

Graen Isse, spokesman for the East Africa Community Council, said the group is working on getting nonprofit status to allow it to apply for grants to further its educational programs. So far, the office rent and computers are being paid for by combined donations from the office’s nine volunteer staff members — all East Africans who are relatively new to Greeley.

You will see in that link I posted above that Isse is unemployed and was thinking about leaving town.   Amazingly he had arrived in Greeley (well-educated and speaking excellent English) and gotten a job at the Swift meatpacking plant just about a week before he and others walked off the job in the prayer dispute.     We have a whole category here on the Swift/Somali controversy.

The Greeley Tribune wants readers to know that the Somalis are here legally, but there is some question about that because the State Department has suspended a large section of the refugee program mostly because of immigration fraud over many years from especially Somalis.

An estimated 400 East Africans, who are legal residents under a United Nations refugee resettlement program, have moved to Greeley over the past 20 months, mostly to work at the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.

Then we have the obligatory wrap up from the Somali point of view about the grievances they have with the JBS Swift plant.   They plan on filing a complaint with the federal EEOC (CAIR’s hit man).

Warsame Ali, a member of the East African Community Council, said about 120 East Africans left town after being fired by JBS in September. The dismissals came after Muslim workers claimed the company reneged on a compromise to allow them a short break around sunset to accommodate prayers during the holy month of Ramadan. Company officials said they tried to accommodate the workers’ religious practices and that the firings were the result of an unauthorized work stoppage that involved about 300 Muslims walking off the job.

Dozens of fired workers are planning to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The workers claim they were discriminated against and harassed at the Greeley plant.

Apparently it doesn’t matter if there is work in Greeley because Somalis keep coming to this welcoming town.   The Trib, above, told us there are 400 Somalis but this new group says 1000.

Despite the problems, Ali said that each day a few more East Africans come to Greeley seeking work. He estimates that there may be as many as 1,000 in the city, since many of them are students or elders who live with family members who work at Swift.

Read on and learn how the Somalis promote Sharia finance.

I think it’s interesting that we have gotten in on the ground level and will have a view from the beginning of how an American town succumbs to Islamization.

And, it is ironic that it is Greeley, CO, the American town that inspired one of the original leaders of  modern day radical Islam.   I assure you that Isse is well aware of Greeley’s role in the rise of  Islam, here.

Communism had Karl Marx. Al Qaedaism has Sayed Qtub. Who’s he, most people would ask. The ideology that nurtured modern Islamic extremism, and spawned every violent movement from Hezbollah to al Qaeda, was born in 1952 when Qtub, an Egyptian writer, returned from studying American literature at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo.

Update and review of the Greeley/Swift controversy

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have to warn you, this article I’m posting is a long and superficial piece about the controversy in Greeley, CO a few months back, the one we created an entire category to follow (here).    If you have been a regular reader of RRW and followed the recent news about Somalis getting into the US by lying about family members or that Somali young men are believed to be headed to terrorist training camps, this is the kind of story that will make you want to barf it is so one-sided.

The problem in Greeley, in a nutshell, is that Somalis flooded the town for jobs at the local JBS Swift meatpacking plant, then demanded special prayer breaks for Ramaden which Swift first gave them then took back when other ethnic workers at the plant protested.  Somalis walked off the job and were told to return to work by a certain time, those that did not were fired.   Swift stuck to its guns and many of the nomadic Somalis moved on to other meatpacking towns.

A few nuggets from yesterday’s article in Denver’s Westworld News follow.  Setting the scene for the clash of cultures:

Hispanics have been in Greeley for years, attracted by the many factory and agricultural jobs. But their numbers have swelled in recent decades, and they now make up at least 30 percent of the city’s population of 89,000, according to the U.S. Census.

Interestingly the clash of cultures came not from white Americans, but from the Hispanics primarily.  Other ethnic groups employed at Swift protested too.

How did the Somalis come to be in Greeley?

In December 2006, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials descended on the Swift plant, arresting and deporting hundreds of illegal workers as their families sobbed outside. The raid was part of a national crackdown that shook the meatpacking industry and left Swift desperate for a new source of cheap labor.

Refugees — those who fear persecution in their native countries and have been screened by the Department of Homeland Security for resettlement in America — are both cheap and legal. After the raid, some Somalis say, Swift sent recruiters to African restaurants in Denver, offering them cash to work in Greeley. The word spread quickly among Somali refugees from Denver to Kansas City to California, as friends and relatives talked up the job openings and the larger paychecks to be earned at the Swift plant.

Now we know from recent news that many of the Somalis are not here legally and could never have been screened by Homeland Security because they lied about who they are.  Kind of hard to screen someone who isn’t who they say they are.

So, when Swift refused to hire back the Somalis who walked off the job did they stay in Greeley or move on?  And, how is Greeley today?

Suddenly, Greeley had a different problem: Scores of Somalis, out of work and worried about making their rent. Within weeks, the fired workers began leaving town for jobs at packing plants in Fort Morgan, Nebraska and Minnesota. They emptied out the Greeley Islamic Center mosque, left vacant apartments, even shut down the only African restaurant in town, creating a massive rupture in the community.

I guess just as local citizens were being told to adjust to their new neighbors, poof, they were gone.  Most of them that is!

Remaining are the “community organizers” who had intrigued me while the controversy was on-going.    Graen Isse was the guy who had showed up in town just before all this started and then busied himself by talking to the likes of Arabic news outfits, blaming the problem on the Hispanics.  He told the Arab publication he had worked in America since he was 16, but from this puff-piece it would appear he had a typical American high school experience.    And, with an education like his, what was he doing looking for meatpacking work (even as a translator)?

Graen Isse, a local Somali leader, understands these conflicting impulses well. In his fourteen years in America, he’s bounced between three states. Now he’s trying to figure out how to help Greeley’s Somali community survive, even if he’s not sure how long he’ll stick around himself.

Slim and amiable, the 27-year-old Isse is constantly in motion — knee tapping, cell phone wire hanging from his ear, eyes scanning the room.  [who is he talking to and what is he looking for?]

[Supposedly separated from his parents as a child by the everpresent violence in Africa, miraculously one day his parents were found.]

One day, Isse’s older brother appeared and announced that their parents had escaped to neighboring Kenya. As his family was reunited, another of Isse’s brothers, who had been injured in the war, made it to California as a refugee. He told the government about his family back home, clearing the way for Isse and several members of his family to apply for refugee status and move to San Diego.

So Isse grew up as an American teenager, running track and playing high school football. After he graduated from high school in Minneapolis, where his mother had moved, his globetrotting continued. He took college classes in California, then completed his degree in Kenya before ending up back in San Diego. There he worked for a transportation tracking company, drove a taxi, even took some law school classes.

Isse moved to Greeley last summer because a friend from California, Aziz Dhies, was working as a nurse there and suggested that Isse might like the town as well. Isse was hired as a translator at Swift and had only been on the job for about a week when the Ramadan controversy began. He was thrust into the midst of the problem as he negotiated on behalf of hundreds of people whom he had only just met. He, too, was fired because he went home to eat and rest on the day the dispute was resolved instead of returning immediately to work. But he quickly found a new job, working part-time as a translator at the Weld County courts. And he and Dhies dedicated themselves to community organizing, forming the East Africa Community, which aims to be “the middleman between the leaders and our community,” Isse says.

I believe that Isse is a professional community organizer brought in to agitate the Swift workers, but I guess the big question is, who sent him?

Ft. Morgan, CO: Let’s be just like Minneapolis!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yippee!   Representatives of Ft. Morgan and Greeley, CO traveled to Minnesota recently to see the wonderous things that immigrants have brought to that “international” city.  Ft. Morgan has a newly acquired flood of Somali refugee workers thanks to the local Cargill meatpacking plant.  Greeley has hundreds too compliments of Swift & Co meatpacking.  From the Ft. Morgan Times:

Immigrant integration workers returned from Minnesota this week with a more optimistic view of the future.

OneMorgan County Coordinator Brenda Zion said the Minnesota efforts to help immigrants assimilate to America hold out great hope for Morgan County.

She took a trip to greater Minneapolis and several agencies this week along with Karen Liston, an English as a Second Language teacher with the Fort Morgan School District, and others from Greeley, Zion said.

It may seem surprising, but Minneapolis is a pretty international city, she said.

It began dealing with an influx of Hispanics and Somalis many years ago, which has given it experience to share with other cities, Zion said.

The article in the Ft. Morgan Times goes on to gush about all the enviable programs and amenities that Minneapolis has in addition to its international flavor.  It has “multicultural services,” “integration navigators,” English and citizenship classes, and a Somali mall and a “global market.”  

It even has a what—a budding Sharia law center to settle disputes:

The Confederation of the Somali Community acts as a community center and works to help settle disputes that arise when cultures clash, Zion said.

The Ft. Morgan Times article gushes on.   However, it doesn’t mention that a large number of the Somalis they are welcoming to Ft. Morgan are illegal aliens according to the State Department yesterday.

Not a word about Minneapolis Somali gangs (just think, Ft. Morgan, you can have community meetings someday to discuss what to do about the Somali murder rate).  Not a word about voter irregularity in the Somali community of Minneapolis.  Not a word about the cost to towns like Emporia, KS incurred when it expanded services and then the nomadic Somalis moved on.  Not a word about how the Somalis have been harrassing the mayor of Grand Island, NE.  Not a word about polygamy in the Somali community.  Not a word about such issues as TB (remember the Somali who died at Tyson’s in Emporia from TB).  Not a word about the controversy over the Muslim “public” school illegally teaching religion.  Not a word about the second class treatment of women (right there in Ft. Morgan). Not a word about Somali lawsuits against employers.  The list actually goes on, I just got tired of putting in links!

The Ft. Morgan Times is doing an injustice to its citizens.   This one-sided report is why the mainstream media, including the print media, is increasingly disregarded.   People deserve to hear all the facts about what is happening in their community, not just the cherry-picked facts from the multiculturalism-is-grand elitists.

For more background see our whole category on the Greeley, Grand Island, Ft. Morgan Somali issue here.

Somalis win settlement in chicken plant discrimination case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Chicken processor Gold’n Plump has been forced to pony-up a settlement in a Somali worker prayer case in Minnesota.  Accomodation of Muslim demands in the workplace continue aided by the folks at the EEOC and its subsidiary, CAIR.  Hat tip:  Janet.   From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

As many as 100 Somali Muslims who are current and former workers at Gold’n Plump Inc. will receive a total of $365,000 in a settlement of federal lawsuits alleging religious discrimination at the company’s chicken processing plants in Cold Spring, Minn., and Arcadia, Wis.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleged in a lawsuit filed in September that St. Cloud-based Gold’n Plump violated federal law by terminating Somali workers who prayed during their work shifts. The EEOC alleged in a separate lawsuit that the Work Connection Inc., an employment agency in St. Paul, required applicants for jobs at Gold’n Plump to sign forms acknowledging that they might be required to handle pork.

Many Muslims consider pigs to be unclean and believe the Qur’an prohibits them from handling pork products.

I guess we can expect Swift & Co. to be next.  Remember they fired Somali workers in Greeley, CO and Grand Island, NE just a few months ago.  See our coverage in this category.