Category: Legal immigration and jobs

Changing South Dakota One Slaughterhouse at a Time

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

This is just a quick update on the post I wrote, here a week ago about Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods’ role in creating a massive Chinese virus hot spot in South Dakota.

Apparently the company is blaming the workers’ community culture and the workers point a finger at the company’s management of the plant. Thanks to reader John for bringing my attention to the story.

Buzzfeed News:

Smithfield Foods Is Blaming “Living Circumstances In Certain Cultures” For One Of America’s Largest COVID-19 Clusters

Was there any way to prevent the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in South Dakota from becoming one of the country’s largest known coronavirus clusters, with more than 700 workers infected? It’s hard to know “what could have been done differently,” a Smithfield spokesperson said, given what she referred to as the plant’s “large immigrant population.”

“Living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family,” she explained.

The spokesperson and a second corporate representative pointed to an April 13 Fox News interview in which the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, said that “99%” of the spread of infections “wasn’t happening inside the facility” but inside workers’ homes, “because a lot of these folks who work at this plant live in the same community, the same buildings, sometimes in the same apartments.”

But internal company communications and interviews with nearly a dozen workers and their relatives point to a series of management missteps and half measures that contributed significantly to the spread of the virus. A BuzzFeed News investigation has uncovered new information showing the company did little to inform or protect employees during the critical two weeks after the first case at the plant surfaced. Then, with confirmed cases rising quickly, Smithfield introduced new safety protocols but applied them unevenly across the plant’s departments, leaving hundreds of workers exposed.

In late March, as word of the first confirmed case leaked, workers began seeing flyers on notice boards and doors. “If you are at work and feeling sick,” the flyers stated, “tell your Supervisor and go directly home.” But the directive was posted only in English, three employees said, even though many of the plant’s 3,700 workers have limited comprehension of English. Safety notices at the plant are usually translated into as many as five languages.

It is a long story, if you are interested in the gory details, continue here.

Someone could write a very useful book, a new version of The Jungle, by focusing on one plant like Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls, SD.

Giant global corporations are changing the American heartland with the continued pressure on government to import (for them!) cheap foreign labor.

An author could hit all the key elements of greed, politicians and fake ‘religious’ charities as enablers, the suffering of American workers, the changing culture of middle America and the federal government’s complicity in the whole mess.

The opening chapter would detail the spread of the Chinese virus through the plant and the impact it is having on Sioux Falls.

Meat Giant JBS Closes Greeley, CO Plant Due to Chinese Virus Outbreak

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

That was last week’s news in the Denver Post.  The Brazilian-owned plant was forced to close as 277 employees tested positive for the Chinese virus.

According to the Post, the closure was necessary earlier this month to avoid overwhelming local health care services.

State and local health officials in a Friday letter warned JBS CEO Andre Nogueira of the virus’ rapid spread among employees, particularly those who work the first shift at the plant, and said continued exponential spread would “quickly overwhelm” medical resources in Greeley and the surrounding communities.

The JBS slaughter house at Greeley, Colorado has played a large role over the years on the pages of RRW.

JBS US headquarters are in Greeley. This is a photo I took when I traveled through the Midwest and West in 2016 mostly to have a look at a few meatpacking towns.

In fact, it is through the controversy surrounding refugee (mostly Somali) workers there in 2008 that I became interested in the concept of foreign-owned meatpackers (I call BIG MEAT) encouraging the admission of cheap legal immigrant labor—refugees—which then changes the character of American towns.

Not to mention the fact that US taxpayers subsidize those low wage workers.

I had devoted an entire category I labeled Greeley, Swift, Somali controversy.  See it here.  Posts go back to 2008!

But problems for the beef giant are bigger than a few facility closings…..

We can thank the COVID-19 situation for helping to expose the globalist fat cats that own these plants—like the Brazilian brothers featured in the New York Post on Saturday.  Hat tip: Judy.

And, don’t miss my post about Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods and how the leftwing media (and refugee contractors!) have for years supported the movement of migrants to the US to work these kinds of jobs.

Corrupt billionaire brothers’ meat plants are riddled with coronavirus

The world’s largest meat-processing giant was forced to shut down some of its US plants as more than 100 of its workers tested positive for COVID-19 last week, but the pandemic may be the least of its problems.

The Brazilian billionaire brothers — one of whom owned a Manhattan penthouse — controlling the massive meat producer JBS, which slaughters 13 million animals a day and has revenues of $50 billion a year, have been linked to high-level government corruption that has rocked the South American country.

Joesley (left) and Wesley Batista are the controlling shareholders of two prominent U.S. companies, JBS USA and Pilgrim’s Pride. https://foxwilmington.com/politics/tainted-beef-how-the-meat-you-buy-could-be-supporting-venezuelas-socialist-regime/

The Batistas’ company is also being probed in America now for bribery, and has been accused of price-gouging during the COVID-19 crisis. The New York attorney general, meanwhile, has been asked to look at the company as “an imminent threat” before it goes public on Wall Street.

[….]

After admitting to bribing nearly 2,000 elected officials in Brazil in order to secure government funding to fuel their company’s US expansion a few years ago, Joesley and Wesley Batista were slapped with more than $3.2 billion in fines in 2017, the highest in the country’s history.

Now JBS’ parent company, J&F Investimentos, is reportedly the subject of US Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission investigations for alleged bribery here. Last year, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) urged the federal government to investigate the beef conglomerate and its alleged dealings with the Venezuelan government after the company developed business ties with the administration of President Nicolas Maduro. The US has levied sanctions against the Venezuelan leader.

Last week, US legislators, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), renewed calls for the federal government to investigate alleged price-fixing by JBS and other big beef producers during the pandemic. According to Grassley, big meat processors are using the pandemic to “gouge” US cattle producers.

[….]

Last week, JBS, which sells beef and chicken under its Pilgrim’s Pride and Swift labels, said it was closing a packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, where four workers died from the coronavirus, including longtime plant employee Saul Sanchez, 78. Sanchez, a father of six, had worked for more than 30 years at the plant. A daughter, Beatriz Rangel, said Sanchez was willing to work at the plant even during the outbreak because he trusted his employer.

There is much more here.

We will be watching to see if the President follows through on his tweet last night, here.

LOL! Is he listening to my man Jeff?

Why Do Reporters on the Left Support BIG MEAT Jobs for Immigrants?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 3 Comments

The dark underbelly of the giant globalist meatpacking industry in the US is being exposed as large numbers of slaughterhouse workers are creating US hotspots for the spread of the Chinese virus.

Neil Munro writing at Breitbart takes a stab at finding out why the mainstream media, populated by Leftwing ideologues, have for years been on the side of the meat industry (I dubbed it BIG MEAT a number of years ago) as are the refugee resettlement contractors (six of nine are ‘religious’ charities)*** which have been acting as head hunters for globally owned corporations for decades. (See Bill Clinton brings refugee laborers to Iowa linked below.)

Wouldn’t you think the Lefties would be on the side of the struggling worker rather than acting like they are doing migrants and refugees a giant favor by admitting them to America and placing them in dreadful working conditions (now being exposed in the COVID crisis)?

There are many reasons they have turned a blind eye, but I think Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies provides one answer.

Here is Munro at Breitbart:

NYT Says Immigrants ‘Mourn’ Loss of Deadly, Low-Wage Meatpacking Jobs

Immigrants are “mourning” the loss of low-wage jobs in a Chinese-owned, crowded slaughterhouse run by Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls, SD, according to an article in the New York Times.

Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a meat-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, in the United States, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of WH Group of China.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithfield_Foods

The main character in the story is an immigrant from Sudan who has worked “11-hour days at Smithfield, six times a week for nearly seven years,” says the April 15 article:

[….]

The Chinese-owned hog disassembly plant has been shut down indefinitely after 600 workers caught the Chinese coronavirus while working alongside each other.

“Why would lefties be supporting this?” asked Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The immigrants are working for low wages in terrible jobs!” The answer is that progressives prefer to pose as the defenders of migrants against claimed threats from ordinary Americans, he said, not from the real economic exploitation by employers.

[….]

The article ignores the American workers at the Sioux Falls mill and instead lauds migrants and refugees, most of whom are assigned jobs at the slaughterhouse by the government-funded refugee settlement groups that bring them into the United States as refugees.

[….]

Establishment journalists are now eager to downplay the painful impact of cheap migrant labor on Americans, Corcoran said. “The reporters are basically working for these globalist companies, for Brazil’s JBS [USA Holdings] and for China’s Smithfield Foods [in Sioux Falls]. They are carrying the water because they want more immigration. They are willing to overlook these workplace conditions, and that Americans would do these jobs if they paid enough — as they did at one time.”

Worshiping the god of diversity!

Who cares what the working conditions are when the Left is busy changing America by changing the people!

S**** the working conditions, we get diversity!

The reporters’ underlying message is that the migrants’ pain and labor are worth trading to get more diversity, said Krikorian. “These holier-than-thou-types [are] saying ‘We are doing such a good thing by letting them in the country, when it is, in fact, horrible work, but it is all so good in the end because we get diversity.’”

There is much more here.

If you bother to read the NYT story Munro dissects, although not explicitly stated, there is an underlying message that these poor migrants are slaving away to provide our hams and bacon in Trump’s mean America.

See my BIG MEAT archive by clicking here.  I had already been writing about meatpackers within the first year of writing RRW and their refugee labor appetites when I came across this news in 2008 about how Bill Clinton first came up with the idea of supplying his meatpacking buddies with Bosnian refugee laborers—in Iowa!

And, on the issue of health, maybe one day, it won’t be COVID we are talking about, but some of the other diseases we don’t screen for as migrants enter the US—I can dream!

 

*** For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.  Some have received direct funding from meat giants.

And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.

The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?  

I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.

More Meatpackers-Meet-COVID Horror Stories

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 2 Comments

You won’t find any sympathy from me about this news.  I have been warning for years (long before a virus marched across the world) that if you like to eat meat—beef, pork, chicken—you need to find a source of locally raised meat.

They are changing America by changing the people!

Of course my major interest has been about how BIG MEAT has a voracious appetite for cheap immigrant/refugee labor that has been supplied to them by the federal government and by the supposed do-gooder ‘religious’ charities that shill for these global giants as they make up the majority of US refugee resettlement contractors…

And, how that ‘need’ for cheap labor is changing the character of middle America.

Below is one of what I am sure will be many stories about immigrant labor and your food supply.

From Iowa Starting Line:

Iowa Plant Workers Describe Inaction, Safety Concerns, Fear

 

Widespread outbreaks at meat packing plants in the Midwest are quickly becoming the latest crisis in the ongoing pandemic. Hundreds of workers, many of whom are immigrants and refugees, are becoming sick, some have already died, and the resulting plant closures are risking the nation’s food supply chain.

In Iowa, a significant percentage of the state’s new positive COVID-19 cases this week came from a Tyson meat packing plant in Louisa County, a small, rural county in Southeast Iowa. 186 positive cases were recorded from the one plant alone and two people have died, which has driven Louisa County to be one of the nation’s biggest hot spots for the virus, while also impacting surrounding counties.

Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds: But they promised me!

At her Wednesday press conference, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said that plant executives had assured her that sufficient precautions to protect workers had been put into place.

“When I reached out to the CEOs of both the plants, they indicated they had already taken the steps,” Reynolds said of mitigation efforts encouraged by the state. “They’re trying to be very proactive to not only protect their workforce, but to make sure they can, you know, can keep the plant up and going.”

[….]

….while most of the focus has been on Latino workers at these plants, it’s important to note that many meat packing employees are refugees from non-Latin American countries. Large numbers of Burmese refugees, for instance, work at the Columbus Junction and Waterloo plants.

Nearly all the workers disputed the idea that employees were being provided the kind of protections that Reynolds said was happening.

I’ve only snipped a bit of the story, continue reading here.

And, I’ll bet if you check the Iowa hotspots at this interactive map you will find some global meatpacker or other large manufacturing facility that is the source of the local infectious outbreak.

That is Louisa County. See the interactive map here: https://coronavirus.iowa.gov/

 

See my BIG MEAT archive by clicking here.  I had already been writing about meatpackers within the first year of writing RRW and their refugee labor appetites when I came across this news in 2008 about how Bill Clinton first came up with the idea of supplying his meatpacking buddies with Bosnian refugee laborers—in Iowa!

 

Meatpackers and COVID-19: Will the Supply of Meat Take a Hit as Workers Get Sick?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

That is the gist of this story from ProPublica (a Leftwing publication), which reports on how the virus is creeping into slaughterhouses across the country.

However, meat industry reps are optimistic that the virus will not slow meat production and that the virus won’t end up in the food supply.

Longtime readers know that Big Meat has been changing America one town at a time as it relies heavily on immigrant and refugee labor and as such has been a favorite topic of mine here at RRW since 2008 when I first learned that Bill Clinton was helping supply his meatpacking buddies with refugee labor from Bosnia.

What Happens If Workers Cutting Up the Nation’s Meat Get Sick?

As meatpackers rush to meet demand, their employees are starting to get COVID-19. But some workers say they’re going to work ill because they don’t have paid sick days and can be penalized for staying home.

Here’s what has happened in the meatpacking industry in the last week alone:

A federal food safety inspector in New York City, who oversaw meat processing plants, died from the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

A poultry worker in Mississippi, employed by America’s third largest chicken company, tested positive for the virus, causing a half-dozen workers to self-quarantine. Another worker in South Dakota, employed by the world’s largest pork producer, also tested positive.

In Georgia, dozens of workers walked out of a Perdue Farms chicken plant, demanding that the company do more to protect them.

Can they keep up with the demand? “Grocery meat sales, excluding deli meat, surged a staggering 77% for the week ending March 15.”

And Tyson Foods told ProPublica on Friday that “a limited number of team members” had tested positive for the disease.

As COVID-19 makes its way across the country, leading to panic grocery buying in state after state, the stresses on the nation’s food supply chain have ratcheted ever higher. But in industries like meatpacking, which rely on often grueling shoulder-to-shoulder work, so have the risks to workers’ health.

In interviews this week, meat and poultry workers, some in the country without authorization, noted with irony that they have recently been labeled “essential” by an administration now facing down a pandemic. Yet the rules of their workplaces — and the need to keep food moving — pressure them to work in close quarters, even when sick.

[….]

Many of the nation’s meatpackers declined to respond to specific questions about how they’ve dealt with infected workers or what they’ve done to try to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in their plants. Or they offered vague assurances that workers are being protected.

So far, only two meatpacking companies — Tyson Foods and Cargill — have announced companywide temperature checks to screen employees for signs of the virus. Two more say they have begun rolling them out.

But except for unionized plants, meat and poultry workers rarely get paid when they’re sick. At many companies, including Tyson, workers receive disciplinary points for calling in sick. Because points lead to termination, workers told ProPublica, they and some of their colleagues have continued to work even when sick, despite the coronavirus.

[….]

Even before the coronavirus, the meat industry had complained of a labor shortage as low pay and harsh conditions collided with a tight labor market, tighter borders and dramatic reductions by the Trump administration in the number of refugees, who make up the backbone of many plants’ workforce.

[….]

“Our primary focus is to keep our plants running so that we can feed America,” Tyson’s president, Dean Banks, said on CNN. “We’re running the plants as hard as we can.”

And some analysts note that even if an outbreak of the virus forced a plant to close, the industry — with more than 500,000 employees at 4,000 slaughterhouses and processing plants across the country — is big enough to absorb the loss.

There is much more, it is a long article, continue here.

In the summer of 2016 I traveled around the midwest and west to have a look at meatpacking towns and how the cheap labor demands of Big Meat were changing America.

My conclusion:

If you can’t live without meat, my recommendation is to find a local producer so you know just where and how your food has been processed.

Note that I have a tag for COVID-19 posts here at RRW.

You might be interested in my previous post about Bowling Green, Kentucky and its newly unemployed refugees.