Mohamed Maow Photo: Liz Dufour, The Cincinnati Enquirer
Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the employer—DHL Global Mail—since they were apparently unaware of the Somali penchant for setting up such claims against employers once enough of them were hired to make an impact on the workplace. Don’t DHL head-honchos read RRW?
CINCINNATI — For more than three years, Mohamed Maow worked at DHL Global Mail in Hebron, Ky. He said he earned $11.57 an hour to sort mail and was paid time-and-a-half for overtime.
Maow, 27, a refugee from Somalia who came to the U.S. in 2007, said he never received any negative comments about his performance.
Yet on Oct. 9, after he said DHL supervisors reversed a policy of flexible break times that allowed Maow and fellow Somalis time to pray, he was among two dozen Muslims fired for stopping to say five-minute evening prayers required by their religious beliefs.
What a surprise! CAIR Ohio comes to the rescue!
Maow’s is one of 11 complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – of an expected 24 total – that allege DHL Global Mail fired a group of Somali Muslims for exercising their legally protected religious rights.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has filed the EEOC complaints on behalf of the fired workers.
“We are requesting all available remedies allowed under Title VII (of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964) and the Kentucky Civil Rights Act, including but not limited to: damages, reinstatement where appropriate and policy changes to ensure that all worker’s civil rights are respected,” said Booker Washington, CAIR staff attorney. [Washington’s bio is here—ed]
The article goes on to say that about 400 Somalis have moved into Erlanger (the friendship city!) and Florence, Kentucky.
Just a reminder, 7,608 new Somali refugees were resettled in the US in FY2013, here.
For your further reading, we archived the majority of our posts about Somalis protesting in the workplace in our Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy category. You might also wish to view our Stealth Jihad category as well because that is what this is all about.
Imam Nermin Spahic on trial for sexual abuse. Trial begins on December 2.
This story is a few days old and I saw it reported by several bloggers so didn’t think it was necessary to post here too, but on second thought decided it was best to keep our coverage of Imam Spahic up-to-date.
We told you about the arrest here in August, where we further discussed how Iowa came to have so many Bosnian Muslim refugees (thank Bill Clinton and his meatpacker buddies).
An attorney for a Des Moines Islamic leader charged with sexual abuse and exploitation is asking a judge to drop two of the charges, arguing that they violate the man’s religious freedom.
In a motion to dismiss filed last week in Polk County District Court, Des Moines defense attorney Angela Campbell argued that Nermin Spahic, 40, had never met the two women who accused him of sexual abuse before the day of a religious ceremony that led to his arrest. The motion also says that Spahic never claimed to offer “mental health services” or counseling.
Spahic faces one count of third-degree sexual abuse and two counts of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist. He was arrested in August after a 42-year-old woman and her 18-year-old daughter told police that Spahic sexually assaulted them during a religious ceremony.
Prosecutors: “Voodoo priest”
The woman on Aug. 12 called Spahic to her house in Johnston for help with her daughter, who reportedly suffered personal issues, including depression and drug use, police and court papers said. Spahic allegedly performed an Islamic ceremony that involved “chanting and rubbing the body with oil,” court papers said.
In one section of the sealed minutes of evidence, prosecutors “inappropriately refer to Mr. Spahic as a ‘Voodoo priest,’” according to the motion. At the time of his arrest Spahic served as the imam – a leader of Islamic prayer services – at the Des Moines Islamic and Cultural Center Bosniak on Lower Beaver Road.
All of our previous posts on Bosnians are archived here.
Garden City’s new logo, The “Yucca Burst!” “The various colors of yucca leaves represent the many different cultures living in unison in the region.”
We’ve written on many previous occasions about Tyson Foods meatpacking town of Garden City, KS (here is our archive).
One of my all time favorites is this post about Somalis in Garden City asking for a separate cemetery for their people (so even in death they needn’t assimilate). And, this postfrom January 2011 was pretty good too—Somali clans squabble in Garden City.
This recent story caught my eye, but at first I figured it was going to be one of those stories about how everything is copacetic after the initial stresses and strains in a town whose population has doubled mostly due to a meatpacking company’s need for cheap immigrant laborers (whose lives, by the way, are subsidized by the taxpayer as you will read below).
From KBIA.org (skipping many paragraphs into the blah, blah, blah). The emphasis is mine:
Despite all the services the local social network provides, there are problems endemic to any place with lots of workers who make low wages. The starting pay at the Tyson plant in nearby Holcomb, Kan., is $13.50 an hour – better than a job at say, Walmart, for $7 an hour. But if a parent with three children takes home roughly $25,000 annually, that’s still below the federal poverty line for a family of five.
The Tyson plant employs 3,400 people, with the top wage $20 an hour for maintenance workers, said Gary Mickelson, a Tyson spokesman. Help wanted ads in the local paper promise medical, dental and vision insurance, paid vacation and holidays and a 401(k) plan.
A majority of “team members,” as Tyson calls them, are Hispanic, followed by Asian and blacks, Mickelson said.
In a press release from August, proclaiming “chicken surges to record earnings and beef rebounds,” Tyson reported record sales of $8.7 billion for the third quarter of this year.
When asked if Tyson provides assistance to the community, Mickelson responded via email that the company and its employees pledged $220,000 to the Finney County United Way last year.
Feeding the hungry here often falls to the Garden City Unified School District 457, where three-quarters of the students get free or reduced-price lunch. The district provides two meals a day and sends supplies home in backpacks for use on the weekend, with help provided by the Kansas Food Bank, said Janie Perkins, the district’s coordinator of supplemental services.
Assistance is also needed away from school, as requests for food stamps in Finney County are up 230 percent in the last five years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The school district, designated as “minority majority” status because 76.8 percent of the students are minorities, have kids who are Hispanic, Burmese, Somali, Ethiopian or are from another ten countries.Documents are printed in several languages and signs at the district offices are printed in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Newcomer classes operate in the elementary, middle and high schools, which separate the children from the rest of their school temporarily so they can assimilate into their new lives. Since most of the Somali and Burmese children were born in refugee camps, they’ve never seen basic plumbing, let alone a pencil, Perkins said. Parents often come to school and express confusion at items in their new life, like a washer and dryer, she said.
In teacher Kay Thompson’s newcomer class at Florence Wilson Elementary School, 14 kids speak four languages – Spanish, Somali, Burmese and Vietnamese. Thompson said she starts each year with the basic school terms.
“Simple directions that they will need in a classroom: How to put away a book. What is the pencil? What is the notebook?” she said. “I’ll say, ‘go to the door.’ They don’t know what the door is.”
[…..]
A housing challenge (indeed!)
The city, which first experienced a large refugee population when the Vietnamese moved here in the early 1980s to work in the plants, is now seeing a surge of Burmese refugees.
Velia Mendoza, coordinator of the Garden City Community Refugee Program, had about 150 Burmese clients when she started there in 2009. Now, she helps approximately 400 refugees with cash, food, medical, language skills and job assistance.
[…..]
Still, one of the services in short supply is housing, thanks to the attraction of the city’s plentiful jobs. Thome said it is her top challenge, and she keeps a running tab on the many mobile home parks and run-down motels on the outskirts of the city, some near the dusty cattle feedlots that supply animals to Tyson.
The school district identified 341 homeless students last year – more than 4 percent of the student body and up from 43 in 2007.Those kids often land with a family member, where two families can be bunched up together in an apartment. Thome has delivered used mattresses that are pushed up against the walls for space during daytime hours.
Seeing so many people sleeping in riverbeds and roadside shelters, struggling for housing and food in a new country, galvanized the local ministerial alliance, she said.
The article makes it abundantly clear that Tyson Foods does little to help solve the problems its need for cheap LEGAL immigrant labor has created. Readers have reported to me that there was a time when meatpackers actually paid a decent wage that did attract American workers, but apparently this business model works better for them—cheaper wages for captive labor (refugees cannot easily go home) and the workers are subsidized by you for their other needs.
Remember back in June, Senator Jeff Sessions called out the meatpacking industry as one of the lobbying groups pushing S.744—the Gang of Eight bill that passed the Senate—which of course will bring them an ever increasing supply of labor.
Read about the creation of the city’s new logo, here. After reading the above you almost have to wonder if it’s a joke (the logo that is!).
Tysons’ pork processing plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa still bringing in the refugees—Burmese this time.
This is probably going to be inside baseball for some readers here. But, when we first began writing Refugee Resettlement Watch in 2007, there were TEN major federal refugee contractors instead of the NINE today. The tenth contractor was the State of Iowa.
Here then is a long story about workplace legal wrangling (wade through the first 25 paragraphs or so) and this is what the upshot of the mess in the office created for the resettlement program. I had wondered how they fell out of favor with the US State Department.
From the Des Moines Register(emphasis mine):
Colbert and Phillips contend that problems in the Refugee Bureau outlined in the court records are a window for the public to better understand the downfall of the agency — specifically its decision in 2010 to stop its resettlement service.
Phillips said that the agency, under Wilken, failed to apply for grants and key subsidies for the resettlement program.
Resettlement was for decades the lynchpin of the bureau, which dates back to former Gov. Robert Ray’s legacy work with Tai Dam refugees. The agency has since helped hundreds of refugee families escape war-torn or politically rife countries.
Today the agency — which is federally funded — focuses on social services instead of refugee resettlement.
“People are afraid that in two years, refugee services will completely cease to exist,” said Phillips, who now works in the human resources department at the Mitchellville Correctional Facility.
Lorentzen McCoy, the DHS spokeswoman, noted that the resettlement decision was made when the U.S. Department of State determined that the Iowa agency did not meet the criteria to continue with the placement program.
Colbert, who was hired in 2007 around the same time that Wilken was promoted to the bureau’s director, said federal officials had alerted Iowa of concerns it had with the resettlement program.
She contends that Wilken, who was the bureau’s deputy director for roughly 20 years prior to his promotion, didn’t act to save the program and even told her he would be satisfied if that part of the program would be terminated because other federal program money would keep the bureau going.
Records provided by the state show the bureau’s current budget of $1.9 million is about $200,000 lower than it was in 2010, when the resettlement program ended.
“I can tell you that when I got there they were in trouble. It was pages and pages of stuff that was wrong,” Colbert said of the Department of State’s assessment.
But, if you think you are off the hook in Iowa, you aren’t, there are at least two agencies resettling refugees in the state—Lutheran Services and Catholic Charities.
In fact, if we are going to have resettlement in the first place, I would get all the churches out of it and get the states back in control. Not that I have a lot of faith in government, I just think there is a little more accountability with a government agency overseen by elected officials (and presumably watching the purse strings). You can’t get at the inner workings of a “church” through normal sunshine legal provisions in the same way government is required to be transparent.
The photo is from this storyabout the impact of Burmese refugees on Columbus Junction (400 refugees to a town of 2000), but since its a pork plant at least they aren’t members of the Religion of Peace.
The importation of refugee labor is how it is being done.
Here is one more storyabout Tyson Foods (or it could be Swift & Co, or perhaps Perdue) attracting refugee laborers to a meatpacking town—this time Columbus Junction, Iowa. Hat tip to one of our friends from Tennessee.
Downtown Columbus Junction, Iowa.
I first really began to understand this driver of the State Department’s Refugee Resettlement program here in 2008 when I read about Bill Clinton importing Bosnian so-called “refugees” for meatpackers in Iowa in the mid-1990s.
You see, readers, the meatpackers had discovered cheap immigrant labor from south of the border, but the enterprise became too risky as the feds began busting them in some highly publicized ICE raids. So, where did they turn…to refugees of course.
Heck they are legal workers and they are basically captive labor—they can’t go home (although some very unhappy ones do find the money to return to their homeland). In addition, you, the taxpayers, help to subsidize them with ‘social services’ while the meatpacker reaps the rewards—quite a business model!
For awhile the meatpacking giants were enthralled with the Somalis, but they came with one serious problem—they are Muslim and they began demanding workplace accommodation for their Islamic religious practices. We have a whole category entitled, Greeley/Swift/Somali controversywith 87 posts in it (here) for your further edification. However, in the story I am about to relate, they wouldn’t have hired Somalis anyway—it’s a pork processing plant.
What to do? What to do? We will tell the State Department to bring us some docile workers like the Christian Chin or Karen, or the Bhutanese/Nepalese who don’t complain so much. And, I’m convinced that somewhere in the bowels of Washington there was such a conversation between big business lobbyists and the federal government.
My scenario is not so farfetched when you see what is going on with the Gang of Eight being driven by Big Business and Grover Norquist, and you know this immigrant legalization push is not about “humanitarianism!”
COLUMBUS JUNCTION, Iowa (AP) — The first Chin Burmese student arrived at Wilma Sime Roundy Elementary School three years ago, a smiling preschooler whose father often checked on his progress.
The school had long been accustomed to educating the children of the Mexicans, Hondurans and Salvadorans who came to work at the sprawling Tyson Foods pork processing plant that sits outside this town of 2,000. But then, principal Shane Rosenberg recalled, Tyson informed school leaders that a new group of workers was coming – the Chin, a largely Christian ethnic minority who were fleeing their homeland in western Myanmar to avoid persecution.
Readers keep reading through all the paragraphs about how wonderful the newcomers are (and surely many are nice people). Everything is just great don’t ya’ know! Then we get to the problems …
Tyson spokesman: Nah! We don’t favor refugees (tell that to the Hispanics!)
Tyson and other meatpacking companies have increasingly recruited non-Latino workers in recent years, including Burmese, Sudanese and others, said Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at University of Northern Iowa. Since a 2008 raid of a Postville, Iowa, slaughterhouse, where 389 immigrants were arrested, companies have become more careful to avoid hiring employees who may have entered the country illegally, he said.
Refugees are in the country legally and may apply for citizenship within five years.
Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson denied the company was favoring refugees over others, saying the industry has long attracted immigrants for entry-level jobs that do not require experience or English skills. The makeup of its workforce shifts as new immigrant groups come to the U.S., he said. [There is also a tax break for hiring certain immigrant workers that no one is willing to talk about!—ed]
A little multi-culti friction has developed:
But in town, both the Chin and Spanish-speaking communities feel that more Chin are being hired at the expense of Latinos, which has caused some friction, said Cristina Ortiz, a doctoral student in anthropology who moved to Columbus Junction four years ago to study the town.
“Latinos and Chin people recognize they both have the same goals in life,” she says. “That is to make their lives better and provide for their families and live a tranquil life. But in a certain sense, they are in competition with each other. They are applying for the same jobs. They have the same skills. And that’s tricky. Obviously there is some tension there.”
Burmese Chin are arriving from other states where it’s tough to get a job (But wait! Isn’t the Gang of Eight telling us we need millions more low-skilled laborers).
In Columbus Junction, Mickelson said, the first five Burmese workers were hired as part of a recruitment effort in Illinois and later encouraged friends and relatives to apply. Burmese started arriving from Indiana, Texas, Florida and other states where they say jobs were harder to come by.
Problems at first with drunk driving, public urination, a few suicides, but once the women got there things calmed down. Now it’s just a housing shortage. But, AP wants you to know that Columbus Junction will be just fine.
City officials say some of the first arrivals abused alcohol, which had previously not been as cheap or available to them. Public urination and intoxication and drunken driving were common. But the police chief and other officials warned community leaders about their expectations, and as more women and children arrived, the problems have dissipated.
Two refugees have committed suicide and a third was found drowned in a river near the Tyson plant, said police Chief Donnie Orr. A shortage of mental health and substance abuse treatment is a problem, Ortiz said.
But refugees and city leaders agree the biggest challenge now is finding housing for the newcomers. City officials say there are hardly any available rental apartments, which go for about $450 a month for three bedrooms.
Hey, here is an idea! How about if Tyson Foods build some housing out of their profits and not with taxpayer money. And. while they are at it they could kick in the money for the school system to pay for the ESL teachers.
