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.
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.
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.
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!
The first thing I thought of when I read this postby an Italian man who describes how Italy is gone was whatever happened to that proposed Chinese meatpacking plant in Montana?
As described by author Giacomino Nicolazzo the COVID disaster for Italy has its roots in the deals between the Leftists running the Italian government and the Chinese who were furiously buying up one industry after another primarily in the Italian north.
A recipe for disaster?
Along with those purchases of major industries they were sending in Chinese workers, many from Wuhan, to help run their new acquisitions. It is long, but well worth reading because it makes sense.
What Montana Chinese slaughterhouse you ask?
Senator Steve Daines
This one! I told you about it in 2017when Montana ranchers and their US Republican Senator Steve Daineswere cooking up a trade deal with China that would see the export of Montana beef to China.
But, someone figured it would be so much easier if the Chinese actually ran a meat packing facility right there in Montana.
Take the time to read what I said about the deal in 2017.
“It’s a really smart place for China to put in investment and to partner with Montana to have a really good packing industry and processing plant here.”
(Fred Wacker, rancher)
Here is one thing I said in that post:
I suppose there is one bright side–unlike Chobani Yogurtin nearby Idaho, I doubt the Chinese owners will approve of Muslim workers in light of their clear historical animosity to the ‘religion of peace.’ I can just see the mess when the Chinese company gets hit with some discrimination lawsuits when they say “NO” to Somali workers.
Heck, maybe they will insist on bringing in Chinese workers!
(Prescient wouldn’t you agree!)
So then what happened to the scheme?
I looked around today and the best answer I could find was that the deal began to fizzle when Trump’s trade war with China began.
Nevertheless in the summer of 2018, Montana cattlemen were still dreaming that they would see a giant Chinese meat plant in ‘Big Sky’ country.
Montana hopes for beef deal with China’s JD.com despite Trump’s trade
HELENA, Montana – Montana officials are hoping that a blockbuster deal with Chinese retail giant JD.com to export local beef will be possible despite the US Government’s escalating trade war with China.
“We are still talking,” Jay Bodner, executive vice-president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSA), said.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Tuesday, Bodner said the win-win deal inked last November in Beijing is not dead in the water, despite a 25-percent tariff on $34 billion of imports from China imposed by the Trump administration last Friday.
Beijing’s expected response – an additional 25-percent import tax on top of an existing 12-percent hike – was hard for Montana to digest, especially in light of the pending JD.com deal.
“There is a pretty high level of concern,” Bodner, a rancher from eastern Montana who has been with the MSA for 16 years, said.
Comparing JD.com to America’s Amazon.com, he said the Chinese internet giant’s commitment to spend up to $100 million to build Montana’s largest meat processing facility was still on the table.
That is the gist of this story fromProPublica (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, continuehere.
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.
There was a time, a decade ago, when an article like this would not have been written.
The image of a refugee resettlement agency was that of a purely humanitarian organization working with little funding solely to save the globe’s downtrodden with the help of generous volunteers.
Now they are right out in the open making it clear that they are working to help globalist companies like the big meatpackers that are changing America by changing the character of the heartland through a greedy desire for cheap migrant labor.
Let me be clear, Americans previously did work in the meat and poultry industry and would do so again if wages reflected the difficult work, but once the meat giants discovered what amounts to captive slave labor that doesn’t dare complain, can’t go home, and is willing to work for far less than Americans, there was no going back.
Pay attention! If your town is getting a Tyson Foods plant, you WILL be getting third worlders of all stripes, changing the character of your town forever!
Trump’s latest immigration ban threatens Tyson labor pool
The latest anti-immigration proclamation by U.S. President Donald Trump could directly impact the ability of Tyson Fresh Meats in Perry to hire laborers.
Trump’s Jan. 31 executive order suspends immigrant visas for nationals of Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria starting Feb. 22. It will also restrict diversity visas for citizens of Sudan and Tanzania, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. State Department.
Refugees from Eritrea and Myanmar have been the most frequently hired workers at the Tyson’s Perry plant in recent years.
Alberto Olguin, human resources director at Tyson Fresh Meats, said he is unsure whether the latest immigration ban will have an effect in Perry.
“We do hire refugees,” Olguin said. “We hope this will not have any effect, but we will see. It’s hard to tell at this point. Maybe by March or April we will know more. It’s still early.”
Holy cow! Look at these numbers!
Tyson is the largest employer of refugees in Dallas County. The company currently employs 1,368 workers at the Perry plant, and about 800 of the employees are refugees, with 400 each of Africans and Asians.
[….]
Annette Sheckler, director of communications for U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), said the Trump administration’s immigration policies are “selectively discriminatory” because they are based on the religions and nationalities of immigrants and refugees.
“USCRI strongly opposes the administration’s alarming efforts to drastically cut immigration to the U.S.,” Sheckler said. She said Trump’s anti-immigration policy is harming employers around the country, and the latest ban will aggravate the condition.
“Definitely, it’s going to have an impact,” she said. “In many smaller communities around the country, and especially in industries like meat packing, which is kind of rough and dirty, American workers are not applying for jobs there.
It’s our new Americans, the refugees and immigrants, who are taking these jobs. Tyson’s has a huge workforce made up of Somalis, Eritreans and people from Myanmar, disproportionate to the number of people they hire.”
Heck, here USCRI’s Sheckler sounds like she is shilling for the Chamber of Commerce.
“We settle refugees in communities that are likely to have employment,” she said, “and certainly the agro-industry is one of these industries where there’s job openings. The communities want the labor. And then you’ve got a whole new community with many coming into the family. They’re buying cars. They’re buying houses. They’re buying groceries. They’re opening up little businesses. So communities are actually contacting us and asking us to settle refugees.”
[….]
Trump’s latest round of exclusions partly frustrated Iowa’s recently expressed state and local willingness to accept refugees for resettlement.
The states and localities know they need the workers, Sheckler said, but Trump’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, has other ideas for America.
Someone could write a modern day version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle using the dozens and dozens of posts I have archived over the years.
A starring role could go to the phony refugee racketeers!
Endnote: Another blogger recently used the phrase the “Slaughterhouse Nine” to describe the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors. I like that!
A few days ago the Washington Post ran a lengthy feature story about how the Brazilian-owned meat giant—JBS—was getting federal taxpayer dollars as part of an agricultural bailout from the Trump Administration.
Of course the premise of the story, which featured the obligatory photo of the President, was that Trump was somehow responsible for a foreign-owned company ripping-off the US consumer by consolidating its holdings in America and creating a monopoly.
This is JBS headquarters in Greeley, CO Photo credit: Me! Taken on my 2016 tour of US meatpacking towns that have been changed by refugee labor.
It sure does look like JBS has a growing share of the meat industry.
The Washington Posttells us that JBS’s growth has been rapid following its first purchase of a US meatpacking business in 2007:
In 2007, JBS bought pork and beef producer Swift and Co. In 2008, it purchased the beef operations of Smithfield Foods. In 2009, it acquired poultry producer Pilgrim’s Pride. In 2015, JBS bought Cargill’s pork division. And in 2017, the company purchased poultry producer GNP Co.
But in the extremely long and damning expose there is not one word about JBS’s voracious appetite for immigrant labor that includes refugee workers provided to the company by the US State Department’s resettlement contractors!
As longtime readers know I have been interested in the role BIG MEAT plays in changing the character of American towns with its use of low wage immigrant labor since I saw a report in 2008 about how Bill Clinton brought refugeesto Iowa to make his meatpacker pals happy.
Lobbying for labor
And, I need to mention that thenSenator Jeff Sessions fingered meatpackersin the lobbying gang pushing for that ‘Gang of Eight’ so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013.
As I had reported at the time, the refugee resettlement contractors were also pushing for passage of the ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty bill that ultimately failed to make it through the House of Representatives.
Lutherans were being paid to find refugee labor for JBS!
Then I got the shock! I had always assumed that it was just happenstance that some of the nine refugee resettlement contractors hired by the US State Department to place refugees in US towns and cities had a casual relationship with industries looking for cheap and compliant labor, but I never dreamed there was a direct financial connection until this news broke in 2017.
(LOL! as I write this I sure am glad RRW has been recovered.There is a lot of history filed here!)
Foreign-owned Big Meat hires Lutherans to help them find and retain refugee labor
That is the crux of this story and not in my wildest dreams did I think that money was directly changing hands between the meat industry and a federal refugee contractor, in this case Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service headquartered in Baltimore, MD.
LIRS is headquartered here in Baltimore. This is their own description: The Lutheran Center (LIRS headquarters) is a six-story structure constructed in 1999 on property owned by Baltimore’s historic Christ Lutheran Church. The building is located near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the historic Federal Hill neighborhood, a charming area rich with history and an eclectic array of eateries and shopping venues.
I always assumed it was an informal relationship where the largely federally-funded ‘religious’ charity (LIRS is 96% funded by you and not via the collection plate) just happened to be bringing immigrant workers to small town America.
Now we learn that there is a formal (secret!), contractual arrangement planned for pilot projects in four states with JBS USA a Brazilian-owned company. And, it makes me wonder if this isn’t new and whether similar arrangements are being made with others of the nine federal refugee contractors.
The four states targeted for pilot projects in 2017 were Georgia, Texas, Iowa and Michigan.
Read it all! An insider at LIRS had revealed internal documents obtained by Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily.
To make a long story short:
A foreign company buys up major meat producing companies in the US then lobbies for and obtains refugee laborers with the help of a fake ‘religious’ charity funded largely by you, the taxpayers.
The immigrant laborers aren’t paid decent wages so they depend on welfare to make ends meet all the while disrupting the social and cultural make-up of small US towns and cities.
And, you, the US taxpayers, are paying for it all as they change America, one small town at a time.
Someone should write a book!
Heck, a lot of the research is done already! See my enormous archive on Meatpackers here.
“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.”
