Eduardo Pena: Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Coalition.
Eduardo is a Route Coordinator for The Miami Route.
Posted on 01/26/2007 1:29:47 PM PST by kennedy
The 21 Smithfield Packing Co. employees arrested by immigration officials while they worked Wednesday are in the process of being deported.
The 20 men and one woman arrested were moved Thursday from the Mecklenburg County Jail to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., nearly 700 miles from Tar Heel.
Meanwhile, church officials within the region’s Hispanic community and spokespeople with the United Food & Commercial Workers union said the workers’ families didn’t know where they were and other immigrant workers were terrified of more arrests.
Production at the plant was substantially diminished Thursday as workers stayed away.
“There are hundreds of immigrant families who will have to decide, ‘Do I show up to work (Friday) and risk being arrested by immigration?’” said Eduardo Pena, a spokesman for the union, which became an unofficial hub of information for workers Thursday, he said.
The workers are going through “removal proceedings,” said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Washington.
Because ICE officials arrested the employees on administrative rather than criminal charges, it will not release their names. Raimondi would not elaborate on whether the workers could also be charged criminally or whether other workers could be targeted.
“The investigation continues,” he said.
An ICE spokeswoman told The Associated Press that administrative immigration charges can include being in the U.S illegally or overstaying a work visa.
Because much of the cleaning crew didn’t show up for work Wednesday night, production was lower and got started late at the plant Thursday, said Dennis Pittman, director of corporate communication for Smithfield.
“We were so far behind because of getting started so late,” Pittman told the AP. “There were several hundred people who didn’t show up.”
The second shift seemed to have normal attendance, he told the Observer.
“It’s been a rough day,” Pittman said. “All we were trying to do today is get the product out the door.”
Pittman told the AP the company spent most of Thursday trying to persuade Hispanic workers who stayed home to return to work, an effort that included advertising on a Spanish language radio station.
Pittman has been told union members were in the parking lot Wednesday night telling workers to leave so ICE couldn’t detain them, but the union has denied that. ICE officials were gone from the plant by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Pittman said.
On Thursday, the workers were calling each other, the union and representatives from area churches.
“The wife of one of the workers who was picked up started calling his co-workers saying, ‘Don’t go to work, immigration officials are there,’” Pena said.
Salvador Salazar, Hispanic ministry coordinator at St. Francis DeSales Church in Lumberton, said several people contacted him in a panic asking for help looking for their loved ones. One was a mother with three children.
“They’re very concerned about how they’ll live,” Salazar said.
Likely on the minds of many immigrant employees is whether ICE officials will arrest more workers.
“We still have people thinking ICE is here, and they’re not here,” Pittman said. “ICE told us they got the group of people they were looking for.”
If employees don’t go back to work for three days without calling, “We would have to replace them,” Pittman said.
Not attending work is common in the region, he said.
“Everyone in the area is experiencing people not coming to work,” he said Thursday morning. “This has put a lot of fear in people in the area.” IMAGE program
The arrests stem from information gleaned about the employees since Smithfield joined the IMAGE program last year. Under IMAGE — which stands for ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers — Smithfield must now cross reference all employees’ names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and genders.
Smithfield has been criticized for joining the program, but Pittman has said the company had no choice if it wanted to avoid immigration raids. He said ICE told the company it was coming on Wednesday and said it wasn’t a raid.
Immigration officials showed up in unmarked cars and plain clothes, Pittman said. The workers were then sent into a room with ICE officials, questioned and arrested, spokesman Raimondi said.
Union and church officials repeatedly pointed fingers at the pork processing plant for the arrests. Some people said the workers who were most vocal about unionization were some of those arrested.
There’s been talk of unionization at the plant for a decade.
A statement from the union Thursday said arrests are likely to continue and that ICE violated its own guidelines, “which preclude the agency from facilitating the use of immigration laws of enforcement to intervene in the course of a labor dispute,” the statement said.
“The entire community has been terrorized,” said Gene Bruskin, head of the Smithfield Justice Campaign, a national coalition backed by the union. “Parents are being torn from their young children who don’t know where they are. Many of these workers have given their life blood to this company for (years) and now are being summarily handed over to be arrested and discarded. It is unconscionable and continues Smithfield’s pattern of callous disregard for the wellbeing of its workers.”
Typically, the strongest investigative efforts by ICE are directed toward companies that have made employing illegal immigrants a “business model,” ICE spokeswoman Jaime Zuieback said Wednesday night. But Smithfield is not one of those target companies, and she commended it for cooperating fully.
Because of discrepancies with employee records found through IMAGE, about 500 more immigrant workers are expected to lose their jobs starting the second week of February, Pittman has said. Employee unrest
In November, hundreds of workers walked out of the plant, protesting the firing of 75 employees who were unable to provide verifiable documentation that they were working legally.
After mediation with the Rev. Carlos Arce, of St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Red Springs, Smithfield rehired the 75 workers and gave them 60 days to provide verifiable documentation, or they’d be fired.
For months, Smithfield has been running employee information through the IMAGE program. Each of those workers gets 60 days to provide proof they are eligible to work in the U.S.
Zuieback said Wednesday she was unaware if the arrested workers had received letters from Smithfield telling them they would be terminated.
Some mismatches in documentation are simple to fix — such as proving a new last name because of marriage.
Those employees are in the clear, Pittman said. About 500 others are not because they likely won’t be able to provide proof.
Because about 75 reviews were conducted per week, it will take a couple of months for all the employees’ 60-day review periods to expire and for them to be terminated.
“The last thing we want to do is lose trained people,” Pittman said. “But we have to comply with federal regulations to make sure they’re eligible to work.”
Self-policing its workforce through IMAGE is supposed to reduce the company’s chances of immigration raids.
Smithfield will immediately look to replace the terminated workers, Pittman said.
“I’m hoping every one of them gets it fixed,” he said.
While there seem to be plenty of applicants who could be hired as replacements, the terminations will slow production and cost the plant substantially for new training, he said.
Any employee who leaves the company on good terms and who gives at least two weeks’ notice is eligible for COBRA health benefits and unused vacation pay, Pittman said. The workers facing termination aren’t excluded from that.
Fired workers will certainly be in a tight spot, but the local economy shouldn’t take a substantial hit, said Chuck Heustess, executive director of the Bladen County Economic Development Commission.
“You feel sorry for the individuals, but at the same time, Smithfield would be crazy to employ illegally when the federal government is cracking down,” Huestess said. “They’ll find 500 new people.”
Rumors were flying in the plant about the terminations before the arrests Wednesday.
“What is clear is there’s a lot of misinformation and fear among the workers about what’s going to happen,” Pena said.
It is.
"Smithfield joined the IMAGE program last year."
Plant managers knew this was coming and apparently, did nothing about it. They knew they hired illegals.
Gene L. Bruskin, Secretary-Treasurer
Food and Allied Services Trades, AFL-CIO
Audio recording of speech by Gene Bruskin of US Labor Against War at UNITE Hall in Chicago, Summer of 2004.
http://tinyurl.com/33v6fm
BTL: Union Campaign to Organize Smithfield Workers at...
by Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus - Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus Saturday, Dec 30 2006, 7:42am
betweenthelines@snet.net address: BETWEEN THE LINES c/o WPKN Radio 89.5 FM Bridgeport, Connecticut
...World's Largest Slaughterhouse~Interview with Gene Bruskin, organizer with the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, conducted by Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus
Union Campaign to Organize Smithfield Workers at World's Largest Slaughterhouse
Interview with Gene Bruskin, organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, conducted by Melinda Tuhus
The recent raid by U.S. immigration enforcement agents at six meat packing plants around the country points to the importance of Latino immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, in what has become a largely non-union workforce. A century ago, Jewish, Polish and other European immigrants worked in the packing plants of the Midwest, along with African Americans who had recently emigrated from the South seeking better opportunities. They helped unionize the thousands of workers in those plants. But times have changed, and much of the workforce is non-union once again.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, is now organizing the mostly African American and Latino immigrant workforce at the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world, run by Smithfield Farms in Tarheel, N.C. The union condemns what it describes as the poverty wages, brutal conditions, and crippling injuries which it says plagues the 5,500 workers who are employed at the plant.
Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Gene Bruskin, director of the UFCW organizing campaign, who discusses the intense union drive now going on at the Smithfield plant and provides an overview of labor history in this sector of the workforce.
For more information on the Smithfield campaign call the UFCW at (202) 223-3311 or visit the union's website at www.smithfieldjustice.com
LISTEN to this week's half-hour program of Between The Lines by clicking on one of the links below:
http://www.btlonline.org
Yep. It won't be there in so many words, but it is their business plan to pay wages that attract only illegal workers.
If you had "Several Hunderd not show up for work" because of the arrest of 21 for illegal status, it is time for the admin group to be combing the personnel records for other scofflaws....
Turning a blind eye to the correct status of a prospective employee is bad news and expensive for everyone involved.
Illegal gets hired= citizen does NOT get hired.
Illegal gives momentum to others of same persuasion=more and more of the lemmings coming north, working or not.
Illegal gets "injured" on the job= payment for "injuries, and now has entire "family" of who knows how many have now followed the illegal north...
Workmen's Comp goes thru the roof, not only for the "employer" involved, but for every employer in that grouping of work type in that state. EI: All roofers in the state will be impacted by the payments made to this illegal hired by one roofing company.
That spirals all our costs out of sight...
Crime, emergency room costs, school costs...all go thru the ceiling.
If they don't start, the market will simply leave them behind. I just use the LSM sources for what few facts they issue and then go in search of the rest of the story, which I generally have to piece together from posts here, info on other blogs, and sometimes a competing news source. Nice of them to decide that, now that there's plenty of competition, they don't have to compete and actually 'work' for a living.
Ya know, if the church had any kind of moral values and integrity, it would encourage illegals to go through the proper channels of citizenship rather than encouraging them to compound their crimes.
They can catch an Adame bus from Atlanta to Mexico for a whole lot less, but it's much harder to get off an airplane before crossing the border.
Eduardo Pena: Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Coalition.
Eduardo is a Route Coordinator for The Miami Route.
This makes me want to vomit. What the hell difference does it make that some illegals have children? They are knowingly and willingly breaking the law. If they are "being torn from their young children," it's their own damned fault for coming here illegally, and procreation is not a defense.
How about a traffic stop means an automatic background check and deportation for illegals? All assets in the US are forfitted to cover the costs of running the deportation program. Falsifying a SSN on a job application, deportation.
We need to make it so unpleasant for illegals to be in this country that they will leave. If they want to come back legally, fine, welcome aboard.
All illegals over 18 must leave. Those who are deported are fingerprinted and must wait at least 3 years before applying to return legally.
If they have a child born in the US, the child can stay or go. If the child stays it will be put up for adoption and the records destroyed. If the child leaves, the child must wait unil they are eighteen to reenter.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
YES.
I am continusally amazed at the absence of the word "terrified" when describing illegal immigrants' thousand-mile trip into the United States.
They are only "terrified" at going home?
What's wrong with this picture?
They are ushered in by US Coyotes wearing the titles of "union leaders" in this specific case.
Do you realize how Smithfield and their illegal aliens are raising the unemployment rates of Americans by illegally recruiting and hiring illegal aliens?
How the local churches are illegally helping to recruit, transport, harbor illegal alien just to fill their emptying pews so their offering plates are filled with tithes - and the IRS gets ripped off along with honest American workers who are displaced by criminal invaders?
Invaders pumping out 4-8 anchor babies each who will soon overwhelm your votes while the American citizens cannot afford to have and raise 2 children because their honest legal jobs are stolen by illegal aliens and crooked corporations like the greedy pigs at Smithfield in North Carolina and elsewhere.
These Smithfield execs and managers need to do hard prison time for conspiring with corrupt church radicals and unions and "immigration attorneys" - all should be prosecuted and do hard time.
North Carolina politicians should be prosecuted too - as well as many in the federal government from both the Klintoon and Bush administration because of their deliberate corrupt criminal activities.
If the illegal can break the laws and steal from the US taxpayers - yet politicians and attorneys and judges say "some laws are not important or fair" - I'd say it should be OK to "borrow" the SUVs of illegal aliens, politicians, judges, church ministers - It's only "fair" to "share" - especially with those who have been ripped off or fired because of illegal aliens.
Physicians, ERs and hospitals ripped off and going bankrupt, your crooked DC politicians forcing physicians and hospitals and ERs to treat illegal aliens that cannot or refuse to pay -
They are worse then ENRON X's 1000
Sooner or later some judges, politicians, Smithfield crooked execs (etc.), will face some "retaliation" that I will obviously not post here -
And the sooner the better!
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