The cover story of the September 23, 1996 US News & World Report, "The New Jungle," focused on the use of immigrant workers in Iowa's meatpacking industry. The story emphasized the role of meat packing companies in recruiting immigrant workers to move to Iowa, and said that "perhaps no industry is so dependent on this low-wage labor as the nation's meat and poultry companies."
A July 1996 Changing Face of Rural America conference of social scientists, by contrast, emphasized that, in most midwestern meat packing plants, Latinos work alongside US-born Blacks and whites. Latinos are less than half of most plants' work force, and many of them are US-born citizens.
Many Latinos move to the Midwest because, in contrast to seasonal farm jobs in California, where workers average 1,000 hours per year at $5 to $6 per hour, in meat packing plants, workers average 2,000 hours at $6 to $8 per hour, enough to support a family. The Changing Face report is available at: //migration.ucdavis.edu
The US News & World Report story focused on Storm Lake, Iowa, a town of 8,700 that has an IBP plant that slaughters 13,000 hogs each day. Education costs and crime are up. Almost half of the kindergarten class in 1996 is non-Caucasian. Many of the workers are from Santa Rita, Mexico, 100 miles southeast of Guadalajara; some allegedly buy false documents from IBP employees who sell them on the side.
About $5,000 worth of money orders are mailed from Storm Lake to Mexico each week.
IBP bought the Storm Lake packing plant for $2.5 million in 1981, and it received $1.9 million in tax incentives and a $9.5 million revenue bond from the city. Turnover in the plant is high; an average of 183 workers had to be hired to keep every 100 jobs filled in 1990, according to one IBP manager.
There are about 500,000 children in K-12 schools in Iowa. The number of Limited English Proficiency children in K-12 Iowa schools has increased from 3,107 in 1989 to 6,931 in 1996, including 21 percent of the Storm Lake students.
Meat packing is a $95 billion per year business dominated by three companies, IBP, Cargill's Excel Corp. and Con-Agra's Monfort Inc. IBP had sales of $12 billion in 1995, and profits of $257 million.
The INS district director for Iowa and Nebraska estimated that 25 percent of the 50,000 workers who dis-assemble animals in the 222 meat packing plants in the two states are unauthorized aliens. INS inspections of the workers in 15 plants since 1992 have led to 1,000 workers being detained, and the INS is opening an office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in January 1997.
On August 24, 30 INS inspectors surrounded a Monfort-Swift plant in Marshalltown at the end of a work shift, detaining 147 of the 900 employees as they left. Most were flown to Mexico within 48 hours.
Another 24 workers were apprehended at an IBP facility in Waterloo, Iowa. After an April 1996 raid on All-State Quality Food, 47 apprehended workers pled guilty to working in the US illegally, making them subject to criminal penalties if they are apprehended in the US again.
Most of the meatpacking plants are constantly hiring new workers to replace workers who quit, and many of the Hispanic workers employed in meatpacking plants use fraudulent documents to obtain their jobs. Meatpackers say that they can only ask job applicants if they are "legally entitled" to work in the US, and close scrutiny of worker documents can lead to charges of discrimination. The INS, however, estimates that 85 percent of the "documented illegals" are "knowingly hired" by employers.
Meatpacking companies offer starting wages of $5 to $7 per hour. According to OSHA, about 36 percent of meatpacking workers are injured on the job each year.
Newly-hired workers are not eligible for health insurance benefits for off-the-job injuries for their first six months of employment, and then they share the cost of the premium on an 80-20 basis (workers pay 20 percent).
Rural Oklahoma is also attracting Hispanic immigrants for meat and poultry processing jobs. Commerce, OK, a town of 2500, increased its Hispanic population from 150 in 1990 to 800 in 1996.
Jerry Fink, "Rural Hispanic Population Booms," Tulsa World, October 13, 1996. Mark Siebert, "More kids needing English; Immigrants' children swelling Iowa schools," Des Moines Register, October 11, 1996. Carl Quintanilla, "Meatpackers feel heat from INS probe," Wall Street Journal, September 27, 1996. Stephen Hedges and Dana Hawkins, "The New Jungle," US News & World Report, September 23, 1996. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/WASH/IMmHIGH.html Curt Brown, "The New Americans: Next challenge for these Minnesota immigrants," Star Tribune, September 15, 1996.
