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Banned
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Originally Posted by rlbond86
This is similar to how I feel. I think the voters who support illegal workers would support this initiative in exchange for future strict border control. But you have to also allow immediate family green cards.
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Where do you come by your arrogant observations, or are they more of a sign of oblivious innocence? You're fully supportive of giving away earning opportunities and worker protections that your great grand-father's generation fought so hard, and had their heads busted by company goons, to achieve.
MrSelfDestruct rounds it all out with his posted preference for tax "reform" that is regressive for the bottom half of the country's household, and is "only fair" to the wealthiest. Here's how some of the wealthiest got that way. They encouraged lax immigration enforcement and then "mined" the bodies that slipped in, cutting wages for the folks who had fought to achieve a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and then turning them out when it suited them.
You have the luxury of "feeling", instead of examining. Why not give a green card to the illegal worker after you give him amnesty, and to his aunt and
first cousins, because they are his dependents, part of his household in Mexico.
Since there is no indication that your sympathies are with anyone but the illegals, consider that the illegals have priced American residents out of the jobs that they've taken:
Quote:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...215724,00.html
By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain News
December 15, 2006
GREELEY - The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.
Among them was Derrick Stegall, who carefully filled out paperwork he hoped would get him an interview and eventually land him a job as a slaughterer. Two of his friends had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and he felt compelled to fill their rubber boots.
"Luckily, they had no wives or family they left behind. But it was still sad. They left their apartments filled with all their stuff. I took two dogs one of them had. The other guy had a cat I gave to my sister," he said.
Greg Bonifacio heard about the job openings on television and brought his passport, his Colorado driver's license, his Social Security card and even a color photograph of himself as a young Naval officer to prove his military service.
"I don't want to hassle with any identification problems because of my last name," said Bonifacio, a 59- year-old Thornton resident of Filipino heritage.
As it turned out, the Colorado Workforce office that was taking applications did not require any identification.
That would come later for those who made it past the interview process.
Bonifacio was hoping to get a job in production or fabrication. So was Nathan Korgan, a former construction worker whose company closed and moved to California.
"I feel bad for the kids, but good for me," said Korgan of Tuesday's raid.
Like many others who had mixed emotions about the raid, Maxine Hernandez said she was upset that families were torn apart, but believes illegal immigrants should not get work using fake documents.
"I guess I'm in the middle," she said. "But I do think they should have planned (the raid) better so that innocent children wouldn't be left behind."
Hernandez, who had gone to the employment office because her husband was there to apply for unemployment insurance, decided to apply for a job at Swift on a whim.
"My whole family used to work there. My mom, my aunt, uncles," she said. "I guess it sort of runs in our blood."....
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<h3>Consider that unionized Hormel workers, doing the same $12.00/hour jobs described in the following article, were paid $10.69 a fucking hour, in 1984, and that was 23 fucking years ago. I wish that you would wake up and see what is happening here. Greedy fucking pig executives, lobbying to keep their penalties light as they lobby for lax immigration enforcement and amnesty. It keeps wages down, divides communties along ethnic and economic lines, and it sure as shit makes for a compliant workforce that lives an "underground" mindset and would never dare to express the militancy necessary to overcome the hurdles of unionizing. The "icing" on the cake is Bush's total makeover of the NLRB...only management is represented.</h3>
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/us...at&oref=slogin
October 12, 2007
Crackdown Upends Slaughterhouse’s Work Force
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
TAR HEEL, N.C. — Last November, immigration officials began a crackdown at Smithfield Foods’s giant slaughterhouse here, eventually arresting 21 illegal immigrants at the plant and rousting others from their trailers in the middle of the night.
Since then, more than 1,100 Hispanic workers have left the 5,200-employee hog-butchering plant, the world’s largest, leaving it struggling to find, train and keep replacements.
Across the country, the federal effort to flush out illegal immigrants is having major effects on workers and employers alike. Some companies have reluctantly raised wages to attract new workers following raids at their plants.
After several hundred immigrant employees at its plant in Stillmore, Ga., were arrested, Crider Poultry began recruiting Hmong workers from Minnesota, hiring men from a nearby homeless mission and providing free van transportation to many workers.
So far, Smithfield has largely replaced the Hispanics with American workers, who often leave poorly paid jobs for higher wages at the plant here. But the turnover rate for new workers — many find the work grueling and the smell awful — is twice what it was when Hispanics dominated the work force.
Making Smithfield’s recruiting challenge even harder is the fact that many local residents have worked there before and soured on the experience. As a result, Smithfield often looks far afield for new employees.
Fannie Worley, a longtime resident of Dillon, S.C., a largely African-American town of sagging trailers and ramshackle bungalows, quit her $5.25-an-hour, part-time job making beds at a Days Inn motel four months ago to take a $10.75-an-hour job at Smithfield. But Ms. Worley remains ambivalent.
“It pays a lot better,” she said. “But the trip is too long.”
Around 1 p.m. each day, C. J. Bailey, a Smithfield worker, picks up Ms. Worley and 10 other employees in his big white van. They arrive at the plant around 2:15, and he drops them back home after 1 a.m.
Several of the newly hired workers in the van — they pay $40 a week for the ride — said they were thinking of quitting, unhappy about having to commute so far and work so hard. <h3>At the plant, where the pay averages around $12 an hour, many spend hour after hour slitting hogs’ throats, hacking at shoulders and carving ribs and loins.</h3> At the end of their shifts, many workers complain that their muscles are sore and their minds are numb.
Employee turnover has long been a problem at Smithfield and other meat-processing plants, but the problem has grown worse recently. Dennis Pittman, a Smithfield spokesman, said 60 percent of the new workers quit within 90 days of being hired, compared with 25 percent to 30 percent two years ago when many new employees were illegal immigrants.
“I’ve heard officials from a couple of other meat processors say they’ve never seen such high turnover with new workers,” Mr. Pittman said.
Several Southern companies have raised wages to attract new workers after immigration raids. “But that’s not the first thing that employers are going to do,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re going to try to cast their net wider before they do something that will raise costs.”
Smithfield, for example, has run a flood of television advertisements boasting that the company is a good, safe place to work. The advertisements aim to persuade Carolinians to apply for jobs and to counter arguments made by a union trying to organize the plant that Smithfield jobs are high stress and unsafe, with stingy benefits.
One of the toughest challenges, Mr. Pittman said, has been training new employees to handle the highest-skilled jobs at a plant that processes 30,000 hogs a day.
“The big problem is we lost a lot of people who were there a long time,” Mr. Pittman said. “We have been facing difficulties in hiring for a number of years, because as the economy got better, the labor market became much tighter.”
When the plant opened in 1992, the area’s jobless rate was high because tobacco was in retreat and textile mills were closing. Early on, most employees were black. That changed with an influx of Hispanic immigrants, most of them Mexicans, in the mid-1990s.
Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, said the Hispanics should not be viewed as shoving blacks aside, because the plant had such high turnover.
“It’s not as if these jobs were stable sources of employment for creating a black middle class,” Mr. Kromm said.
The way Hector David, a longtime worker from Mexico who quit in February, sees it, Smithfield had been eager to hire Hispanics because they worked so hard. “The Americans just don’t work as well,” Mr. David said. “In Mexico, we work from the age of 5 in the corn fields. We’re used to working hard.”
The New York Times wrote about the sometimes uneasy relations between blacks and Hispanics at the Smithfield plant as part of a 2000 series that examined race relations in the United States.
Mr. Pittman said Smithfield did its best to ensure that immigrant employees had legitimate documentation. But many workers said Smithfield did not look too hard at the paperwork.
Last November, the company notified 640 employees that their identity information did not match government records. In January, federal agents arrested 21 workers at the plant, and in August, helped by information the company provided, agents arrested 28 more, many at home.
Mr. Pittman said cooperating with immigration officials “serves our goal of 100 percent compliance 100 percent of the time.” But for many families, the cooperation has come at a price.
Tears came to Maritza Cruz’s eyes as she described the scene when immigration agents banged on her trailer door at 3 a.m. and arrested her husband, Alejandro, who faces deportation. “Everyone is very scared, especially after they arrested people at their homes,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has four children and is on maternity leave from the plant.
The company and its employees are not the only ones affected by the crackdown.
Since the enforcement actions began, said Jazmin Gastelum, owner of a local Christian bookstore, La Tierra Prometida, business from Hispanic customers has plunged 40 percent at her store and two nearby Hispanic groceries. “A lot of people are going back to Mexico,” Ms. Gastelum said. “And a lot who haven’t moved are scared to go outside.”
As for the workers who remain at the plant, many wonder why so many new employees come from South Carolina. Gene Bruskin, the director of the unionization campaign, sees a simple explanation.
“Thousands and thousands of workers from North Carolina have come through the plant, and they left, saying, ‘No way,’ because they were injured or didn’t want to work in such an oppressive atmosphere,” Mr. Bruskin said. “This plant burned up a large number of people, and the word got around about their bad experiences.”
Mr. Pittman said Smithfield had hired many workers from South Carolina because the counties close to the plant had a low unemployment rate.
The immigration arrests have also created problems for the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has spent 15 years seeking to organize the plant.
“A lot of the people who left or were detained were strong union supporters,” said Gabriel Lopez Rivera, a Smithfield worker.
Mr. Bruskin, the union official, added, “It’s extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights when they’re threatened with arrest or deportation.”
The Tar Heel workers voted against unionizing in 1994 and 1997, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Smithfield had broken the law by intimidating and firing union supporters.
The company has called for a new election, but the union instead wants Smithfield to accept unionization through a majority sign-up, a process that would give management less opportunity to pressure workers. .....
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Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...ubjects/M/Meat
Minnesota Hormel Plant Gains Union Control
AP
Published: July 19, 1987
LEAD: Workers at the flagship plant of Geo. A. Hormel & Company have regained control of their union local 14 months after the union's international unit placed the local in trusteeship and removed its officers for refusing to end a strike.
Workers at the flagship plant of Geo. A. Hormel & Company have regained control of their union local 14 months after the union's international unit placed the local in trusteeship and removed its officers for refusing to end a strike.
''We have reached a point where we have done all the things that needed to be done and wanted to do,'' Ken Kimbro, a deputy trustee of the Hormel unit, Local 9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, said after the union regained control Thursday. ''It's time for the members of this local to elect officials to run this local.''
Revisions in the bylaws this month changed the local's name from P-9. Its members struck after Hormel imposed a 23 percent wage cut that officials said was necessary to remain competitive.
The walkout by 1,400 local members, which started in August 1985, pitted family against family and friend against friend in this southern Minnesota town of about 23,000 people. 'Rebuilding Our Union'
''It's been a long, drawn-out affair with the strike, but we're in the process of rebuilding our union,'' said John Anker, a 22-year Hormel employee who was elected president Wednesday.
Mr. Anker was among the union members who crossed the picket line to return to work when Hormel began hiring replacements for the strikers in January 1986.
The international initially sanctioned the strike but later accused the local union leaders of conducting a ''suicide mission.'' After it imposed the trusteeship in May 1986, the international negotiated a three-year contract with Hormel under which workers received $10 an hour, <h3>a reduction from the $10.69 base wage they received before Hormel instituted the wage cut in October 1984. The contract will pay workers $10.70 an hour in the third year.</h3>
The local president ousted by the international, Jim Guyette, contends that the changes in the bylaws, proposed by the international and adopted unanimously, will put too much power in the new president's hands. Control Is Debated
Mr. Guyette said they would take control away from members, ''putting it in the hands of one person,'' which the international ''can manipulate and control.''
A spokesman for the international, Al Zack, said the union prided itself on its democratic principles.
The local's new contract did not include a guarantee that former strikers would be recalled to work, and none have been, according to Deryl Arnold, the plant manager. About 600 are on the recall list.
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I do mean to pick on you guys, but it isn't just you two who lack perspective of where we've been and where we're going. In some states, 50 percent do not graduate high school. If you dilute the labor force by permitting illegals to stay and work here, the result is lower pay, bigger profits for a few, and a society of already strapped lower ninety percent...the rest of us", who only own 30 percent of total US wealth, as it is.
Sheesh ! I'm not a radical. My father was a career labor relations lawyer, he represented management in contract negotiations, but he believed in respecting workers right to organize. I've been a union shop steward, and I've also been a business owner. I see almost no posted perspectives, on these threads that is fair or sustainable, or cognizant of today's economic conditions, as far as support for labor or for more equitable wealth distribution.
All I see are folks who supported politicians who told them that government is ineffective, it doesn't work....but there they were, wanting to run it, and make gains for themselves and their cronies, as they ran the government they mismanaged, into the ground.
Now, a number of you want to elect the most fervent, anti "big government" candidate for president, because, he's honest.
He still hates government. Why would you want to elect him to run it? You wouldn't hire a football coach who didn't believe coaching players, and you wouldn't want a general who didn't believe that a military force could be organized and managed to be effective and efficient.
<h3>We have a huge and growing trend of wealth imbalance, and the solution...do away with progressive income taxes, and legalize a huge pool of docile, illegal workers who work for much less than the American residents. Way to go !!</h3>
I do not see coherent sets of ideas posted in this forum, and the ones that are posted are supported by links to, what?????
Last edited by host; 11-11-2007 at 07:36 PM..
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