Five Minutes with Don Stull

The ICE men raided half a dozen Swift plants on December 12, 2006; a sneak attack that might have done in the venerable old company. The pre-Christmas raid by dozens of agents in riot gear snared 1282 people and netted 65 arrests. One newspaper, reporting on the aftermath, surmised that “It didn’t make our country any safer but it did raise the price of pork.”

It deprived Swift of hundreds of workers and killed operations for weeks as they struggled to find replacements for semi-skilled workers doing jobs in cold, wet and generally unpleasant conditions. A few days “off-line” meant a leg up for all Swift’s friendly competitors who were more than glad to step into the breach and satisfy unfillable orders.

It meant a tough sales quarter and a long haul back to hopeful profitability for the company.

The effect of the raids was devastating. Today, Swift is rumored to be on the auction block, possibly to be bought out by Brazilian JBS S.A., an international exporter of fresh and processed beef based in Sao Paulo. According to industry observer and Cattle Buyers Weekly publisher, Steve Kay, the apparent asking price is in excess of $1.5 billion. Swift & Co. owners, HM Capital Partners, put the company in play in January and Swift president Sam Rovit said an announcement might be made as early as May.

The raid and the people caught up in the net recalled a book written in 2003 by Don Stull, a University of Kansas anthropologist, and Michael Broadway, a Northern Michigan University social geographer. "Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America." It was controversial in the beef business, of course, a label probably assured by the forward written by gadfly journalist Eric Schlosser, author of the sensationalistic, best-selling "Fast Food Nation.”

Still, if there is such a thing as a “spinless” overview of the packing industry, “Slaughterhouse Blues” was it. Stull and Broadway approached their subject as a scholastic study in the social sciences. They made some interesting points that should be revisited in the harsher light of recent events. I tracked down Don Stull at the University of Kansas and asked him a few questions.

Q. You and Michael Broadway conducted a two-year study of the impact of the meat industry on Garden City, Kansas and did similar research in Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Canada. Your work was detailed in “Slaughterhouse Blues,” a book published in 2003. It certainly gives you some bona fide, third-party credentials to talk about the working conditions within a meat plant and the people employed by the major beef packers. What can you tell me about it?

A. Twenty years ago next month, Michael Broadway and I joined forces with four other social scientists to begin a study of changing ethnic relations in Garden City, Kansas. From the summer of 1987 until early 1990 members of our team lived on and off in Garden City, where we carried out systematic research on the relations between new immigrant Southeast Asians (largely Vietnamese) and Latinos (mainly from Mexico) and established Anglo and Mexican Americans. This was part of a national study of what was being called the new immigration (set in motion by the 1965 changes in immigration laws) that was beginning to change the face of the United States. Other cities included in the study were Chicago, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, and Monterrey Park, California.

Michael's role, as our team's geographer, was to examine the presence of new immigrants in Garden City and document the social and economic changes that accompanied the arrival of the meatpacking industry in 1980. I was the team leader, and, like Michael, my research focused on beef packing and cattle feeding.

As our fieldwork in Garden City wound down in late 1989, we began to wonder whether what we were finding in Garden City was also happening in other packinghouse towns. A new IBP beef plant was then under construction in Lexington, Nebraska, and so Michael and I moved on to do similar research in that community. Over the course of the next decade we also teamed up to carry out research in Guymon, Oklahoma, site of a new Seaboard pork plant. Michael then went on to carry out short-term research in several communities in Iowa and began his long-term study of the impact of beef packing on Brooks, Alberta, Canada. I led another team in a study of labor relations in a major beef plant and began my long-term research on the impact of the poultry industry in western Kentucky, where I was born. Throughout this period, Michael and I, along with Mark Grey, another member of the original Garden City team, have consulted with numerous communities in the United States and Canada on the social, cultural, and economic impacts of meat and poultry processing on host communities, as well as its consequences for growers and processing workers.

Michael Broadway and I were the first social scientists to systematically study the modern meat and poultry industry and its impact on workers and communities that host its plants. Our research has taken us to farms, ranches, and towns across a good deal of the United States and Canada, and our publications have informed scholars and students, journalists and industry insiders, community leaders and general readers. Since we wrote our first article together in 1990, scholarly and journalistic writings on the meat and poultry industry have mushroomed. Still, our work remains the broadest in geographical coverage and the deepest in research experience on this subject. In fact, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Chew on This, has called Slaughterhouse Blues the best book available on the meatpacking industry. It was translated into Japanese earlier this year.

Q. The recent ICE raids have put a microscope on undocumented workers in the meat and poultry industry. Approximately 10% of the employees at the Swift plants were apprehended and held as “illegals.” Some estimates place the total number of undocumented workers at 25% or more. Certainly the numbers of Latinos is very high in comparison to the general population. Do you have a grasp of the true numbers of people who are working without the necessary paper work?

A. Michael Broadway and I began studying the meatpacking industry shortly after the passage of IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was supposed to solve the "growing problem of illegal immigration." IRCA granted "amnesty" to some "illegal aliens," then resident in the United States, and required employers to verify job applicants' citizenship or right to work in the United States. Employers who knowingly hired "unauthorized workers" could be prosecuted. In the two decades since the passage of IRCA the estimated number of "illegal aliens" has risen dramatically and very few employers have been penalized for hiring unauthorized workers.

Line work in a packing plant does not require pre-existing job skills or knowledge of the English language and it pays considerably more than other "unskilled labor." As a result it has attracted immigrant workers in larger numbers. And the packers themselves have also viewed immigrants as an attractive labor force. In the mid-1990s, for example, IBP went so far as to open a labor office in Mexico City (with the blessing of the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and pay recruits bus fare to the U.S. In 2006, Tyson's Lakeside beef plant in Brooks, Alberta, began bringing in temporary workers from China, the Philippines, El Salvador, and the Ukraine to staff its plant.

The meatpacking industry has a well-deserved reputation for hiring "illegal aliens," and anyone who is knowledgeable about the industry will readily admit that a significant number of its workers are unauthorized. But the question is what kind of numbers does "significant" translate into? And that is a very difficult question to answer. Twenty-five percent (25%) is the number most often cited, but when you try to track down the evidence from which this figure derives, it seems to disappear into thin air.

What we do know is that 90 percent of beef plant employees are hourly workers and of those a large majority are minorities and immigrants (around 90% in beef plants in southwest Kansas; 60% in Tyson's Brooks plant). And that percentage rose significantly during the past decade. Since all applicants for meatpacking jobs must present documentation of their citizenship or work authorization, it cannot be determined, without checking all employee records, just how many obtained employment with false documentation. However, recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, formerly INS, give us some idea.

The by now infamous ICE raids on several Swift plants in December 2006 arrested approximately 10 percent of the workforce at these plants. A raid on the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in January arrested only 21 workers out of 5,200 workers, but another 500 Hispanic workers quit rather than face a Social Security card check. Assuming all of these workers had false papers--and that is not a certainty--then 10 percent of that workforce was also unauthorized. Based on these two "pieces of evidence" it is safe to assume that at least 10 percent of meatpacking workers are working without authorization.

Large meat and poultry plants regularly kill and process animals over two shifts--usually from 7:00 a.m. to midnight. The third shift, from the time the line shuts down till it starts up the next morning, is devoted to cleanup. This is very dangerous work. It is performed by workers employed by firms that contract with the meatpacking companies. And it has been generally believed that many of the workers on these crews are "illegal immigrants." This belief was borne out earlier this month when ICE raided the Cargill plant in Beardstown, Illinois. The raid targeted Quality Service Integrity Inc., which contracts with Cargill to clean that plant. ICE arrested 66 of the companies 100 employees in Beardstown: 27, including 2 managers, were charged with identity theft, while 49 were arrested or were being sought as being illegal aliens.

Q. The industry currently employs a significant number of minorities including first generation immigrants from Southeast Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It seems to be following an historical trend, stretching back well over 100 years. Why? Have “assimilated Americans” always refused to do these jobs?

A. In 1911, the US Immigration Commission estimated that 60 percent of meatpacking workers were foreign born. Today that figure is even higher. Why? There is no simple answer; however, much of it has to do with declining wages. Through the first half of the 20th century, meatpacking unions fought hard for improved working conditions and wages, and as a result an industry wide master contract was put in place that paid meatpacking workers 15 percent ABOVE the average manufacturing wage in 1960. The so-called IBP Revolution, which relocated and restructured the industry, dissolved the master contract, crippled the unions, and produced a steep decline in meatpacking wages, so that by 2002 they had fallen to 25 percent BELOW the average manufacturing wage.

During the mid 20th century, not only were wages and working conditions markedly better than they are today, but the workforce was composed in far greater numbers of native-born workers. And one of the reasons why the packers have aggressively recruited immigrants is because they believe that immigrants are not only good workers, but they also believe that they are more likely to accept lower wages and are less likely to organize.

Work on a meat or poultry processing line is hard, nasty work--and it is dangerous. Wages are better than in fast food or much of the service sector, but they are not good. For example, current wages at the Smithfield Tar Heel plant range from $7.50 to $13.00 an hour, with the typical pay in the $9-11 range. In terms of pay, pork plants generally pay somewhere between the scale for beef and poultry, so thy typical beef plant workers makes a little more, the typical line worker in a chicken plant a little less. With these working conditions and this pay scale, employee turnover is high--60-100 percent, even higher for new plants--but not as high as in fast food, where turnover often reaches 300 percent or more.

Given the above conditions, meatpacking work does not attract those persons--native born or immigrant--who have other options.

Q. The issue of undocumented workers has been with us for decades and, with the exception of the ill-fated Operation Vanguard in 1999 and raids on some Tyson poultry plants a few years ago, has been largely ignored by the U.S. Government. What’s behind the recent increased activity?

A. You are right. Unauthorized workers have become an integral--and growing--part of the US economy, and until the last year or two, the federal government paid little attention to it. Certainly the growing xenophobia that is a lasting legacy of September 11, 2001, is a contributing factor as has been the escalating rhetoric about securing our borders. This most recent interest can be traced to some degree to President Bush's 2004 proposal for a guest worker program and of course the campaign rhetoric of the 2006 midterm elections.

I think that this most recent surge of nativism will subside in time, but not, I fear, as soon as it did after IRCA. And I am convinced that building walls between Mexico and the US or adding more and more Border Patrol officers are not the answer. As long as economic opportunity is stifled in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and other places in the "developing world," and as long as opportunities for economic betterment remain in the United States, people will find a way to come here. And how can we blame them? Our ancestors did the same.

Q. Dave Ray, speaking for the American Meat Institute, said "Hiring illegal workers just doesn’t make good business sense. Employee turnover is very disruptive.” But most data show turnover is endemic in the meat business. Good business sense or not, what’s been the effect of turnover in the industry? Does the Basic Pilot program work?

A. Regardless of what industry spokespersons say, turnover is endemic in the meat and poultry industry. The packers' prime directive remains: "Get the product out the door" as cheaply as possible. Let me quote from a testimony given by Arden Walker, former head of labor relations for IBP, in a 1984 National Labor Relations Board proceeding.

COUNSEL: With regard to turnover, since you are obviously experiencing it, does that bother you?

MR. WALKER: Not really.

COUNSEL: Why not?

MR. WALKER: We found very little correlation between turnover and profitability. An employee leaves for whatever reason. Generally, we're able to have a replacement employee, and I might add that the way fringe benefits have been negotiated and installed, they favor long-term employees. For instance, insurance, as you know, is very costly. Insurance is not available to new employees until they've worked there for a period of a year or, in some cases, six months. Vacations don't accrue until the second year. There are some economies, frankly, that result from hiring new employees.

Now, Mr. Ray would no doubt say that Mr. Walker was speaking of a time, two decades ago, when things were different. IBP is gone, purchased by Tyson. But turnover remains every bit as big a problem now as it was then. And work out on the floor--and the attitudes of management, from the suits in corporate offices right down to the line supervisors, remains pretty much the same. Until working conditions change, which will only come with significant change in corporate attitudes, turnover will remain a serious problem in meatpacking.

Q. In a story published November 21, 2006 by the Dallas Morning News, you were quoted as saying, “Immigrant workers make up as much as 80 percent of the non-management workforce at some plants in Texas, Kansas and other top meatpacking states. They're less likely to organize and don't necessarily know their rights, an attractive combination for the industry.” Certainly a large number of those workers are legally employed and your comment took dead aim at the industry. Do you think the industry is unfairly taking advantage of these workers? And, if so, what’s being done to protect their rights?

A. Let me begin by saying that I am an avid meat eater, and I am not, I repeat, not, anti-industry. But I am, as you know, a vocal critic of the industry and its treatment of its workforce. I believe that some improvements have been made in this area over the 20 years I have studied the industry, but much remains to be done. The American public is used to cheap food, including meat, and until the public demands better working conditions for those who produce and process its food--and is willing to pay for it--I fear that little real progress will be made.

I think the solutions are pretty simple, really. As Michael Broadway and I wrote more than a decade ago in a chapter in our book, Any Way You Cut It: "Provide better and longer periods of training. Adequately staff work crews. Vary job tasks to relieve muscle strain. Provide longer recovery periods for injured workers. But, most of all, slow down the chain."

Implementation of such measures would take concerted efforts on the part of the federal government, through its regulatory agencies. It would also take more public pressure, akin to that which has led to improvements in food safety and animal welfare. And it would, of course, require changes in corporate attitudes, which will only come from greater government pressure and public outcry.

Do I think the industry is unfairly taking advantage of workers? Absolutely. It exploits all its workers, not just the most vulnerable. But as the most vulnerable, they are least able to stand up for their rights. While more plant inspections and greater enforcement of existing laws would definitely help, we are also witnessing the erosion the rights of immigrant workers. In 2002, the Supreme Court held, in Hoffman Plastic v. NLRB, that undocumented workers are not entitled to back pay for lost wages if they are illegally fired for union organizing. I fear that in the present anti-immigrant climate, further erosion of such rights may occur.