12.07.11
The Iowa town reliant upon slave labor
Short version: The biggest business in Postville, Iowa, was a kosher meat-packing plant that employed illegals and abused them. The Feds swept in a couple years ago, ended it, while arresting and jailing the company owner on criminal counts.
Since Postville’s economy was primarily based on slave labor, even now — with the company under new ownership and operating legally — it has been unable to recover.
It’s a pattern that is everywhere throughout the US system, an economic model built upon stealing labor. And it does not seem surprising that after decades of relying on such a thing, any place that loses it by force remains unable to cope and rebuild.
Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers’ immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008 …
One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.
“The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized,” said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.
Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again.
It’s a terrible story with no morals and no happy endings. It shows only
that when one of the foundations of an economic system reliant on abusing people is torn out most of what was built on top of it comes down, too.