Articles in this document:

· Socialist candidate meets with workers fighting deportations

· A shameful raid in Postville, Iowa

Socialist candidate meets with workers fighting deportations

BY FRANK FORRESTAL

The Militant

August 4, 2008

POSTVILLE, Iowa—“We were very happy with the march. It showed we are not alone,” said Roselia Ramírez, who was arrested in the May 12 immigration raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. Fifteen hundred people marched here July 27 to oppose the raid and support the nearly 400 workers arrested.

Ramírez, along with others who used to work for Agriprocessors, invited Róger Calero, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, to visit them the day after the march. Originally from Mexico, Ramírez is one of 45 workers arrested in the raid and later released on “humanitarian” grounds to care for her children. She is forced to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. Only three of the 45 workers have been given court dates, she said.

“We came here to work,” said Ramírez. “It’s what we have always done, and now the government doesn’t let us work, and instead we are living on charity from the church and help from other people.”

‘A powerful example’

Calero, who marched in the July 27 protest, said the demonstration set a “powerful example of the kind of response needed to answer the attacks on workers rights and to press our demand for legalization of undocumented immigrants.”

Immigrant and U.S.-born workers are going through experiences together in meatpacking plants in the region, using their unions to fight or organizing to get a union where there isn’t one, he added. Calero said the fight at Agriprocessors is part of a broader resistance to the meatpacking bosses in the upper Midwest. The socialist candidate pointed to the successful fight at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, where workers organized in United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789 successfully fought off an attempt by the bosses to bust the union earlier this year.

Several workers described the spontaneous walkout workers carried out at Agriprocessors in 2007 against the company’s use of Social Security “no-match” letters. Adrian, who was working there at the time, said a good number of workers were interested in joining the union but many were intimidated by the threat of being fired.

Normally a two-shift operation, Agriprocessors is barely running one shift now. The plant employed 900 workers, the vast majority from Guatemala and Mexico. In the May 12 raid, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested almost the entire first shift of 400; most of the remaining Latino workers never returned.

As a result, many workers are finding it difficult to get jobs. With Agriprocessors the main employer in the region, some travel more than an hour by car to work in construction.

Bernardino, who was fired from Agriprocessors for allegedly not having the right documents after working there for several years, said local police have been harassing immigrant workers when they travel for jobs. “My cousin, who works in a nearby town, was picked up by the police. He’s been in jail for 22 days now with no charges,” he said.

Another worker, Jorge, told Calero he was fired the day before the raid for lack of proper work documents. His wife, who was working when the raid happened and was seven months pregnant at the time, hid in the plant for 12 hours. More than a dozen other workers did the same. Several who hid in the freezer ended up with frostbite.

Calero passed out campaign literature and three workers picked up subscriptions to the Militant so they could follow the socialist campaign and developments in the fight for legalization.

Somali workers at plant

As you approach the Agriprocessors plant here, there are several “Hiring Now” signs. In a parking lot dozens of workers, the majority of them from Somalia, were waiting to be hired when Calero and a supporter stopped to talk. According to one Somali worker who just started working, there are about 200 Somalis now employed at Agriprocessors, many of them experienced meatpackers who previously worked in beef slaughterhouses in Kansas and Nebraska.

The Somali workers have rented a space in downtown Postville, which will serve as a community center and restaurant. Calero handed out campaign brochures and spoke to about a dozen of the workers gathered there.

Some of them were from Minneapolis and had supported the fight by Omar Jamal, a Somali activist who was threatened with deportation in 2003, at the same time that Calero was fighting his own deportation case. Calero explained how his defense campaign gave support to Jamal and other Somalis threatened with deportation and government harassment.

Agriprocessors promised the Somali workers $12-an-hour jobs and one month of free rent to work at the plant. As with other workers the company recruited, the Somalis are being paid considerably less than $12 and are not happy about it. A few of them talked about their experiences at other plants, including when Somali workers walked out of the Swift plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, in 2007 to protest company denial of prayer breaks.

During the visit, the Somali workers got a subscription to the Militant for their center and picked up several Pathfinder titles. They invited the socialist candidate to come back.

themilitant.com

A shameful raid in Postville, Iowa

IMMIGRATION

By MARY SANCHEZ

Miami Herald - Opinion

Aug. 04, 2008

Pray that you never need an advocate as much as those caught up in the Agriprocessors immigration raid in Postville, Iowa.

A lot of people are feeling soiled by the raid, which officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement initially bragged was the largest such operation in immigration history. Almost 400 people were scooped up and shuffled in shackles to a fairground designed to hold cattle.

Now, three months after the raid at the kosher meatpacking plant, more details are emerging -- and attorneys, clergy, members of Congress and labor officials are decrying a major miscarriage of justice. Translators and even local townspeople say they were duped into participating in a federal government plan to railroad exploited workers.

And state labor investigators complain that ICE overran an ongoing investigation into horrible working conditions in the Agriprocessors plant. And for what? So that ICE could make its numbers look good. So that it could claim it had deported more ''criminals.'' At the heart of the Postville operation was a ''hurry up and charge `em'' process that made it difficult, if not impossible, for attorneys to meet with the arrestees.

Immigration officials, it seems, were bent on charging the immigrants with higher crimes than simply working illegally. They wanted crimes punishable by mandatory jail time. The hook was the immigrants' use of Social Security numbers not issued to them. That's document fraud and identity theft, which everyone can agree is a bad thing. But it's not clear how many -- if any -- of the immigrants were knowingly using a real person's identity to work at Agriprocessors. For the crime to rise to aggravated identity theft, which is what ICE officials were intent on charging the workers with, the suspects had to be knowingly defrauding those whose Social Security numbers they were using.

Many of the workers were Guatemalan Mayans, indigenous people who are not literate in Spanish, much less English. They were brought in groups of 10 before judges who held court in trailers. ICE was in a hurry because within 72 hours, legal statutes say, the suspects either had to be charged with a crime or released for deportation.

Observers and translators say many of the people didn't even know what a Social Security card was. They had shown up for work and had their paperwork filled out by others employed by Agriprocessors. Almost 100 fraudulent green cards were found in the company's human re sources department. The immigrants were offered a plea deal: Either take five months jail and deportation, or serve as much as two years in jail if convicted.

Guess what the workers chose? Most just wanted to be reunited with their families in Guatemala as quickly as possible, so they took the plea. Now, almost 300 sit in jails nationwide -- yes, at taxpayer expense -- serving their time and awaiting deportation.

Meanwhile, the Iowa labor investigation of Agriprocessors is getting back on track. State officials are attempting to document countless stories of chemical burns, broken bones and amputations when body parts were caught in the machines of the plant, among other injuries. That's in addition to accusations of child labor (one teen told of working 17-hour shifts) and that female workers being told their jobs could become easier in exchange for sexual favors.

No small-town values

But many of their witnesses have already been deported or have simply fled. So much for holding employers responsible for breaking the law.

Postville, Iowa. The name conjures Norman Rockwell civility, small-town values -- the moral fiber of America. Instead, it harbored a throwback to the hellish abattoirs chronicled by Upton Sinclair a century ago.

And then it became, in the words of one federally certified translator brought in to help interpret for the hapless workers, ``a judicial assembly line where the meat packers were mass processed.''

Mary Sanchez is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.

miamiherald.com