Boycott Swift NOW!

[quamp]

Story here

Warning: This story is NOT for the faint of heart.

Basically it tells the tale of the workers at a Swift plant in Cactus, Texas. (Swift makes meat products such as sausage and beef.) It's basically a story of how workers were shamelessly exploited and cast aside when they were hurt or complained.

She thought of how she'd left her kids every day to start work at 6:30 a.m., standing on a floor covered in blood and grease, cutting cow carcasses as they swung by on a chain that always seemed to move too fast. She thought of how, later, after her tendinitis got bad from all the cutting and she slipped in the bloody muck and hurt her back, she cleaned the bathrooms and worked in the employment office. She knew dozens of other injured workers who had also been fired, and most of them were replaced by Guatemalan immigrants as well.

But these weren't just your run-of-the-mill illegal aliens...

[Amanda Salcido] and her co-workers knew that the tiny Central Americans—many of whom came from the same highland area and spoke a Mayan dialect, not English or Spanish—were for the most part undocumented.

They spoke Quiche, a Mayan dialect that few outsiders spoke. That makes for a convenient language barrier so they don't do something like report the slave-like conditions there.

Today Salcido is a plaintiff in two separate class-action lawsuits against Swift. One alleges that the company wrongly terminated dozens of injured workers to save on workers compensation costs, slashing them from $6 million in 2002 to just $600,000 two years later, and another claims the company deliberately and systematically replaced native workers with illegal Guatemalan immigrants in a scheme to depress wages.

Since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on Swift & Co. plants in six states last December and arrested more than 1,200 immigrants, scores of articles have been written about the raids and their fallout: towns' populations cut in half, children left behind when parents were deported and hundreds of immigrants prosecuted for identity theft and immigration violations. But the lawsuits against Swift raise the question: Why, when ICE maintains its goal is to punish the leaders of companies employing large numbers of illegal immigrants, has not one manager or company higher-up been indicted?

And for that matter, why is mainstream media not reporting this story?

An assistant human resources manager allegedly helped undocumented immigrants secure jobs at the plant, directing them to an employment manager who charged the immigrants $1,000 per person and was eventually fired.

Salcido and several others say that when they helped illiterate Mayan Guatemalans fill out employment applications, the new workers were often unable to say their names and would instead point to their supposedly legitimate IDs with English names.

I hope you're angry at this company by now, at least as much as I am, if not more.

As a union steward with Local 540 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Valenzuela filed numerous grievances with supervisors after workers fell and hurt themselves. And she'd complained several times about that patch of cement. "I'd told the supervisors it was gonna cause someone to slip and fall, and doggone it, it was me," she says.

Naturally, Valenzuela was fired shortly after her accident, and complaints to union management went unanswered.

The most common complaints Valenzuela heard as a union steward were about the dangerous floors, the speed of the chain and dull knives that made cutting difficult and caused tendinitis. Statistics on the number of injuries at the plant each year were not available, but Valenzuela and other former employees say someone got hurt at least once a week, even once a day. Then there were the deaths. The worst she remembers is the time a maintenance worker's head was crushed in one of the roller machines that presses cow hides. OSHA reports confirm a 2001 accident investigation in the tanning department that concluded with fines of $10,000 for two serious safety violations. The reports also show that in 2003, the company was fined $12,500 after chlorine mists caused bloody noses, vomiting and headaches. Other problems investigated that year included no employee access to potable water and toilets.

I think this is enough. Everyone, let's boycott this company and show them that we don't like rule breakers.