Washblog

Locally, the canneries around Willapa Bay would go out of business if they had to rely on citizens only to open oysters. It's tedious and smelly work and there's always the danger of clumsy and inexperienced workers stabbing holes in their hands trying to get the dang shells open.

There's a significant Hispanic community in Pacific County - real people with families who have real lives that look just like ours; remove them entirely and we lose local employers.

Then all that rhetorical cow pie crap whining about how them folks are taking jobs away from willing American citizens becomes foolisher and foolisher. Deport all the willing and we are left with the few needy patriotic and civic-minded citizens willing to work the canneries. They won't be enough to keep the business afloat. If the parents are illegal, their kids born here ain't. They're citizens just like me ... and you ... and every other descendent of immigrants who came here uninvited all the way back to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown.

 

Immigration raid pushes Oregon into thick of fight

Work - As President Bush presses for reforms, agents arrest 167 at a Portland plant, escalating the national debate

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
BRYAN DENSON and BRENT HUNSBERGER

A federal raid on a large North Portland food processing plant Tuesday ended in the arrests of 167 workers, intensifying Oregon's immigration debate, tearing apart families, unnerving employers and sparking new calls for U.S. leaders to rewrite the nation's immigration laws.

An estimated 160 federal agents swept into Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. and the firm that supplied its workers, American Staffing Resources, arresting three managers and locking up most of the arrested workers in a federal detention facility, where they face possible deportation.

The action was part of a six-month criminal investigation into the North Carolina-based employment agency, which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accuses of conspiring with Fresh Del Monte to hire and employ undocumented workers. Federal authorities allege that nine out of 10 employees hired by the staffing company used Social Security numbers that were fictitious or belonged to other people.

Government officials said it was the largest immigration raid on an Oregon workplace in recent memory.

The arrests sparked criticism from immigration reform supporters and workers rights advocates and Portland Mayor Tom Potter, who said the events underscore failures in federal immigration policies. At the same time, immigrants rights, religious and Latino activists moved to support those arrested and find housing and care for their family members.

... On a given day, about 600 employees work at the Fresh Del Monte plant in Portland in two separate shifts. They cut fruits and vegetables for grocers, restaurants and other retailers.

They were recruited and hired by American Staffing Resources, owned by North Carolina-based Staffco Management Group Inc., mostly to work for the state's minimum wage, $7.80 an hour.

Informant plays key role

The criminal case began shortly after Christmas, when immigration agents, operating on tips from the public, sent an informant to apply for work at Fresh Del Monte's plant on North Rivergate Boulevard.

The informant told a produce manager that he was born in Mexico and had no legal documentation to work in the United States. The manager pointed him to the nearby office of American Staffing Resources, according to a federal search warrant affidavit. There, wearing an audio recording device, the informant began gathering information that culminated in Tuesday's arrests.

In the early months of this year, according to the affidavit, managers told the informant he could find phony identification on the streets of Woodburn. One manager eventually sold the informant a Social Security card, the government alleges.

... Of those arrested, 32 were released for humanitarian reasons, said Marc A. Raimondi, a Washington, D.C.-based spokesman for ICE. Those released, he said, were either single parents or sole caregivers of dependent children or ill family members but would be required to appear in front of an immigration judge.

The detainees were scheduled to be taken to an ICE processing center in Tukwila, Wash., before being moved to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

... Mayor criticizes action

Potter expressed anger that families were swept up in the arrests, saying the raid stemmed from a failure of Bush and Congress to craft reforms that are fair and workable for employees and business.

"I certainly understand why federal officials executed criminal warrants against three individuals who stole and sold Social Security numbers," Potter said in a statement. "But to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy."

---

[Excerpts only] from Willamette Weekly. Read the entire article on line.

Chop Shop 

In a town that cares about food and human rights, WW finds a hidden world of illegal immigrants. On this May Day, something's rotten in St. Johns.

BY BETH SLOVIC | bslovic at wweek dot com

[May 2nd, 2007]

The knives cut through the air like paper fans on a hot day. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

One after another, gleaming green heads of broccoli are held out in sacrifice. Suspended above stainless-steel worktables, they look like wedding bouquets about to be tossed ceremoniously into the air.

Instead, they are briskly trimmed into precise one-and-a-quarter-inch pieces. The florets drop. The piles build. In a matter of hours, more than 2,000 pounds of broccoli will meet this fate.

Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

No one speaks.

Across this cavernous warehouse, which sits in an isolated industrial section of North Portland's St. Johns neighborhood, another two dozen workers hack at pineapples, cantaloupes, honeydew and watermelons. Using swift repetitive motions, workers diligently shave the rinds off the fruit. Mixed together and tossed in a bin the size of a hot tub, the rinds smell like a fruit smoothie. Naked, the watermelons resemble giant pink lungs.

Like the other fruit, the watermelons are soon reduced to bite-sized chunks. Uniform. Rindless. Convenient. Contextless. Within days, these chunks will sit on the shelves of Oregon's Wal-Marts, Costcos and Fred Meyers�on party platters bound for Cinco de Mayo celebrations, 40th-birthday parties and corporate meetings across Portland, the state and beyond.

It's been a long journey from the farm to this Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in North Portland, where raw produce arrives on trucks in 600- to 1,000-pound boxes and leaves in plastic containers stacked into new boxes. On one recent afternoon, the broccoli was from California, the fruit from Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico.

Curiously enough, the workers were from equally distant locations: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. Men and women, they included teenagers and those in their twilight years, people who had traveled thousands of miles to end up here.

Some might call their journeys decisions born of courage and limited economic options at home. Others would call them illegal aliens, lawbreakers exploiting a shattered immigration policy in their adopted land.

However you categorize them, it's undeniable that the forces that draw them here are as real as they are invisible. And those forces can be summed up in three simple words: the global economy.

The phrase may ooze sex appeal. Yet there's nothing sexy about this particular outpost of the new international order. This isn't a Las Vegas-style casino in Macau, drawing tourists and their money from Dubuque to Dubai. Nor is this the Portland arm of Intel, where New Delhi-trained engineers develop products that are made in China and sold in S�o Paulo. Nonetheless, this North Portland plant is as much an expression of the global economy as other more vaunted enterprises.

But here, on the tip of the peninsula formed by the Columbia and Willamette rivers, the plant reveals a grittier side of that economy, one that depends on breaking laws to sustain the rules created by others.

... Less than 10 miles north of downtown Portland, the Del Monte plant is an illustration of this peculiar cycle and a little-noticed reminder that Portland is not built on the backs of the creative class alone.

... It's close to freezing cold inside this football-field-sized warehouse in North Portland. I know because I've spent three days working at the plant, and on a recent Friday at 8 am the thermometer registers 36 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm regretting not having brought a hat to wear under my green hairnet. I can see my own breath and the respiration of the other 24 workers beginning their eight-hour shifts.

... Two weeks ago I was hired as a quality assurance supervisor at Del Monte, which means I'm monitoring the size, sweetness and expected shelf-life of the chunks of fruit taking shape on the plant's production floor. I'm also watching to make sure there's enough chlorine in the water to kill any potentially dangerous microbes when the produce is washed in the large tanks that run across the production floor.

For some of the workers, though, this salary is enough to support relatives in the United States and send money to family at home. One laborer, a man in his 20s, tells me he has worked at Del Monte for three years. He says he earns about $600 every two weeks and that he and his wife, who works as a waitress, send $500 back to Mexico every 15 days. He, too, volunteers that he doesn't have papeles.

To make it through their shifts in the cold, the workers are all wearing winter hats under their hairnets. They have warm liners on under their blue rubber gloves. Under their white lab coats, they're wearing bulky sweatshirts, winter jackets and multiple layers of pants and socks.

...I got a job at the plant by filling out an application with the staffing agency that hires workers for Del Monte in St. Johns. I used my real name but I didn't tell them I was a reporter.

... In one [training] video, a man with a striking resemblance to a young-looking Jerry Seinfeld instructs me in proper hand washing. I'm left to my own devices to figure out how to wipe the snot running down my face without contaminating the rubber gloves I've just cleaned with soap and water.

... Still, the allegations seemed to point to the fact that there was a sweatshop albeit a cold one operating in Portland, a city that professes to care both about its food and liberal causes such as worker rights.

My three-day experience suggests that the work at Del Monte is mindless, boring and repetitive. It requires standing largely in one place for eight hours a day. And it clearly depends on the compliance of a large group of relatively powerless workers.

... As if to make sure no one is ever late to the floor after a break, the clock in the lunch room is five minutes faster than the clock on the production floor.

Del Monte, whose corporate headquarters are in Coral Gables, Fla., owns 10 fruit and vegetable processing plants across the U.S., according to its website. But the company's plant in North Portland, situated several hundred feet off Lombard Street and surrounded by trees on a four-acre lot, is the biggest. It also processes the widest variety of products, my supervisor tells me.

It has operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week since 2000. Its sliced green peppers are shipped to Pizza Hut. Chopped onions, lettuce and tomatoes are sent to Taco Bell. Fruit cups from Del Monte appear on the menus of local Jack in the Box restaurants, and its sliced tomatoes garnish sandwiches at KFCs.

... Occasionally, I'm told, workers do cut themselves and the production lines have to stop to clean up blood spills. Bits of slimy fruit that fall on the production floor prove to be slip hazards. But many workers' greatest fear of seems to be getting run over by the forklifts whizzing across the production floor as they bring in 1,000-pound boxes of raw cabbage and haul out equally heavy containers of diced onions and other products. One woman recently broke a toe when her foot was run over by one such forklift, another worker tells me.

Despite these conditions, the female workers at least try to maintain some feminine dignity; hanging over the quarter-inch slits in the stalls in the women's bathroom are carefully folded strips of plastic bags, which shield from view the women using the toilets behind the peach-colored doors.

... Del Monte Fresh Produce is not the only food processing plant in Portland. A similar business, Duck Delivery, operates in Northeast Portland.

And finally this from Mark Fiore via Mother Jones
If you must download the Flash Player, do it! It's worth it. Pay attention: It doesn't end after the first segment. Keep watching.