Record: 1 Title: CUT TO THE BONE. Authors: GRABELL, MICHAEL Source: New Yorker.

Question

Record: 1

Title: CUT TO THE BONE.        

Authors:        GRABELL, MICHAEL       

Source: New Yorker. 5/8/2017, Vol. 93 Issue 12, p46-53. 8p. 5 Cartoon or
Caricatures.    

Document Type: Article

Subject Terms: *FOREIGN workers
*EMIGRATION & immigration law -- United States
*WORK environment
*EMPLOYEES -- Dismissal of
*INDUSTRIAL relations  

Company/Entity: CASE Farms LLC DUNS Number: 837832492   

People: SHELTON, Tom   

Abstract:       The article offers the author's insights on poultry
company Case Farms which uses immigration law against employees. Topics
discussed include recruitment of immigrants, conditions of workers at
the plant, and insights from poultry executive Tom Shelton and
vice-chairman Mike Popowycz. He also mentioned the case of Evodia
González Dimas who challenged her termination before the U.S. National
Labor Relations Board NLRB.    

Full Text Word Count:   5791   

ISSN:   0028-792X      

Accession Number:       122750898      

Persistent link to this record (Permalink):
_____

Section:
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
How a poultry company exploits immigration laws.

~~~~~~~~

BY LATE AFTERNOON, the smell from the Case Farms chicken plant in
Canton, Ohio, is like a pungent fog, drifting over a highway lined with
dollar stores and auto-parts shops. When the stink is at its ripest, it
means that the day's hundred and eighty thousand chickens have been
slaughtered, drained of blood, stripped of feathers, and carved into
pieces—and it's time for workers like Osiel López Pérez to clean up. On
April 7, 2015, Osiel put on bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, and
trained a pressurized hose on the plant's stainless-steel machines,
blasting off the leftover grease, meat, and blood.

A Guatemalan immigrant, Osiel was just weeks past his seventeenth
birthday, too young by law to work in a factory. A year earlier, after
gang members shot his mother and tried to kidnap his sisters, he left
his home, in the mountainous village of Tectitán, and sought asylum in
the United States. He got the job at Case Farms with a driver's license
that said his name was Francisco Sepulveda, age twenty-eight. The
photograph on the I.D. was of his older brother, who looked nothing like
him, but nobody asked any questions.

Osiel sanitized the liver-giblet chiller, a tublike contraption that
cools chicken innards by cycling them through a near-freezing bath, then
looked for a ladder, so that he could turn off the water valve above the
machine. As usual, he said, there weren't enough ladders to go around,
so he did as a supervisor had shown him: he climbed up the machine, onto
the edge of the tank, and reached for the valve. His foot slipped; the
machine automatically kicked on. Its paddles grabbed his left leg,
pulling and twisting until it snapped at the knee and rotating it a
hundred and eighty degrees, so that his toes rested on his pelvis. The
machine "literally ripped off his left leg," medical reports said,
leaving it hanging by a frayed ligament and a five-inch flap of skin.
Osiel was rushed to Mercy Medical Center, where surgeons amputated his
lower leg.

Back at the plant, Osiel's supervisors hurriedly demanded workers'
identification papers. Technically, Osiel worked for Case Farms' closely
affiliated sanitation contractor, and suddenly the bosses seemed to care
about immigration status. Within days, Osiel and several others—all
underage and undocumented—were fired.

Though Case Farms isn't a household name, you've probably eaten its
chicken. Each year, it produces nearly a billion pounds for customers
such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, and Taco Bell. Boar's Head
sells its chicken as deli meat in supermarkets. Since 2011, the U.S.
government has purchased nearly seventeen million dollars' worth of Case
Farms chicken, mostly for the federal school-lunch program.

Case Farms plants are among the most dangerous workplaces in America. In
2015 alone, federal workplace-safety inspectors fined the company nearly
two million dollars, and in the past seven years it has been cited for
two hundred and forty violations. That's more than any other company in
the poultry industry except Tyson Foods, which has more than thirty
times as many employees. David Michaels, the former head of the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), called Case Farms
"an outrageously dangerous place to work." Four years before Osiel lost
his leg, Michaels's inspectors had seen Case Farms employees standing on
top of machines to sanitize them and warned the company that someone
would get hurt. Just a week before Osiel's accident, an inspector noted
in a report that Case Farms had repeatedly taken advantage of loopholes
in the law and given the agency false information. "The company has a
twenty-five-year track record of failing to comply with federal
workplace-safety standards," Michaels said.

Case Farms has built its business by recruiting some of the world's most
vulnerable immigrants, who endure harsh and at times illegal conditions
that few Americans would put up with. When these workers have fought for
higher pay and better conditions, the company has used their immigration
status to get rid of vocal workers, avoid paying for injuries, and quash
dissent. Thirty years ago, Congress passed an immigration law mandating
fines and even jail time for employers who hire unauthorized workers,
but trivial penalties and weak enforcement have allowed employers to
evade responsibility. Under President Obama, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agreed not to investigate workers during labor disputes.
Advocates worry that President Trump, whose Administration has targeted
unauthorized immigrants, will scrap those agreements, emboldening
employers to simply call ICE anytime workers complain.

While the President stirs up fears about Latino immigrants and refugees,
he ignores the role that companies, particularly in the poultry and
meatpacking industry, have played in bringing those immigrants to the
Midwest and the Southeast. The newcomers' arrival in small, mostly white
cities experiencing industrial decline in turn helped foment the
economic and ethnic anxieties that brought Trump to office. Osiel ended
up in Ohio by following a generation of indigenous Guatemalans, who have
been the backbone of Case Farms' workforce since 1989, when a manager
drove a van down to the orange groves and tomato fields around
Indiantown, Florida, and came back with the company's first load of
Mayan refugees.

JUST BEFORE THE Presidential election in November, I toured Case Farms'
chicken plant in Canton with several managers. After putting on hairnets
and butcher coats, we walked into a vast, refrigerated factory that is
kept at forty-five degrees in order to prevent bacterial growth. The
sound of machines drowned out everything except shouting. Thousands of
raw chickens whizzed by on overhead shackles, slid into chutes, and were
mechanically sawed into thighs and drumsticks. A bird, I learned, could
go from clucking to nuggets in less than three hours, and be in your
bucket or burrito by lunchtime the next day.

Poultry processing begins in the chicken houses of contracted farmers.
At night, when the chickens are sleeping, crews of chicken catchers
round them up, grabbing four in each hand and caging them as the birds
peck and scratch and defecate. Workers told me that they are paid around
$2.25 for every thousand chickens. Two crews of nine catchers can bring
in about seventy-five thousand chickens a night.

At the plant, the birds are dumped into a chute that leads to the "live
hang" area, a room bathed in black light, which keeps the birds calm.
Every two seconds, employees grab a chicken and hang it upside down by
its feet. "This piece here is called a breast rub," Chester Hawk, the
plant's burly maintenance manager, told me, pointing to a plastic pad.
"It's rubbing their breast, and it's giving them a calming sensation.
You can see the bird coming toward the stunner. He's very calm." The
birds are stunned by an electric pulse before entering the "kill room,"
where a razor slits their throats as they pass. The room looks like the
set of a horror movie: blood splatters everywhere and pools on the
floor. One worker, known as the "backup killer," stands in the middle,
poking chickens with his knife and slicing their necks if they're still
alive.

The headless chickens are sent to the "defeathering room," a sweltering
space with a barnlike smell. Here the dead birds are scalded with hot
water before mechanical fingers pluck their feathers. In 2014, an
animal-welfare group said that Case Farms had the "worst chicken plants
for animal cruelty" after it found that two of the company's plants had
more federal humane-handling violations than any other chicken plant in
the country. Inspectors reported that dozens of birds were scalded alive
or frozen to their cages.

Next, the chickens enter the "evisceration department," where they begin
to look less like animals and more like meat. One overhead line has
nothing but chicken feet. The floors are slick with water and blood, and
a fast-moving wastewater canal, which workers call "the river," runs
through the plant. Mechanical claws extract the birds' insides, and a
line of hooks carry away the "gut pack"—the livers, gizzards, and
hearts, with the intestines dangling like limp spaghetti.

On the refrigerated side of the plant, there's a long table called the
"deboning line." After being chilled, then sawed in half by a mechanical
blade, the chickens, minus legs and thighs, end up here. At this point,
the workers take over. Two workers grab the chickens and place them on
steel cones, as if they were winter hats with earflaps. The chickens
then move to stations where dozens of cutters, wearing aprons and
hairnets and armed with knives, stand shoulder to shoulder, each
performing a rapid series of cuts—slicing wings, removing breasts, and
pulling out the pink meat for chicken tenders.

Case Farms managers said that the lines in Canton run about thirty-five
birds a minute, but workers at other Case Farms plants told me that
their lines run as fast as forty-five birds a minute. In 2015, meat,
poultry, and fish cutters, repeating similar motions more than fifteen
thousand times a day, experienced carpal-tunnel syndrome at nearly
twenty times the rate of workers in other industries. The combination of
speed, sharp blades, and close quarters is dangerous: since 2010, more
than seven hundred and fifty processing workers have suffered
amputations. Case Farms says it allows bathroom breaks at reasonable
intervals, but workers in North Carolina told me that they must wait so
long that some of them wear diapers. One woman told me that the company
disciplined her for leaving the line to use the bathroom, even though
she was seven months pregnant.

CASE FARMS WAS founded in 1986, when Tom Shelton, a longtime poultry
executive, bought a family-owned operation called Case Egg & Poultry,
whose plant was in Winesburg, Ohio. In the world of larger-than-life
chicken tycoons, like Bo Pilgrim—who built a grandiose mansion in rural
Texas nicknamed Cluckingham Palace—Shelton, with a neat mustache, a
corporate hair style, and a mild manner, stood out. The son of a farmer,
Shelton majored in poultry technology at North Carolina State, where he
was the president of the poultry club and participated in national
competitions in which teams of aspiring poultrymen graded chicken
carcasses for quality and defects. Perdue Farms hired him right out of
college, and he quickly rose through the ranks, attending Harvard
Business School's Advanced Management Program before becoming Perdue's
president, at the age of forty-three.

In 1986, the year that Shelton resigned from Perdue and started Case
Farms, he gave a keynote address at the International Poultry Trade
Show. It was a time of change: new mass-market products such as nuggets,
fingers, and buffalo wings—along with health concerns over red meat—had
made chicken a staple of American diets. With more women working,
families no longer had time to cut up whole chickens. To meet the
growing demand, Shelton told the audience, poultry plants would have to
become more automated, and they would also need lots of labor.

Shelton was the kind of manager who could recite the details involved in
every step of production, from the density of breeding cages to the
number of birds processed per man-hour. He set about maximizing line
speeds at Case Farms, buying additional family-owned operations and
implementing modern factory practices. Today, the company's four
plants—Morganton and Dudley, in North Carolina, and Canton and
Winesburg, in Ohio—employ more than three thousand people.

Winesburg, the home of Shelton's first plant, is a small community in
the middle of Amish country. Even today, it's not uncommon for drivers
to yield for horse-drawn buggies or to see women in long dresses and
bonnets carrying goods home from Whitmer's General Store. Before Shelton
bought the plant, it had employed mostly young Amish women and
Mennonites. But, as the company expanded, it stopped recognizing Amish
holidays and began hiring outside the insular community. "The Amish
fathers found the urban newcomers objectionable because of such things
as coarse slogans on T-shirts, vulgarity in conversations, and 'necking'
in the parking lot," the company said later, in federal-court filings.
The Amish workers left Case Farms, and, almost immediately, the company
had trouble finding people who were willing to work under its poor
conditions for little more than minimum wage. It turned first to the
residents of nearby Rust Belt cities, which had fallen on hard times
following the collapse of the steel and rubber industries. Turnover was
high. About twenty-five to thirty of its five hundred employees left
every week.

Scrambling to find workers in the late nineteen-eighties and early
nineties, Case Farms sent recruiters across the country to hire Latino
workers. Many of the new arrivals found the conditions intolerable. In
one instance, the recruiters hired dozens of migrant farmworkers from
border towns in Texas, offering them bus tickets to Ohio and housing
once there. When workers arrived, they encountered a situation that a
federal judge later called "wretched and loathsome." They were packed in
small houses with about twenty other people. Although it was the middle
of winter, the houses had no heat, furniture, or blankets. One worker
said that his house had no water, so he flushed the toilet with melted
snow. They slept on the floor, where cockroaches crawled over them. At
dawn, they rode to the plant in a dilapidated van whose seating
consisted of wooden planks resting on cinder blocks. Exhaust fumes
seeped in through holes in the floor. The Texas farmworkers quit, but by
then Case Farms had found a new solution to its labor problems.

ONE SPRING NIGHT in 1989, a Case Farms human-resources manager named
Norman Beecher got behind the wheel of a large passenger van and headed
south. He had got a tip about a Catholic church in Florida that was
helping refugees from the Guatemalan civil war. Thousands of Mayans had
been living in Indiantown after fleeing a campaign of violence carried
out by the Guatemalan military. More than two hundred thousand people,
most of them Mayan, were killed or forcibly disappeared in the conflict.
A report commissioned by the United Nations described instances of
soldiers beating children "against walls or throwing them alive into
pits," and covering people "in petrol and burning them alive." In 1981,
in a village of Aguacatán, where many Case Farms workers come from,
soldiers rounded up and shot twenty-two men. They then split their
skulls and ate their brains, dumping the bodies into a ravine.

Through the years, the United States had supported Guatemala's dictators
with money, weapons, intelligence, and training. Amid the worst of the
violence, President Reagan, after meeting with General Efraín Ríos
Montt, told the press that he believed the regime had "been getting a
bum rap." The Administration viewed the Guatemalan refugees as economic
migrants and Communist sympathizers—threats to national security. Only a
handful received asylum. The Mayans who made it to Florida had limited
options.

Beecher arrived at the church in time for Sunday Mass, and set himself
up in its office. He had no trouble recruiting parishioners to return
with him to the Case Farms plant in Morganton, in the foothills of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. Those first Guatemalans worked so hard, Beecher
told the labor historian Leon Fink in his book, "The Maya of Morganton,"
that supervisors kept asking for more, prompting a return trip. Soon
vans were running regularly between Indiantown and Morganton, bringing
in new recruits. "I didn't want [Mexicans]," Beecher, who died in 2014,
told Fink. "Mexicans will go back home at Christmastime. You're going to
lose them for six weeks. And in the poultry business you can't afford
that. You just can't do it. But Guatemalans can't go back home. They're
here as political refugees. If they go back home, they get shot."
Shelton approved hiring the immigrants, Beecher said, and when the plant
was fully staffed and production had doubled "he was tickled to death."

EVODIA GONZÁLEZ DIMAS could feel the pain in her left arm getting worse.
For eight hours a day, she stood at a cutting table at the Case Farms
Morganton plant, using a knife or scissors to remove fat and bones from
chicken legs every two to three seconds. She wore a chain-mail glove on
her non-cutting hand to protect it from accidental stabs by her knife or
by the blades of her co-workers. The glove weighed about as much as a
softball, but grew heavier as grease and fat caught in the steel mesh.
By 2006, the pain and swelling were routinely driving González to the
plant's first-aid station. A nursing assistant would give her pain
relievers and send her back to the line. She could no longer lift a
gallon of milk, and had trouble making a fist. At night, after putting
her children to bed, she'd rub soothing lotion on her swollen wrist and
forearm.

One Friday, in September, 2006, González was called to Case Farms'
human-resources office. The director told her that the company had
received a letter from the Social Security Administration informing it
that the Social Security number she had provided wasn't valid. González,
one of the few Mexicans at the plant, told me that the director sold her
a new permanent-resident card, with the name Claudia Zamora, for five
hundred dollars, and helped her fill out a new application. (The
humanresources director denied selling her the I.D.) She was assigned to
the same job, with the same supervisor. And Case Farms paid her more
than it did new hires, noting in her file that she "had previous poultry
experience."

Around that time, Case Farms workers began complaining that their yellow
latex gloves ripped easily, soaking their hands with cold chicken juice.
Only after pieces of rubber began appearing in packages of chicken did
Case Farms buy more expensive, better-quality gloves. It passed the
extra expense along to its employees, charging workers, who were making
between seven and eight dollars an hour, fifty cents a pair if they used
more than three pairs during a shift.

The morning the policy took effect, in October, 2006, there were
grumbles throughout the plant's locker rooms. As workers began cutting
chickens, the line abruptly stopped. One woman yelled that if they stuck
together they could force the company to change the policy. When they
refused to go back to work, managers called the police, and officers
escorted workers off the premises.

More than two hundred and fifty workers left the plant, gathering at a
Catholic church nearby. González and another woman agreed to speak to a
local newspaper reporter. Quoted as Claudia Zamora, González said,
"Workers at Case Farms are routinely told to ignore notes from doctors
about work restrictions when they've been injured on the job." OSHA
later found that Case Farms often made workers wait months to see a
doctor, flouted restrictions, and fired injured workers who couldn't do
their job.

Returning to the factory on the Monday after the walkout, González
brought a note from the local medical clinic prescribing "light work or
no work" for a week. She gave it to the safety manager, who asked her to
fill out a report stating when the pain began. When she wrote "2003," he
was baffled. According to personnel records, "Zamora" had worked there
for only a month. The human-resources director who had hired González as
Zamora summoned her to the office; she had been sent a copy of the
newspaper article quoting González. The pain couldn't be related to work
at Case Farms, the director told González. After all, she was a new
employee.

González didn't understand. "I'm not new," she said, her voice rising.
"You know how many years I've been working here."

"Claudia, you're a probationary employee," the director replied. "I
don't have a job for you."

González challenged her firing before the National Labor Relations
Board, a federal body created to protect workers' rights to organize.
The N.L.R.B. judge wrote, "In my opinion, [Case Farms] knew exactly what
was going on with respect to her employment status." The company, he
said, "took advantage of the situation." The board eventually ruled that
González had been illegally fired for protesting working conditions. But
the victory was largely symbolic. In 2002, the Supreme Court had ruled,
in a 5–4 decision, that undocumented workers had the right to complain
about labor violations, but that companies had no obligation to rehire
them or to pay back wages. In the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer
predicted that the Court's decision would incentivize employers to hire
undocumented workers "with a wink and a nod," knowing that "they can
violate the labor laws at least once with impunity."

Case Farms had broken the law, but there was nothing González could do
about it. The doctor told her that she needed surgery for carpal-tunnel
syndrome, but she never got it. A decade later, her hand is limp, and
her anger still fresh. "This hand," she told me, sitting in her living
room. "I try not to use it at all."

WHAT HAPPENED TO González was part of Case Farms' decades-long strategy
to beat back worker unrest with creative uses of immigration law. The
year that Case Farms was founded, Congress passed the Immigration Reform
and Control Act, which made it illegal to "knowingly" hire undocumented
immigrants. But employers aren't required to be document experts, which
makes it hard to penalize them. The requirement that workers fill out an
I-9 form, however, declaring under penalty of perjury that they're
authorized to work, makes it easy for employers to retaliate against
workers.

In 1993, around a hundred Case Farms employees refused to work in
protest against low pay, lack of bathroom breaks, and payroll deductions
for aprons and gloves. In response, Case Farms had fifty-two of them
arrested for trespassing. In 1995, more than two hundred workers walked
out of the plant and, after striking for four days, voted to unionize.
Three weeks after the protest, Case Farms requested documents from more
than a hundred employees whose work permits had expired or were about to
expire. Case Farms refused to negotiate with the union for three years,
appealing the election results all the way to the Supreme Court. After
the company lost the case, it reduced the workweek to four days in an
effort to put pressure on the employees. Eventually, the union pulled
out.

Case Farms followed the same playbook in 2007, when workers at the
Winesburg plant complained about faster line speeds and a procedure that
required them to cut three wings at a time by stacking the wings and
running them through a spinning saw. Occasionally, the wings broke, and
bones got caught in workers' gloves, dragging their fingers through the
saw. One day, a Guatemalan immigrant named Juan Ixcoy refused to cut the
wings that way. As word spread through the plant, workers stopped the
lines and gathered in the cafeteria. Ixcoy, who is now forty-two, became
a leader in a new fight to unionize. "They saw that I didn't have fear,"
he told me.

In July, 2008, more than a hundred and fifty workers went on strike. For
nine months, through the depths of the recession, they picketed in a
cornfield across the street from the plant. In the winter, they bundled
up in snowsuits and protested from a shed made of plywood and bales of
hay. According to the N.L.R.B., when the workers walked out again, in
2010, a manager told an employee that he would take out the strike
leaders "one at a time." A short time later, Ixcoy was fired for
insubordination after an argument with a manager on the plant floor
prompted some workers to bang their knives and yell "Strike!" A judge
with the N.L.R.B. found that Ixcoy had been unlawfully fired for his
union activity and ordered that he be reinstated. After Ixcoy returned
to work, however, the union received a letter saying that it had come to
the company's attention that nine of its employees might not be legally
authorized to work in the United States. Seven were on the union
organizing committee, including Ixcoy. All were fired.

The company's sudden discovery that the union organizers were
undocumented was hard to credit. Ixcoy had first been hired in 1999, as
Elmer Noel Rosado. After a few years, a Case Farms manager told him that
the company had received notice that there was another person, in
California, working under the same I.D. "The manager, he told me if you
can buy another paper you're welcome to come back," Ixcoy said. So he
bought another I.D. for a thousand dollars and returned to Case Farms
under the name Omar Carrion Rivera. Current and former workers at Case
Farms' four plants said that the company had an unspoken policy of
allowing them to come back with a new I.D. An employee in Dudley told me
that he had worked at the plant under four different names. Case Farms
executives had to have known that many of their employees were
unauthorized. On at least three occasions, scores of workers fled their
plants, fearing immigration raids.

Ixcoy eventually received a special visa for crime victims because of
the workplace abuses he had suffered. "Ixcoy lived in an atmosphere of
fear created by supervisors at Case Farms," the Labor Department wrote
in his visa application. "He feared for his own safety, that if he
complained or cooperated with authorities, he would be arrested or
deported."

IN THE PAST few years, Tom Shelton has cast himself as the genial
proprietor of a winery that he runs on his forty-acre estate on
Maryland's Eastern Shore. Its name, Bordeleau, means "the water's edge,"
and it's one of the few wineries in the United States that you can visit
by boat. Shelton exercises the same attention to detail at the winery
that he does at Case Farms. According to Bordeleau's Web site, he is
"particular about everything, from pruning vines to the operation of the
bottling line to the freshness of the wines being served in the tasting
room." The label features Shelton's elegant Georgian-style château.

Shelton never responded to my calls or letters. A Case Farms P.R. person
said he declined to be interviewed and, instead, arranged for me to meet
with the company's vice-chairman, Mike Popowycz, and other managers in a
conference room in Winesburg. Popowycz is the son of Ukrainian
immigrants, who came to America after the Second World War. His father
was a steelworker, and his mother worked nights in a thread mill. "I
know what these people go through every day," he said. "I can see the
struggles that they go through because those are the struggles my
parents went through."

Popowycz, who is the chairman of the industry's trade group, the
National Chicken Council, said that Case Farms had made some safety
mistakes but was working hard to correct them. He defended the company
on every question I had. Case Farms, he said, treated its workers well
and never refused to let them use the bathroom. Fees for replacement
equipment discouraged workers from throwing things away. As for unions,
the company didn't need someone to stand between it and its employees.
"Our goal is to prove that we're not the company that OSHA has basically
said we are," he told me.

Popowycz seemed unaware of many of the specific incidents I cited. He
was almost like a parent hearing of his teen-ager's delinquency: he
hoped supervisors didn't do that, but, if they did, it was wrong. Case
Farms operates under a decentralized management system, which Shelton
instituted early on. Every Monday at 8 A.M., Shelton hosts a conference
call from Maryland, but many decisions are left to local managers. "We
want the people at the locations to manage their business as if it's
their own," Popowycz said.

I found it hard to believe that Shelton, who is known to ask questions
about a ten-thousand-dollar equipment expense, wouldn't be aware of
workplace disputes costing tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. I
contacted sixty former Case Farms managers, supervisors, and
human-resources representatives. Most declined to comment or didn't
return my calls, but I spoke to eight of them. Many agreed that Shelton
gave them a good deal of autonomy, and denied that there was pressure to
produce chickens faster and more cheaply. "When I was there, any
problems that we saw, we took care of it," Andy Cilona, a
human-resources director in Winesburg in the nineties, told me. But two
said that promotions went to those who pushed employees hardest, which
led some supervisors to treat workers harshly.

Popowycz acknowledged that some human-resources supervisors had sold
fake I.D.s; when the company found out, it fired them. He insisted that
Case Farms complied with immigration laws. It was one of the first
companies in Ohio to report Social Security numbers to immigration in
the nineties. Case Farms also periodically audits its personnel records,
and when it receives letters from the authorities about discrepancies in
workers' I.D.s it investigates. But the company has never used
immigration status to retaliate against injured or vocal workers,
Popowycz said; any firings that occurred after protests were
coincidental. "At the end of the day, we need labor in our plants; we're
not looking to get rid of these folks," Popowycz said. "Do we do
everything right? We hope we do."

LAST FALL, I travelled to several villages in the Guatemalan state of
Huehuetenango in the hope of finding former Case Farms workers. After
passing through the market town of Aguacatán, where women in
white-and-red huipiles sell everything from garlic to geese, I headed
forty-five minutes up a mountain to the village of Chex, where I found a
cargo truck that had careened over the side of a road. Dozens of men
came from the nearby fields and helped brace the truck with branches and
ropes. I asked the men if any of them had worked for Case Farms. "I
worked there for a year, around 1999 to 2000," one man said. "2003,"
another added. "Six months. It's killer work." "Eleven years," said
another. Two said that they had been among the first Guatemalans to work
in Winesburg.

Former Case Farms workers turned up everywhere—the hotel clerk in
Aguacatán, members of the local church, a hitchhiker I picked up on the
way to another village. One man in Chex had been a chicken catcher in
Winesburg, but years of overuse had left his elbow swollen and in
chronic pain. Unaware that Case Farms is supposed to pay for workplace
injuries, he told me that he had returned to Guatemala to heal and had
spent thousands of dollars seeing doctors. Now his arm lay frozen at his
side.

The village where Osiel grew up, Tectitán, is at the top of another
mountain five hours west, reachable by a winding red-dirt road. It's so
isolated that it has its own language, Tektiteko. Like Chex, Tectitán
has a long history of sending residents north to work at Case Farms. By
the time Osiel was a teen-ager, a man watching a soccer match could make
fun of the Guatemalan team's goalie on Facebook by saying that he
"couldn't even grab the chickens at Case Farms."

I met Osiel at Centro San Jose, a social-welfare agency and legal clinic
operated from an old redbrick Lutheran church on the edge of downtown
Canton. For the past few years, Centro San Jose has been swamped by
hundreds of unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence in Guatemala.
Osiel was wearing a blue knit hat with a pompom, a white compression
shirt, sweatpants with patches, and blue sneakers. He told me that he
left Guatemala on his sixteenth birthday, after his mother's murder,
and, two weeks later, was in the custody of border-patrol agents in
Arizona. He moved in with an uncle in Canton and befriended some other
teen-agers from Tectitán who were working nights at Case Farms. He
worked at the plant for eight months, earning nine dollars an hour,
before the accident.

Osiel said that, on the night of the accident, after passing out in the
machine, he awoke in the hospital. "The nurses told me that I lost my
leg," he recalled. "I couldn't believe it. I didn't feel any pain. And
then, hours later, I tried to touch it. I didn't have anything there. I
started crying." Today, he lives with two of his brothers in a weathered
gablefront house next to a vacant lot. He is still getting used to the
prosthesis, and hobbles when he walks. "I never thought that something
like this could happen to me," he said. "They told me that they couldn't
do anything for my leg to get better. They told me that everything was
going to be O.K."

The Labor Department, in addition to finding numerous safety violations,
fined Cal-Clean, Case Farms' sanitation contractor, sixty-three thousand
dollars for employing four child laborers, including Osiel. The fines
and the citations against Case Farms have continued to accumulate. Last
September, OSHA determined that the company's line speeds and work flow
were so hazardous to workers' hands and arms that it should "investigate
and change immediately" nearly all the positions on the line. As the
company fights the fines, it finds new ways to keep labor costs down.
For a time, after the Guatemalan workers began to organize, Case Farms
recruited Burmese refugees. Then it turned to ethnic Nepalis expelled
from Bhutan, who today make up nearly thirty-five per cent of the
company's employees in Ohio. "It's an industry that targets the most
vulnerable group of workers and brings them in," Debbie Berkowitz,
OSHA's former senior policy adviser, told me. "And when one group gets
too powerful and stands up for their rights they figure out who's even
more vulnerable and move them in."

Recently, Case Farms has found a more captive workforce. One blazing
morning last summer in Morganton, an old yellow school bus arrived at
Case Farms and passed through the plant's gates, pulling up to the
employee entrance. Dozens of inmates from the local prison filed off,
ready to work at the plant. Even their days may be numbered, however.
During the tour in Canton, Popowycz and other Case Farms managers showed
me something they were excited about, something that would help solve
their labor problems and also reduce injuries: in a corner of the plant
was a shiny new machine called an "automatic deboner." It would soon
replace seventy per cent of the workers on the line.

CUT TO THE BONE   by Michael Grabell    New Yorker, 5.8.17, v. 93, i. 12, pp 46-53

GRAD COURSE

1. What is the N.L.R.B.?   Write a minimun two paragraph history.

2. Summarize the key points of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; what is this statute designed to accomplish?

3. The author writes: “…Case Farms had repeatedly taken advantage of loopholes in the law….”   Identify the loopholes.

4. Write a descriptive profile of the average worker employed by Case Farms.

5. Why are the workers at Case Farms so vulnerable? So easily exploited?

Discuss fully.

6.   Discuss fully the following:

     As the author notes, you and I have probably eaten chicken from Case Farms.

Hence, we are as responsible for the employment conditions at Case Farms as is Tom Shelton. Why do you and I and American society tolerate this situation?

Explanation / Answer

1. NLRB stands for National Labor Relation Board. It is an independent federal agency which protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without union, to improve upon the wages and the working conditions. It acts as an intermediary between the employees and employers of the private sector. It uses its vested power to safeguard employees' right to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative. The agency also acts to prevent and remedy any unfair practice committed by private sector employers and unions on their associated employees.

Its basic functions are-

2. The Immigration Reform and Control act of 1986 was enacted on 6th November, 1986 and was signed into law by US president Ronald Reagan. It was aimed to institute following regulations in the labor policy of US-

The impact of the law were as follows-

3. Inefficiently devised Labor laws and poorer prosecution of the defaulters can be considered as one of the biggest loophole in the system, encouraging employers like Case farms to be take advantage of the situation. A standardized work condition and wage structure could have prevented exploitation of employees at the hands of their employers. In addition to this, the poorly implemented Immigration law was another loophole, which led to lack of basic rights for the immigrants and thus leading to their exploitation by the employers.

4. An average profile of the worker at Case Farm can be described as that of an immigrant working in a poor work condition with low wage. He/She is required to work tirelessly without any social and financial security. These worker are not provided with the required efficient tools and appropriate medical facilities. They are also expected not to raise their concerns and thus are required not to participate in any activity like formation of Union, etc.

5. The employees of Case farms can be easily exploited because of the non-existent labor and immigrant law. In addition to this, their illegality and need for the job also adds upon their vulnerablity to exploitation. Moreover, these employees were also easily replacable by other people and hence, because of the lack of job security, they are ready to accept any kind of treatment met out to them and this encouraged their employees to exploit them more. Last but not the least, indirect involvement of governmental agencies increases their vulnerabilty to exploitation to greater extent.

6. American society responds with a blind eye towards these situations. They are reluctant to participate in the betterment of these people on their expenses. In addition to this, the populist notion of Job insecurity also creates an illusion of non-applicability of rights on these exploited people. This illusion further tends to society reasoning out the appropriateness of treatment met out to these exploited people in their mind.

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