I’ve started to poke around the Mother Jones site, for kicks, and landed on an old article, “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret.” I’m not sure if it’s their usual practice to “recycle” older articles (this dates from 2011), but here it is, an extended description of Hormel’s actions: “First, Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they got canned.”
Now, “getting canned” isn’t really the right statement.
Hormel did indeed, over the course of the 90s and 2000s, speed up the line and cut pay, dramatically. They also shifted to a 75% immigrant workforce, and, the article implies, nearly all those immigrants are illegal, so all it takes to “can” someone is to tell them, “you know, your name and Social Security number match that of someone else.”
What would happen if our laws against working without authorization were actually enforced? Clearly, it was the availability of an immigrant workforce that enabled Hormel to cut wages and speed up the line. In order to fill the “jobs Americans won’t do,” the company would be required to pay its workers a fair wage and create more human working conditions.
Yet the author empathizes with the illegal-immigrant workers, and praises the resolve of one man who, instead of slinking away when he’s told that ” law enforcement was investigating, that they had already found records of [his] information being used in five other states, . . . insisted he didn’t know anything about that, that those people must have somehow stolen his information.”
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