This important article breaks two mainstream media taboos:
it shows how immigration status enables corporation to super-exploit workers,
and it mentions one of the ways in which Washington’s foreign policy pushed
millions of undocumented immigrants—so-called “illegals”—into the United
States.
“Case Farms,” ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell writes, “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.” And where did the company find these vulnerable workers?
From among the thousands of Guatemalans “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…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.’”—TPOI editor
By Michael Grabell, New Yorker
May 8, 2017
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.[...]
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