Agriprocessors Staffing Partners

We heard about the problems of OneForce Staffing several times, most recently late yesterday. And we've heard about Jacobson Staffing many times, as well – most recently, the Friday before last.

And the Forward just exposed abuses at Agriprocessors Brooklyn distribution center and warehouse – abuses that mimic what workers have found in Postville.

Here's a new disturbing quote from Agriprocessors' largest staffing company, Jacobson:

Jacobson Staffing, a temporary worker agency, took over recruitment for the Iowa plant in early June. Ryan Regenold, who oversees the Agriprocessors account for Jacobson, said the Amarillo recruiters already were working for Agriprocessors when Jacobson came on. He said in most cases the Amarillo recruits didn't pan out.

"They were people that came up here looking for a handout," said Ryan Regenold, who oversees the Agriprocessors account. The company offered them bus tickets back to Amarillo and most accepted, he said.

Many of those workers left on their own because of the way they were treated by Agriprocessors.

Some got bus tickets home. Others did not. Some of those eventually got back to Texas because the Catholic Church gave them a bus ticket.

Jacobson is part of the zero check phenomenon, where, after copious deductions, workers get paychecks that net them nothing. Those workers then go to the food shelf – run largely by the Catholic Church – so they can eat.

At any rate, there is a lot of evidence from clergy, former workers, media and workers' advocates that new workers have been mistreated by Agriprocessors. (Here is some new evidence, just posted three hours ago.)

To claim, as Regnold does, that the problem rests solely with the workers – and, by implication, the other staffing agencies that recruited them – is simply not supported by fact, and Regnold must know this.

Here's the entire article, with Regnold's quote in context:

Immigration raids are boon to Texas labor recruiters
By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN Associated Press

McALLEN — The largest single-site workplace raid in U.S. history might have cost a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa nearly half of its employees, but it's been a boon to labor recruiters around the country.

After federal immigration agents raided Agriprocessors Inc. and arrested nearly 400 undocumented workers, Gavino Bravo's phone started ringing.

Suddenly a steady — though mostly illegal — stream of workers willing to toil long hours in difficult conditions for low wages had dried up. And the northeast Iowa meatpacking plant needed hundreds of new employees. Fast.

From a cluttered office suite a block off Main Street in this city near the Mexican border, Bravo, his father Jose and their Bravo Labor Agency set out to fill the void. So far, they've recruited about 200 workers for Agriprocessors, sending them north on buses in batches of 10 to 15.

Bravo and other recruiters applaud the recent crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at jobsites in Iowa, Texas and elsewhere.

"That's great for us — they're going to have to come to us for workers," said Bravo, who is paid a flat fee — he would say how much — for each worker he recruits.

Under normal circumstances, meat processors and other large employers that rely on immigrant labor have little need for outside recruiters. Agriprocessors had established labor supply lines from Mexico, Guatemala and some Eastern European countries.

"New employees come to Agriprocessors mainly through word-of-mouth," its company Web site says. "As a result, many of Agriprocessors' new employees found their jobs through family members already working for the company."

But with nearly half its workers jailed and awaiting deportation, those lines were suddenly severed.

"They're just trying to reconstruct the migrant labor supply that was blown to pieces by the raid," said Lourdes Gouveia, director of the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies of the Great Plains at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Gouveia, a sociology professor who has studied food processing plants and their ties to immigration, said that while some of the largest companies, such as Tyson Foods, recruit internally, more and more companies depend on outside agencies to refill the labor pool after a raid.

"It happens more with raids because they're desperate," Gouveia said.

The depth of that desperation was apparent in Amarillo earlier this summer, when a recruiter for the Iowa plant cruised homeless shelters and the bus station in search of potential hires.

Cathy Manes, director of employment services at Faith City Ministries in Amarillo, said the recruiter asked if he could discuss job opportunities at Agriprocessors following the shelter's regular chapel service.

Manes said she had questions about the company and safety and welfare of its workers and decided not to recommend the jobs to her clients.

"I didn't want to uproot someone and them be treated poorly," Manes said.

Jacobson Staffing, a temporary worker agency, took over recruitment for the Iowa plant in early June. Ryan Regenold, who oversees the Agriprocessors account for Jacobson, said the Amarillo recruiters already were working for Agriprocessors when Jacobson came on. He said in most cases the Amarillo recruits didn't pan out.

"They were people that came up here looking for a handout," said Ryan Regenold, who oversees the Agriprocessors account. The company offered them bus tickets back to Amarillo and most accepted, he said.

Things went badly for workers another staffing agency sent to Agriprocessors in May.

Ten days after sending about 150 workers to the plant, Labor Ready pulled them out, citing concerns over safety conditions, said Stacey Burke, spokeswoman for Labor Ready's parent company, True Blue. She declined to detail the safety issues.

Regenold, however, said Agriprocessors decided to send the Labor Ready workers home after safety incidents.

The spring raid came amid investigations into labor, food safety and environmental violations at the plant. The company has been accused in recent years of mistreating animals and employees.

Labor officials have said they were investigating possible wage violations at the plant and the state has accused Agriprocessors of violating child labor laws.

Since June 2, Jacobson Staffing has supplied about 900 temporary workers to Agriprocessors, with about 480 still on the payroll as of Aug. 1, Regenold said.

Jacobson started with ads in local newspapers, exhausted the labor pool within driving distance and expanded the search, adding another recruiting firm and using four of its own recruiters.

Jacobson runs all of its potential hires through the government's E-Verify system to make sure applicants are in the U.S. legally and are able to work.

The search was easier for Bravo.

His agency ran ads in Spanish-language newspapers and on Mexican radio stations in the Rio Grande Valley and had little trouble finding workers, although only about one quarter were skilled in meat processing. Bravo's simple ads only said that the jobs were out of state and the applicants must have permission to work in the U.S. Bravo does not use E-Verify, but requires applicants to show original documents indicating they can work legally in the U.S.

Bravo has been sending laborers to sugar cane fields in Louisiana, dairy farms in Maine and grain silos in South Dakota for years, Bravo said.

The $10 per hour starting wage offered by Agriprocessors is enough to get workers to relocate to Iowa, he said.

"There are not that many opportunities for work here and the opportunities there are, are low paying," Bravo said. A new pile of applications in Bravo's office from friends and relatives of the first batch of workers he sent to Iowa indicate that a new labor pipeline already is forming.

An attempt at comprehensive immigration reform failed late last year amid an immigration crackdown at work sites nationwide. In fiscal year 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made 4,000 administrative arrests of workers who were in the country illegally and 863 criminal arrests for more serious offenses. The arrests were ten times the number made five years earlier.

Through the first eight months of this fiscal year, ICE has matched the criminal arrests from last year and made 2,900 administrative arrests.

Bravo said business has improved along with enforcement.

"I don't think they'll be able to go back to undocumented workers because they're being scrutinized so much," Bravo said.

"I knew sooner or later it was going to catch up with them," he said.

Associated Press Writer Anabelle Garay in Dallas contributed to this report.

Agriprocessors From The Inside, As Told By An Agriprocessors New Hire.
The Zeroed Out Paycheck.
Agriprocessors' Brooklyn Warehouse.

Comments

[Carol Ann Varley]

Agri should hire Martians--an untapped illegal alien workforce.

Seriously, is meat worth the costs of human exploitation and animal misery?

A growing number of Jews and Christians have forsaken meat--it's good for the soul.

[Reb Yudel]

How many Postville man-hours go in to one pound of beef?

[Paul Freedman]

Carol, to feel morally cleansed you will probably have to give up purchasing anything you didn't personally make. Including veggies whose growers you don't know. The interesting thing, sociologically, is that AgriP is not unique in its labor policies, that they are shared throughout the packing industry. Unlike Shmarya, at bottom, you don't need to make the argument that AgriP is uniquely exploitive since to some degree AgriP has been a polemical whipping boy for you as at the end of the day the argument here is vegan.

Unfortunately, if the meat packing industry relies on illegal and marginal labor recruited from economic outliers in the continental North American labor market then we can assume that other industries, including canneries, processors, and packagers of non-meat foodstuffs employ the same labor contracting practices.

With American unions comatose, organized exploitation of the weakly resourced, combined with seek-bottom-dollar outsourcing exploitation of out-of-country labor for our consumables might leave you with only two options to live a guilt-free holier-than-thou existence, either move to an economically undeveloped country or grow and make your own ... everything.

[Shmarya]

Paul –

Federal and state officials who saw the Agriprocessors operate on the day of the raid (and before) say it was the worst of the worst – "medieva,l" in the words of one of them.

You confuse employment of illegals with exploitation and abuse of illegals.

Many companies may hire illegals. Few exploit them. Even fewer abuse them. Agriprocessors did all three.

[Paul Freedman]

Shmarya: I think we have one quote on "medieval" and I am cautious in evaluating statements made in conjunction with a slaughter house as being necessarily restricted to AgriP, it could be that depending upon the facility area investigated many slaughterhouses appear "medieval" on any given day; this is not to absolve AgriP of responsibilities for past or future citations as to health and worker conditions--I would submit however that the ubiquity of staffing agencies and the primary responsibility for staffing agencies for zeroing out paychecks through deductions routed to those agencies suggests that employee abuses are shared as some of the abuses you have quoted are taken at the initiative and under the control of the contracting agencies and not the employers from what I read here

[Paul Freedman]

As an example having nothing to do with AgriP, chasids, or meat, the facilities accorded to migrant labor recruited to harvest grapes, lettuce and other crops of the great and progressive states of the American west coast have frequently been referred to as, ah, "medieval"

[Yochanan Lavie]

The Middle Ages brought us the university system, philosophy, literature, chivalry, and other good things. Agri-vation isn't "medieval." It's just plain evil.

[Jerome Soller]

Paul Freedman said the following,
"I would submit however that the ubiquity of staffing agencies and the primary responsibility for staffing agencies for zeroing out paychecks through deductions routed to those agencies suggests that employee abuses are shared as some of the abuses you have quoted are taken at the initiative and under the control of the contracting agencies and not the employers from what I read here."

Paul, I agree that the contractor would be the primary group at fault. How many staffing agencies have been known to give out $0.00 paychecks? However, Agriprocessors does not get a free pass. They still has a moral responsibility to make sure their contractors behave in an ethical way towards their workers. I come from a different industry (software), but I know for a fact that an organization that subcontracts or contracts to another organization can insist on contractual clauses that impact how the contracted workers are treated and paid. Violations of these terms could cause payments to the contractor to be suspended and in some cases the workers to be paid directly. Under federal contracts, we have been a subcontractor and also a group that subcontracted other companies or consultants (individual contractors). Even as a small company, we insist that certain pass-through clauses are included in our subcontracts, even if the subcontractor has 40,000 employees and we have less than 10. If the subcontractor says "No we won't agree to that," we can not do business with them. How much more influence does Agriprocessors have on their contractors than we do on ours? I believe that Agriprocessors could rapidly resolve this problem if it chooses to do so. What concrete steps has Agriprocessors taken to resolve this situation?

Jerome