The new leader of the former Agriprocessors meatpacking plant is
promising a different way of doing business than his controversial
predecessors practiced.
Register exclusive: New Postville plant leader promises a safer, fairer facility
By TONY LEYS • Des Moines Register
Postville, Ia. – The new leader of the former Agriprocessors meatpacking plant is promising a different way of doing business than his controversial predecessors practiced.
Hershey Friedman said the plant, now called Agri Star, no longer will be known as a place where illegal immigrants work in unsafe conditions for low wages. He said his managers are using tight controls to ensure that all workers are legal, and the company has improved safety training and raised wages for production workers.
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Friedman spoke this morning in a conference room inside the plant, which has been the subject of nationwide scrutiny since federal agents raided it in May 2008 and arrested hundreds of immigrant workers who were in the country illegally.
The raid led to criminal charges against most of the workers and against the plant’s former leader, Sholom Rubashkin, whose federal trial starts today in South Dakota.
Friedman, whose family bought the plant out of bankruptcy earlier this year, would not discuss Rubashkin’s trial. He said the plant will thrive no matter what happens with its former leader.
“It’s a new beginning,” he said. “The past is history. We need to look to the future.”
Several workers, interviewed away from the plant, confirmed that work conditions have improved. They said their pay has increased, from as little as $6.25 an hour to as much as $11 an hour, and they’re no longer being cheated out of hours they worked.
Also, they said, supervisors are taking more care to train workers on safety issues, and they’ve slowed down the production line. “They’re not pressuring us as much as they were before,” Oscar Mejia Santos said in Spanish. Mejia, who is from Guatemala, was among those arrested in the raid, and he served prison time. The federal government has given him a temporary permit to work here legally, because he is scheduled to testify in Rubashkin’s trial.
Friedman said the future will include a return to processing beef at the plant, which used to be the nation’s largest producer of kosher meat. Beef production should resume in a few months, after the company installs updated equipment, he said. The company will be requesting federal and state help in paying for the improvements, but his family will invest heavily as well, he said.
Currently, the plant is only slaughtering chickens and turkeys. It also is making hot dogs and deli meats from beef it buys elsewhere, though neither line is close to producing as much as before the raid.
He said employment has risen from about 325 to about 385 since he took over a couple of months ago. He expects to hire a few dozen more people in the coming months and another 200 when the beef line restarts. He expects to employ 700 to 800 workers in a year or so. That would be a couple of hundred fewer than worked at the plant before the raid. He said the remodeled plant would be more efficient, so it wouldn’t need quite so many workers, but he said the employees would be better-paid and safer because of the improvements.
Friedman, 59, lives in Montreal, Quebec, and has no plans to move to Iowa. But he said he intends to be a long-term leader of the company, and he promised to have solid managers on-site.
Friedman rarely gives interviews, but he said he wanted to introduce himself to Iowans and show that he is a different kind of leader than his predecessors, whom he said he never met before his family bought the company. Friedman said his daughter, Sarah Hirsch, and her husband, Daniel Hirsch, of New York, are the majority owners. Friedman said he has no title, but owns part of the company and will function as its chief executive officer.
Friedman said he has bought several troubled companies over the years, including a plastics manufacturer in Canada. He has no experience in meatpacking, but he said that should not be a problem.
“I’m a quick learner,” he said. “Industry, as far as I’m concerned, is industry. Everybody is not going to say the same thing, but I have been involved in many, many industries. Once you know industry, it doesn’t make a difference if it’s meat, plastics, printing, or anything else.”
[Hat Tip: The Other DK.]