“this just looks like a scheme to keep standards low.”

December 28, 2017 8:35 AM

Who Would Pay $26,000 to Work in a Chicken Plant? Chicken plants have recruited thousands of foreign workers in recent years through a little-known program to fill jobs they say Americans won’t do. (SLProPublica by Michael Grabell)
posted by crazy with stars (33 comments total)

Correction: jobs Americans won't do for minimum wage with no benefits.
posted by Locobot at 8:39 AM on December 28, 2017 [51 favorites]

If these immigrants actually get a real green card, hey, good work. Because it's really, really fucking hard to get one, regardless of what Trump tries to tell everyone. I'm not surprised that people would put up with this shit for a year to become full, legal US immigrants. For a lot of people it would be a small price to pay.
posted by GuyZero at 8:50 AM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

For a lot of people it would be a small price to pay.

It's not a price they should have to pay, and especially not to a private corporation.
posted by praemunire at 9:02 AM on December 28, 2017 [17 favorites]

Correction: jobs Americans won't do for minimum wage with no benefits.

Except the benefit of a legal way to get into the Land of Opportunity. At the end of the article, former computer engineer from South Korea, Yongho Yeom, ended up buying a closed fish market, and stories like his aren't unique. Some cities have capitalized on being open and supporting to immigrants who come in and work at terrible jobs for a year, then they set up their own businesses in town.

Garden City, Kansas is viable and booming, with at least 27 different languages are spoken, some say up to 40, in a town of only 27,000. And these people are busy, as unemployment hovers around 3 percent.

City manager Matt Allen says it's an economic system powered by a steady stream of irrigated corn and immigrant labor.

"In this region, we pump water out of the ground to grow a tropical plant in the sand hills, in mass, so that we can feed cattle in mass, so that we can kill cattle in mass, so we can distribute beef in mass, and that requires a big workforce," he says. "That is the common thread through the economy."

All those workers, producing food that the rest of the country buys, bring wealth — in the form of stores, services and terrific ethnic restaurants — to the remote western Kansas town.

All that, in turn, helps Garden City hang onto workers.
...
The town's turning point came in the 1970s, says Sister Janice Thome, when city and church leaders debated bringing in a meatpacking plant.

Thome slides behind the wheel of her faded red Ford truck she uses to haul donated furniture to newcomers.

Those leaders, as she recalls, "said, if we say 'no,' then Garden City is liable to become one of these ghost towns, like many other towns. If we say yes, then we've got a vibrant economy, but then we're going to be bringing all of, quotes, 'those people.' "

"Those people," as in immigrants, mostly poor ones, who don't speak English, and need significant help getting their footing in a new culture.

"They decided they didn't want to be a ghost town, so they would say yes, and then they said, 'OK, are we going to count the people that come in then, as a blessing or a curse?' " Sister Thome says.

But this is not to exempt House of Raeford and others from atrocious working conditions, or the fact that only those with enough money in their home countries can pay to be abused for a year, just to get a chance to live in the United States.

So many broken systems.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:10 AM on December 28, 2017 [7 favorites]

If the benefit is a green card, that is, in some respects, compensation. But it's compensation being provided by the people of the USA, not by the company.

Regardless of why and how they can do it, these companies are getting away with paying people less than the market (or ethics and morals) dictates people should be paid, and passing the rest of the bill onto the rest of us.
posted by explosion at 9:13 AM on December 28, 2017 [25 favorites]

Except the benefit of a legal way to get into the Land of Opportunity.

What you're basically saying here is that it's cool not to give people health insurance or PTO because we are ever so graciously allowing them to be here in the first place, in the vicinity of the wealth at least partially plundered from their own countries.

Hell, ethics and morals aside, if you can't work out how this turns into a race to the bottom that in the long run could well ensnare you and your family, I don't know what to tell you.
posted by praemunire at 9:20 AM on December 28, 2017 [21 favorites]

These jobs would have higher pay if the companies couldn't import serf labor to suffocate wages. In a sane world, if a company hired poor immigrants, they would also be required to house these immigrants, educate their children, and provide their families with proper healthcare. Instead, all of those cost are passed along to the taxpayer.

Yes, it's a sensitive subject. No, the foreign workers shouldn't be blamed for moving to a country who's business leaders practically beg them to immigrate to. Yes, we'd do the same thing if we were them. All those things are true, absolutely. Here's something else that's true. Mass immigration of uneducated low skilled workers is a textbook example of corporate welfare.
posted by Beholder at 9:26 AM on December 28, 2017 [13 favorites]

Yeah, getting the feeling not everyone has read the article.

The $26k was paid to the immigration services people on the South Korean side. The dude in the article wrote a check to cover it. He made $8.50 per hour to start, ~$10 after a few months. He got a second job to make more money. After 13 months he quit and bought a restaurant.

The legal fees on the sponsor side for green cards is probably more then the yearly pay of these employees. So, these plants figured it worth paying (effectively) twice as much for foreign workers than local workers. Also, these expensive workers quit and go do something else as soon as they can. Which is only 1 year, which is amazing. On the H1-B side, green cards can take many years.

So, doesn't quite follow the "importing slave labor" narrative we are seeing in the comments.

Also, $26k seems to be way on the low end for this kind of thing, according to the article. $130k gets you the same kinda deal at Burger King/Pizza Hut. Which makes sense, since flipping burgers is a way better job than processing chickens.
posted by sideshow at 9:52 AM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

House Republicans are pushing a bill that could help the meat and poultry industry bring in more than 10 times as many foreign workers a year with few of the protections provided by the green card program.

well, just as long as we build that wall, it should all be ok, right?

they don't really want to keep immigrants out - they just want them to stop acting like they're free to work where they want
posted by pyramid termite at 9:55 AM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Also: This American Life just did a two parter on the effect of illegal immigrants on the local economy of a chicken processing town in Alabama (spoiler alert: things are getting real shitty for uneducated/unskilled Americans, and it has little/nothing to do with immigrants, legal or otherwise).

But, "Illegals are taking our chicken processing jerbs!" was a pet project of then Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. To find out that part of the "problem" is EB-3 visas issued by the current administration is [Chef Kissing Fingers.gif]. In fact, I'm guessing that irony inspired this article.
posted by sideshow at 9:59 AM on December 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

sideshow: "The legal fees on the sponsor side for green cards is probably more then the yearly pay of these employees."

This site will find you an EB-3 worker for $6,400, of which only $1925 are federal legal fees. So that's a lot less than the yearly pay for these employees, and actually seems like a real bargain to me, if that will get you a minimum wage employee who will work under poor conditions for 6 months to a year.
posted by crazy with stars at 10:02 AM on December 28, 2017

I live in and around towns with factories (chicken and otherwise) where it's obvious the companies are doing this sort of thing. Two things from on the ground here - people think of these jobs as being done in the past by poor [white, male] Americans and in my experience that has not been true for a very long time, if it ever was. Most women one and two generations up from me worked in these same factories doing jobs their husbands either wouldn't do or jobs that paid too little for it to make sense for them to do. When the women around me worked with men it was almost entirely MOC. Except the bosses and supervisors and managers and people who got the money and probably benefits of some kind who were, of course, all white men.

The second thing is that our communities are absolutely enriched by the people who immigrated here to do those jobs. I can also vouch for the 'take the green card, work the year, open your own business' model. There's also a fair amount of family immigration where one person works at the factory while the other opens or buys a business to run.

None of this is me defending the companies - I've seen them engage in all sorts of illegal and immoral practices (12 year olds tearing down chicken houses with no masks or protective clothing of any kind for way under minimum wage and sometimes as church projects, as a "contractor" who was usually related to someone at the plant pocketed the money from the state for removing and updating the chicken houses, for example). Just wanted to give a little insight from living around it.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 10:09 AM on December 28, 2017 [9 favorites]

In Minnesota, these used to be good-paying union jobs with benefits. Then, in the 80s, the companies played hardball and broke the unions. Next step was knowingly hiring hundreds of undocumented workers - not only is it much cheaper, they daren't complain about working conditions and pay for fear of being deported.

And so these formerly good-paying jobs with benefits and workplace protections turned into low-paying shit jobs.

They could come back, if the plants could be unionized all over again. The price of chicken and eggs would take a big jump, but the workers would be earning a living wage and have much safer working conditions.
posted by Lunaloon at 10:35 AM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Sideshow, I believe you misread the article.

The immigrants are paying the fees for "access" to the low-paying US jobs. The poultry slaughterhouse isn't paying $8.50/hr plus $26,000 a year. If that were the case, they could raise their wage to $12/hr and *easily* find more workers.

Any and all fees relating to coming to, or staying in (green card application, etc) are paid by the immigrant. Any fees that the company incurs for joining this program are likely minimal, or covered by a kickback from the recruiters on the Korean/Chinese end.
posted by explosion at 10:36 AM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

Actually, I think sideshow had it right - though they might have overestimated the sponsoring employer's costs, the pattern is correct.

American citizenship is a privilege. I think many of us USites don't like to admit that, as we justifiably have huge problems with the country and with the government, and many of us certainly aren't always (or ever) proud to be Americans, but that doesn't make it untrue. This program may be a raw deal compared to being born to American citizen parents or something, but $26k and a year of super crappy work is easy compared to other paths. Should we offer better paths to residency? Surely, though we can't seem to agree on how (even within the same political ideologies, I don't think we have a good idea of what we want the immigration system to look like).

It's so troubling to me that nearly all Americans have no freaking idea how immigration works (even when it comes to visas they may well have opinions about, like H1-Bs!)
posted by mosst at 11:53 AM on December 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

The price of chicken and eggs would take a big jump,

Would it really? Or would the owners have to accept slightly smaller profit margins.
posted by The Whelk at 12:21 PM on December 28, 2017 [10 favorites]

Honestly, what will it take for humans en masse to stop eating meat? It's shameful on so many fronts.
posted by koavf at 12:30 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

To stop eating meat en masse? Given that humans have been eating meat for millions of years, nothing short of a major catastrophic event or disease outbreak among livestock, I suspect, would cause a sudden cessation. E.g., mad cow disease, or a nuclear winter that made raising cattle untenable.

Highly publicized, bad meat-processing practices have had an effect, but they tend to be short-lived.

The trend, in fact, is that USians are eating more meat in recent years. But, and directly appropos to the economics posed by this post, this article suggests it’s primarily due to...the lower cost of chicken.

If the price goes up (say, because poultry processors shift back to union labor), then demand would definitely decrease again.
posted by darkstar at 12:45 PM on December 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

Or would the owners have to accept slightly smaller profit margins.

Hmm, depends. Some combination of automation, consolidation, and imports would keep prices down too.
posted by FJT at 12:48 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Honestly, what will it take for humans en masse to stop eating meat?

I think meat consumption would decline if meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger become price competitive. They already offer some advantages over traditional meat as they are more food safe and also various fast food outlets may be interested in tweaking the base patty to provide a more "unique" taste for consumers. At this point, it's really a matter of the price and a well-funded marketing budget.

Then it's just a matter of imagination. Like burger patties, a significant amount of meat eaten is processed or mixed in with other foods: Deli meats, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc. I assume it would be easier to emulate a processed food rather than steak or chicken on the bone.
posted by FJT at 1:32 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

Modern Americans eat a lot more meat than many of their ancestors. My grandparents certainly didn't have meat at every meal, or even every day, and they all engaged in farming on some scale. Back when politicians campaigned on "a chicken in every pot," it really meant something.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:51 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

People would presumably eat less meat if the price went up; we decided to eat more of it as the price has gone down, so it makes sense that the reverse would be true. There's probably some stickiness as the result of habit, but it would change. My grandparents certainly didn't eat as much, and the same cuts, of meat that I eat, because the stuff was just a lot more expensive. Hell, my dog probably eats cuts of meat that would have gone to human consumption in the 1940s.

There's a narrative that eliminating labor-importation programs that depress wages would be catastrophic, because the price of meat and eggs and produce might rise. I find this to be especially hollow and unconvincing, because we know what life was like when those items were more expensive, and it certainly wasn't that bad.

If the upshot of making industrial-agricultural jobs back into unionized, market-rate-for-legal-workers (on other words, on par with other hot/dirty/dangerous tasks), jobs, is that I have to dig out my grandmother's recipes for cube steak instead of sirloin, or cookies with shortening instead of butter, it seems a small price to pay, and I have a lot of sideeye for the idea that it's just too much of a collective sacrifice to make. And for better or worse, the amount of processed food we eat today makes those sort of input substitutions even easier.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:53 PM on December 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

it seems a small price to pay, and I have a lot of sideeye for the idea that it's just too much of a collective sacrifice to make.

The furor against Michelle Obama's attempt at encouraging healthy eating whos that it's less seen as a sacrifice, but more as a nefarious liberal encroachment on, I guess, "dietary freedom". Ron Swanson puts it another way.
posted by FJT at 2:19 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Modern Americans eat a lot more meat than many of their ancestors

This wasn’t very long ago, either: my grandfather still recounts how when he was growing up they had beef once or twice a YEAR when a relative slaughtered old dairy cows. His mother had chickens but they were for eggs, not eating regularly.

Even in my parents’ generation meat definitely wasn’t a multiple meals a day kind of thing, either.
posted by adamsc at 2:56 PM on December 28, 2017

I suppose plants are switching over to immigrants because their abuse of the intellectually disabled has been exposed and halted.
posted by epj at 3:27 PM on December 28, 2017

Humans have had slavery for a long time, too. Doesn't mean that we can't fight against it. Humans are the only animal who chose their diet and we can start making choices based on ethics and nutrition rather than convenience and taste.

I probably misunderstood your use of the term en masse, then. Yes, I agree we can and should make choices that diminish overall meat consumption to the ultimate point that it might eventually be seen as either an untenable economic choice or even a cultural taboo, at least in the developed countries where people have food options.

There are promising developments in substitute meats mentioned above. If they ever become truly developed in taste and texture, and cost competitive, that’s probably the biggest game changer I see on the immediate horizon.

(Disclaimer: I eat meat, but for a variety of personal reasons I’ve reduced it to once or twice a week. So, somewhat less than 1/10th of the average per capita meat consumption in the US. But I fear this may be derailing into a veganism discussion, so I’ll leave it at that.)
posted by darkstar at 3:39 PM on December 28, 2017

Related: Can Low-Wage Industries Survive Without Immigrants and Refugees?

“Just as technology firms and hospitals have come to rely on high-skilled immigrants secured through visa programs, low-wage industries depend heavily on migrants from the world’s hotspots, secured through refugee programs as well as other means. That reliance has prompted some of the nation’s meatpackers to fear that under Trump the global marketplace may shut down, resulting in labor shortages that, they say, will drive up prices and reduce food supplies. “A legal immigration system that works is the best way to address illegal immigration,” Cargill chief executive David MacLennan wrote recently. “We must not close our minds or our borders.”

Poultry and meatpacking companies have long drawn labor from the bottom rung of society. Jurgis Rudkus, the hero of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was a new Lithuanian immigrant. As processing plants moved out of union-heavy cities closer to farms, they relied on poor, rural whites and, after the country desegregated, African Americans. By 2006, 46 percent of meat and poultry processing workers were Hispanic. In recent years, slaughterhouses have turned to refugees, from Bosnians in Iowa to Somalis in Kansas. Tyson Foods is based in Springdale, Arkansas, which has become home to thousands from the Marshall Islands who hold special status because of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.”

posted by Fizz at 4:24 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

From the US, salmon and crab is sent to China for labor intensive deboning or deshelling before making its way back to the US. The owner of Trident cites that the deboning work gets done for 20 cents per pound in China versus $1 per pound in the US, and that transport costs are only 20 cents per pound.

In Australia, we send scallops to Thailand to be shucked then bring them back into the country. It's not just dirty work, it's also a problem of seasonality - one processor reports that a skilled scallop splitter can earn $320 per day but his factory mostly sends scallops to Thailand to be opened then shipped back to Australia, because even at $320 per day no one wants to do the work.
posted by xdvesper at 7:49 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

even at $320 per day no one wants to do the work.

Presumably there's something that makes the job a really bad deal that's not obvious. I mean, given two explanations: (1) that everyone in the entire labor pool has suddenly decided that they're just too special to do a particular job for completely arbitrary reasons, or (2) that after looking into the job, workers reasonably aren't willing to do it for the compensation offered, because of something non-obvious about the job making the compensation insufficient... the second one seems far more likely to be the case.

The people who push the first explanation ("___ans just won't do ___!") are almost always industry apologists or spokespeople trying to justify why they need a more-slack labor market or defend compensation that's below what the market demands.

I'm admittedly not an expert on the Australian labor market, but given that it's an industrialized country, it's safe to assume it has many of the vaguely-horrific-but-fairly-compensated jobs that other industrial economies do. If you can get people to do confined-space tank inspection or work on offshore oil rigs or fell trees in swampland (and I kinda figure Australia probably has a range of horrific jobs that don't exist in the US, probably dealing with venomous creatures of unusual size), but those same people "just won't do" some other job, it's probably that the job is perceived to be a crap deal. Plenty of people in the legitimate labor market do physically or emotionally unpleasant or taxing, dirty, dangerous, or just gross jobs all the time; the chances of accidentally stumbling on a job that's just a step too far for an entire labor market to perform at any price seems ... beyond dubious.

It could be that "$320/day" actually implies not $40/hr over an 8-hour day, but $16/hr over a 20-hour day, or something similarly ridiculous. (I've seen piecework jobs in the US advertised like this, although it's illegal.) Or maybe that's what you can make after years of practice, but not immediately, and someone weighing the opportunity cost of learning the skill might reasonably decide that their time is better spent learning something with more upward mobility. There are any number of ways in which the deal might not be as good as it appears. If workers are categorically refusing to take a job, except when they have no other options, it's a screaming indicator that something is really off with the job, and that market signal should be given far more weight than an employer's claim that they're offering a fair wage. If nobody is willing to take the job, they are by definition underpaying.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:57 PM on December 28, 2017 [14 favorites]

Technically immigrants on work visas aren't supposed to cover sponsorship fees. However, I've met enough people who were strong-armed into paying their own fees (even for supposedly "higher-class" jobs) that I won't be surprised if the cost ended up being transferred to the worker anyhow. Hell, I got suggested to do that by friends who wouldn't understand why I wouldn't do literally anything to stay in the US. (I wanted to, but I didn't want to do something that was actually illegal, and also it's not like I have that kind of money!!!)
posted by divabat at 10:36 PM on December 28, 2017

I think the "seasonality" I mentioned might explain that - the scallops job is only for 6 months in a year, after which you have to survive on other odd jobs for the other six months - not a way to build a career.

Anyway, $40 an hour isn't that crazy in Australia for odd work, and I can see why people would turn it down. I did weekend and holiday shifts at the supermarket for $33 an hour. My friend did morning load / unload of goods at the market at 4am for $40 per hour, 2 hours a day.

I think the issue is that of you want to do scallops for 6 months a year you're pretty much saying you're going to do scallops the rest of your life, with how accessible higher education is in Australia people would rather build a career in something else.
posted by xdvesper at 10:52 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

adamsc: This wasn’t very long ago, either: my grandfather still recounts how when he was growing up they had beef once or twice a YEAR when a relative slaughtered old dairy cows. His mother had chickens but they were for eggs, not eating regularly.

So, why does America (seem to) have an underdeveloped vegetarian cuisine? When I lived there in the Midwest, my outside choices for veg were Indian restaurants or pizza with veg toppings or ... can't think of others, right now.
posted by Gyan at 11:39 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Just because they weren't eating slabs of meat for the most part (though my maternal grandparents seemed to eat it often enough aside from the worst years of the depression in their description) doesn't mean they weren't eating animal flesh or otherwise using animal products on the regular.
posted by wierdo at 9:39 AM on December 29, 2017 [5 favorites]