Share
The $1.5 million settlement announced this week between prosecutors and a major Carolinas poultry producer may well teach the company a needed lesson - but isn't there a bigger problem?
The deal lets two indicted managers at the House of Raeford's Greenville, S.C., plant avoid criminal convictions. After a huge immigration raid last year, the N.C-based company was charged with intentionally hiring illegal immigrants. More than 20 Latino supervisors served jail time. The raid took place after a 2008 Observer investigation found unsafe conditions and a high number of undocumented workers at Carolinas poultry plants.
Obviously, it's a good idea to enforce federal immigration law. But the biggest poultry plant problem isn't illegal immigrants. It's how all the workers were treated - and the continuing lack of enforcement and punishment for companies that flout laws and endanger workers.
Observer reporters found workers were being maimed by machines and poisoned with toxic chemicals - yet the House of Raeford wasn't reporting injuries as required by law. Injured workers were sent from the doctor's office right back to the plant. Child labor laws were broken. Some injured workers, or those who sought worker's compensation, were fired.
Current and former supervisors told reporters the plants preferred undocumented workers because they were less likely to question working conditions. One former poultry plant supervisor told reporters a manager had specifically told her in 2001 to stop hiring African Americans in favor of Latinos.
Other than federal immigration raids, though, there's been little worker safety enforcement at the poultry plants by the two states' labor departments. The N.C. labor department did cite a House of Raeford plant in Teachey, N.C., for 49 serious violations and issued $178,000 in fines, but the case hasn't been resolved.
Yet immigration enforcement may, inadvertently, help improve worker safety.
After the immigration raid, House of Raeford began hiring more Americans. The result? Earlier this year, 10 current and former workers sued, saying they weren't being paid for the hours they worked. (The company denies it.) In Bladen County, after immigration raids at a Smithfield Foods pork plant led to more African American workers, the workers voted to unionize.
Carolinas poultry workers deserve stronger protections on the job. And immigration raids alone aren't going to solve that problem.
