by Ted Genoways
Under the newly inaugurated Obama administration, ICE was shifting away from such large-scale work-site raids and the rounding up of undocumented workers for deportation. New policy focused instead on conducting payroll audits, nicknamed “desktop raids,” in which the agency compared an employer’s I-9 files to the Social Security database and notified the company each time they turned up a conflicting record, known as a “no-match.” Under the law, employers were then allowed thirty days to either correct the paperwork in cases of clerical error or terminate the employee. If a company chose not to address the problem or missed the deadline, it faced a fine. The objective of this new policy was to shift the risk of illegal hiring practices away from immigrants seeking employment and onto the companies that had been relying on them for cheap labor. But activists on both sides of the issue complained that minimal fines and protecting the identities of violators effectively allowed companies to continue breaking the law without the worry of either public backlash or serious financial consequences from a plant shutdown.
But the quiet, under-the-radar ICE actions carried out in Minnesota in 2009 touched off a series of events that unexpectedly shifted the balance of power at one of Hormel’s subsidiaries. According to sources within the UFCW locals, the agency conducted an I-9 audit at QPP and its sister company Albert Lea Select Foods and returned roughly six hundred no-matches. ICE won’t say what finally spurred the audits or even confirm that they occurred, but union leaders told me that ICE launched the investigation after a rash of criminal cases in which the accused were found to be QPP employees working under false identities. According to official reports, Austin police made thirty-two arrests for aggravated forgery involving QPP workers and several more involving Select Foods employees between March and September 2009. Patrick Neilon, the president of Local 6 in Albert Lea, told me that one of those arrested was a woman employed in Human Resources at Select Foods. According to rumor, she had struck a deal to avoid deportation, agreeing to reveal all she knew about the immigration status of the workforce at Select Foods and QPP.
With inside information now available to them, ICE was able to squeeze Kelly Wadding, the CEO of both companies. They instructed Wadding to reduce his undocumented workforce at each plant by three hundred employees. Neilon said the management team at Select Foods, in particular, had no choice but to embrace the recommendation of the audit. The numbers were simply too overwhelming to dispute and too conspicuous to plead ignorance. “To be realistic,” Neilon said, “they had to have known that the majority of their workers weren’t properly documented.” And ignoring that volume of no-match letters would risk a large-scale enforcement action. A one-day raid, with exits sealed and workers hauled away in handcuffs, would have crippled the company. “They would have had to shut down production,” Neilon explained. “If they would have lost three hundred and some employees at once, they couldn’t run.” The bad publicity on top of the shutdown might have been enough to sink Select Foods.
Wadding accepted the deal. However, to avoid production problems or potential line injuries resulting from hiring so many inexperienced workers all at once, investigators allowed Wadding some leeway: he would have six months to slowly turn over his two workforces, and there would be no publicity surrounding the audit. But if, at the end of the allotted time, records indicated that QPP and Select Foods were still relying on undocumented labor, then the CEO could expect steep fines and high-profile raids at both plants. Wadding agreed to the timeline.
But, at the same time, someone within Wadding’s management team was negotiating a different kind of deal—one with the Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM), a St. Paul–based nonprofit tasked with finding homes and jobs for ethnic Karen refugees from Burma and Thailand. If KOM would supply proof that the immigrants they served had legal green cards obtained under political asylum laws allowing them to work in the United States, then QPP and Select Foods would provide them with cut-and-kill jobs in Austin and packing jobs in Albert Lea. The plan, in short, was the wholesale replacement of undocumented Hispanic workers with Karen political refugees.
Albert Lea was founded on meatpacking. Even before the community’s formal incorporation as a city, East Front Street had a butcher shop—which, appropriately, was opened and operated by a pair of recent immigrants. Brothers Axel and Charles Brundin were new arrivals from Sweden and still teenagers when they started the Brundin Meat Market in the 1870s. By the turn of the century, the population of Albert Lea had more than doubled, and the Brundin brothers’ need for a steady supply of fresh meat had grown with it, enough so that they built their own packinghouse. They slaughtered and prepared hogs at that facility on a corner of Main Street until 1912, when they built an enormous pork processing plant on the banks of the Shell Rock River on the eastern edge of town. The Albert Lea Packing Company was grand and modern enough to rival George A. Hormel’s plant on the Cedar River in nearby Austin, but the Brundins soon fell on hard times and shuttered the plant just two years after opening it.
But the facility didn’t sit idle for long. It was briefly reopened by a division of Schwarzschild & Sulzberger before being bought up by the heirs to J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Sr. These new owners selected Thomas E. Wilson to head their packing venture and called the company Wilson & Company in his honor. From the start, Wilson was the very opposite of the Hormel family in Austin. Where George Hormel and later his son, Jay, had begun their lives as butchers and sought to keep the peace between workers and management, Wilson was a Chicago aristocrat and a throwback to Gilded Age industrialists—an iron-fisted, top-down manager and unapologetic union buster. In 1935, Wilson went so far as to set up a company-run union to compete with United Packinghouse Workers of America Local 6, until the newly formed National Labor Relations Board shut down his union as a violation of the Wagner Act.
Wilson’s successor was no better. James A. Cooney, a former federal district judge from Iowa, had served as the company attorney and vice president for labor relations since 1926, and he seemed to delight in trying to intimidate the labor force at Wilson & Company. Cheri Register, whose father worked at the plant, later remembered that in the minds of union members, Cooney was “a Wild West robber baron who maintained a terroristic control over our town.” When the union demanded better working conditions, he threatened to move the plant to the South, where there was less union sentiment. And without Wilson & Company, he told the Chamber of Commerce, the city would see grass grow down the middle of Broadway. With that threat forever looming, Cooney made more and more demands of the city and his workers.
Finally, in 1959, members of Local 6, disgruntled over company-mandated overtime, staged a sit-down strike, which soon turned into a full-scale, 109-day walkout. When the company finally resorted to recruiting scab workers to reopen the plant, the pickets erupted into street violence with strikers hurling rocks at replacement workers and smashing out the windshields of their cars. Governor Orville Freeman closed down the plant and called out the Minnesota National Guard to establish martial law. Eventually, a judge declared Freeman’s move unconstitutional, but by then the leadership of Local 6 had negotiated improved terms for their members. The strikers had won.
It was a defining moment for a community that had always regarded itself as a second city to Austin. At last they had a labor victory to match the hard-nosed tactics of Frank Ellis and the Winkels brothers in 1933, and the modern brickwork of Wilson & Company became a symbol of labor strength in Albert Lea. In fact, the plant became so foundational to life in the community that nothing seemed to shake its central place. Even when Wilson Foods filed for bankruptcy in 1983, nullifying the union contract and reducing workers’ pay from $10.69 an hour to $6.50, the community took pride in having averted a shutdown. Even when Wilson sold the plant to Farmstead, and Farmstead sold to the Seaboard Corporation, and Seaboard sold to Farmland Industries, the plant stood as a monument to how Albert Lea had weathered hard times and held on to its meatpacking heritage. And by 2001, bus
iness at the aging plant had picked up enough that Farmland had ordered the facility renovated and expanded.
But then, the unthinkable occurred. On July 8, a team of contractors switched off the main sprinkler system, in order to cut through existing pipes in the plant ceiling and connect them to new pipe for the plant addition. At the end of the shift, unknown to the workers, sparks from the cutting torch had fallen into a pile of cardboard boxes and started a small fire. The workers left without turning the sprinklers back on, and the flames grew undeterred and undetected inside the vacant plant. Soon, someone outside spotted smoke billowing from the roof, but by then it was too late. The fire burned all through the night and well into the next day, engulfing and eventually consuming the iconic plant. Firefighters were still on the scene putting out hotspots in the rubble as five hundred workers lined up outside the Albert Lea Union Center on July 10 to formally apply for unemployment.
Less than a year later, Farmland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold its remaining hog operations to Smithfield Foods. The ruins of the old Wilson & Company plant, once the symbol of the city’s economic might, were demolished, leaving an enormous empty lot in the center of town. Albert Lea struggled for years after that. Jean Eaton, the mayor at the time, admitted that it was a hard stretch for the city—with still more setbacks to follow. Local officials made overtures to the Ford Motor Company and Premium Pork and Winnebago Industries, but every time the deal fell through. “We felt like the big losers,” Eaton said, “and it was a very depressing time for many of us in Albert Lea.” But then Governor Tim Pawlenty launched the Job Opportunity Building Zone (JOBZ) initiative, a program through the Minnesota Department of Revenue that offered businesses twelve years of tax-free operation in return for moving into struggling communities like Albert Lea.
The tax break attracted the attention of Hormel and Kelly Wadding at QPP. Wadding soon announced that Hormel would be building a fifty-thousand-square-foot pork deboning and packaging facility on eleven acres in the Northaire Industrial Park, at an estimated cost of more than $5 million. As with QPP in Austin, Hormel would own the property and the plant, would pay for construction, and would provide all of the raw materials and buy all of the processed meat exclusively, but the business would technically belong to Wadding and would operate under the name Albert Lea Select Foods. Wadding touted the project as a show of support for the community where he had gone to high school and gotten his first job on the floor of what was then the Farmstead packing plant. “We looked at a lot of sites,” Wadding told Minnesota Public Radio, “and decided on Albert Lea.”
For the hundreds of out-of-work meatpackers still in town, the arrival of Hormel seemed like a godsend. They assumed that the company had chosen Albert Lea as the site for Select Foods in order to take advantage of the town’s experienced meatpackers, but just the opposite was true. “We had an available workforce here locally,” said Patrick Neilon at Local 6. “But they hired very, very few of them—very few. And there was a reason for that.”
Kelly Wadding rises before the sun and arrives at QPP each morning by six o’clock. Every day, he reviews reports of the previous day’s productivity and problems, before touring the plant with the vice president of operations and the plant manager. Then he drives to Albert Lea, where he repeats those rounds with the plant manager at Select Foods. Finally, each afternoon, he heads back to Austin to conduct meetings and troubleshoot any bigger problems. It’s rare that he leaves before four o’clock. Patrick Neilon at Local 6 told me that he respects Wadding’s work ethic. “He started out working on the floor,” Neilon said, “just like the rest of us.”
After Wadding and Neilon graduated from Albert Lea Senior High School, Neilon stayed and worked in the Farmstead plant; Wadding started out at Farmstead, too, but bounced around, getting management training. He worked at Wilson Foods in Oklahoma City, Iowa Pork Industries in South St. Paul, and John Morrell & Company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In July 1993, Richard Knight, who had formed QPP a few years earlier, hired Wadding as general manager. When Knight retired Wadding bought him out. For a decade after that, Wadding continued to run QPP more or less as he’d found it, but when the USDA finally approved implementation of the HIMP reduced inspection model in 2002, granting QPP the opportunity to dramatically increase its chain speed, the company decided it was time for an expansion and reconfiguration.
Hogs would continue to be slaughtered and butchered at QPP, but to keep pace with the increased speed of the line, certain cuts—loins, picnic roasts, and ribs—would be trucked down Interstate 90 to Albert Lea, where they would be deboned and packaged for Hormel co-brands like Famous Dave’s and Lloyd’s Barbeque. Hormel chose to outsource these jobs partly because they were labor-intensive but also because sending these cuts to Albert Lea took the processing out of the reach of Local 9 in Austin and allowed QPP to claim that Select Foods (despite its identical management team to QPP) was a separate company—and, therefore, not subject to the union contract shared by Hormel and QPP workers.
Because workers at Select Foods opened with a lower wage than union workers just twenty miles away, the plant attracted an even higher percentage of undocumented workers than QPP. And the large number of undocumented workers, in turn, made it difficult to unionize the workforce and demand better pay. Neilon tried to organize the shop in 2006 and again in 2008, but both times the votes fell just short. He said that executives at Select Foods had scared the workforce out of choosing to join the union: “With a wink and nod—we’re not going to come right out and say it—but we’re going to make you think that if you organize you’re apt to get deported.”
After the second failed organizing effort, Wadding seems to have guessed that the plant was never going to go union. To take advantage of this cheap labor and the tax-free operations offered by the state, Hormel shifted a greater portion of its processing to Select Foods and, just three years after opening, paid for a $1.5 million expansion, including new lunchrooms, locker rooms, and office space. The workforce too had grown—from 75 employees in 2006 to nearly 500 by 2008. But then in 2009, there was that rash of aggravated forgery cases, and stories in the local press were beginning to make note of the fact that almost every case involved either QPP or Select Foods.
Austin detective Travis Heickley didn’t believe that Wadding was as innocent and helpless as he claimed. The detective told the local newspaper that QPP had caught the attention of higher-ups at ICE. “They see the problem. They’re interested,” he said. The city couldn’t have a rash of arrests like this “without getting the attention of someone, somewhere.” Soon ICE agents contacted Kelly Wadding instructing him to reduce the number of undocumented workers on his payroll or face the prospect of a full-blown raid.
The Karen (pronounced Ka-REN) are an ethnic minority from the mountainous eastern border region between Burma and Thailand. First converted to Christianity by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society in the early nineteenth century, the Karen rose to prominence when Burma was annexed as a province of British India in 1886, after the Anglo-Burmese wars. During World War II, when the Japanese occupied Burma, violence broke out between ethnic Burmese and the Karen people, leading the Karen to aid British efforts at retaking the country. After the war, however, when the British ceded control of Burma, they failed to make good on wartime promises to help the Karen obtain their own sovereign state. The newly formed Burmese-led government officially took power in January 1948 and instituted a policy of removing Karen from positions of power, in favor of Burmese nationalists. Many Karen fled into Thailand and joined a cross-border insurgency that, officially, has never ended.
By 2005, however, the ranks of the Karen National Liberation Army were estimated to be fewer than 4,000, while the refugee population of massive camps, such as Mae La in Thailand, had swelled to more than 50,000. When the UN Committee on the Prevention of Genocide launched an investigation into allegations of massacres, widespread rape, the conscription of child soldiers, and attacks on civi
lian encampments, the U.S. government officially permitted the emigration of registered refugees from the nine camps along the border with Thailand, sparking a wave of resettlement. The Minnesota Council of Churches Refugee Services in the Twin Cities, which had already taken an active role in resettling Hmong displaced by the Vietnam War and Somalis fleeing their country’s long civil war, now led the effort at recruiting the Karen to St. Paul. That same year, already established members of the Karen community in St. Paul began training with Vietnamese Social Services in order to learn how to navigate American governmental bureaucracy and obtain health care, public housing, and employment for the incoming surge of Karen immigrants.
The Karen Organization of Minnesota was officially formed in 2009, just months before Kelly Wadding was in sudden need of a new workforce at QPP and Select Foods. The companies made an attractive offer to KOM: if the organization would simply provide proof of green cards, QPP and Select Foods would provide jobs. In the end, Select Foods filled nearly 250 of its new 300 vacancies in Albert Lea with Karen workers. Patrick Neilon told me that Wadding thought he had found the perfect replacement workforce. “He knew they were going to be documented correctly,” Neilon said, “but because they didn’t speak the language and didn’t understand the culture, they would still be less likely to organize.”