The Chain

by Ted Genoways

  Neilon broke into a wide smile.

  “You know, I grew up with Kelly. He’s actually a good guy, and I think he’s a smart guy. But in this case, he guessed wrong.”

  Among the new workers on third shift, packing ribs from eleven at night until seven in the morning, was a young man named Tha Wah. He had grown up just across the Burmese border in a part of the Mae La refugee camp run by Baptist missionaries. Eventually, with the help of church donations, he attended university in Thailand and received a degree in philosophy. When the UN High Commissioner for Refugees declared the situation in Burma an official humanitarian crisis, Tha Wah went through the formal emigration process and was sent to live in Maine. But the tiny Karen population in Maine left him feeling isolated and lonely; then he heard through friends that a large group of Karen had settled in Minnesota.

  When I first met Tha Wah, at a meeting arranged by Patrick Neilon in the offices of Local 6, snow was swirling outside. Diminutive and fine-boned, Tha Wah was a striking contrast to the immigrants from Eastern Europe favored by the packinghouses a century ago. But he trudged in from the snow in nothing more than a union sweatshirt and smiled warmly as he yanked off his stocking cap, sending up a wild shock of staticky hair. His English was better than I had been led to expect—though Tha Wah seems always to speak, at least in English, in a hesitant cadence and so near to a whisper that I had to lean close to hear him. “In 2009, December eleven, I came with the Karen organization, and then we applied job,” he told me. “The government announced that the company need to accept only those who have legal papers. Then most other employees are Spanish, but because they’re illegal, they had to quit. They hire Karen, more and more.”

  Tha Wah was put to work on the rib line, trimming rib plates after the pork chops had been removed. “Some coworkers told me, ‘Oh, rib line is easy,’” he remembered with a smile. It wasn’t true. The line ran so fast and the workstations were packed so close together that the ribs sometimes piled up and line workers knocked into each other as they tossed trimmed rib plates into large bins behind them. “I don’t want to mention, but they treat us not good,” Tha Wah said. “They push us.” He said his hands were too small to handle the straight knife he was given and the automatic sharpeners never yielded a well-honed edge. So he started using his own knife and learned to use a conventional sharpening hone. When he had mastered the knife, he taught his fellow Karen on the line “how to sharpen the knife with the machine,” he said, “how to use our own technique.” The work started to go better, and Tha Wah pressed the plant management to ask Karen workers at other stations what they needed to do their jobs, rather than simply shouting at them to work faster.

  Soon, Tha Wah’s coworkers came to regard him as a leader, and word filtered back to Patrick Neilon that the new workforce might follow him, if the union could convince him to organize a third union campaign. When they met, Neilon found that Tha Wah was eager to secure better pay for Karen workers, in hopes of bringing family members to the United States, and he spoke enough English to translate for union organizers. Best of all, Tha Wah explained that the Karen people are communal by nature. “The people, they’re like a brotherhood. Karen culture is when we are friends, we look out for each other, we trust, and we keep like a relative. We call friends ‘brother,’ ‘sister.’” He promised to explain to his coworkers that they needed to join with “the brother Spanish.”

  Over the course of 2010, as more and more Karen joined the Select Foods workforce, Tha Wah visited their homes with union officials, organized events in St. Paul, and worked with a translator named Keh Moo, brought in by the UFCW leadership in Washington, D.C., to produce union brochures and fliers in Karen.

  On January 31, 2011, Local 6 filed a notice with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of its intention to hold a vote to unionize Select Foods.

  All day long on March 11, before and after all three shifts, workers filed into the orientation room at the plant to vote. Finally, at 6 a.m. on March 12, after all workers had been allowed the chance to vote and the morning shift began, a representative from UFCW Local 9 in Austin began tallying the results. As each ballot was read, he marked it down. The lead seesawed between yeses and nos, and it became clear that the vote was going to be very close. At one point, Keh Moo looked down and noticed that the union rep’s fingers were trembling. “His hand was shaking when he was writing the numbers,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Brother, are you okay?’” In the end, the 215 pro-union votes narrowly edged out the 206 votes for no union, but everyone was still quiet. Keh Moo was confused. “Did we win?” she demanded. The union rep told her, “Yes,” but almost too quietly to be heard. He knew that any celebration would be short-lived.

  Less than a week later, Select Foods attorneys filed suit, alleging that the union had duped the non-English-speaking workforce into returning pro-union ballots by buying them off with gifts of clothing. The suit alleged that 40 percent of the workforce was now Karen, but “one-third to one-half of Karen-speaking employees do not have functional reading or writing skills in Karen. Almost none of the Karen employees can understand spoken or written English.” They had voted in favor of the union, they said, because the workers had been bribed with free UFCW sweatshirts and stocking caps—like the ones Tha Wah had been wearing when I first met him.

  When I spoke to Patrick Neilon about the allegations, more than a year had passed, but he was still palpably upset. “It made it sound like the Karen people didn’t have a brain, couldn’t think,” he said. Besides, if the company was so concerned about the workers’ lack of English-language skills and their general illiteracy, why had they fought union efforts to offer ESL classes at the plant, and why did Select Foods hold their own closed-door meetings with employees and distribute English-language literature against the union?

  What angered Neilon most of all was the additional allegation that the twenty-eight workers who had chosen not to vote had been intimidated by the union. “Before Tha Wah came and before Keh Moo was here, I knew where Burma was on the globe, but I had no idea about the country,” he told me. He leaned forward in his office chair, propping his elbows on his desk. His voice had turned soft, introspective. “You start doing a little research into their history and what happened after World War II, how they were killed and imprisoned and had to flee to Thailand. The struggles they went through, none of us can imagine.” The idea that anyone could go through all of that, could brave a trip across the Pacific to a new country and take hard, dangerous jobs in a meatpacking plant, but then allow themselves to be intimidated into voting a certain way was more than preposterous to Neilon; it was insulting. “Man,” he said, “how they portrayed their employees, their own people, was pretty bad.”

  The charges would touch off months of legal motions, but in reality it was merely a last-ditch delay tactic. The NLRB eventually denied all of the company’s claims. In August 2011, Select Foods became the first offshoot of Hormel to successfully organize in more than twenty-five years—and, by the end of the year, the workers had negotiated a new contract with increased wages. The deal provided for wage increases of $2.15 over the course of the contract, which expires in 2018. In addition to the pay raises, Select Foods workers now have the option of joining a company-sponsored health plan, and workers specifically negotiated contract language, which provided for the plant to join the UFCW Local 6, in order to have national backing.

  The battle had been long and sometimes bitter, but Neilon still gave Wadding a lot of credit for how he handled defeat. “Once their final appeal was disallowed and we got the final certification, the company came around,” he said. “I’ve known Kelly since we were kids. We go way, way, way, way, way back. Kelly is basically a good guy. I tell you what, when he gives you his word on something, you can take it to the bank. It took a while to get the contract done, but whenever they committed to something, they stuck with it. After we got the contract signed, sealed, and delivered, and got everybody on board, they’ve been really g
ood to deal with. Kelly always says, ‘With the union and the company, it’s a marriage. It may have been a shotgun marriage, but it’s still a marriage.’”

  After I left the union offices in Albert Lea, I drove back to Austin. I called several former QPP workers, but their numbers were all disconnected. I went to their homes and was greeted by unfamiliar faces at the door. Evening was coming on, so I went to Queen of Angels Church, where the Friday night Spanish mass was already in swing. Often, in the past, when I was having trouble contacting Emiliano Ballesta or Matthew Garcia, I could find them there, as they shuffled out of the sanctuary. But that night, I didn’t recognize anyone leaving the service, and the pews were noticeably emptier than the last time I had visited. Just when I was about to give up, Walter Schwartz, the translator who had run the driving service for sick workers, spotted me near the door. He pulled me aside, letting the congregation continue to pass.

  “What brings you back here?” he asked. Schwartz is tall and lean and exudes a welcoming air. Driving as much as he does, he has been stopped countless times by the Austin police, and he told me once that their eyes always light up when they see his Germanic name. They don’t know that there were as many German immigrants in his native Colombia as there were in the American Midwest. Rather than turning bitter over having to repeatedly explain himself, he seemed to delight in enlightening the police.

  I told Schwartz I was trying to find any of the workers with PIN. I knew where to find Pablo Ruiz, but I had come up empty with everyone else. I listed off the names, one by one, and each time he shook his head: gone, he said—most of them returned home to Mexico to be with family. Of everyone I mentioned, only Emiliano Ballesta’s son, who had also translated for me, was still in Minnesota, but he was in prison. When someone who owed him money refused to pay up, he had gone to his home and taken his television; he had been convicted of burglary.

  Schwartz told me that so many Hispanic immigrants had left Austin that he could no longer make a living driving people around town. Now he drove people from Minnesota back to Mexico. When I asked if these were all people who had been displaced by the ICE desktop raid, he said he didn’t know. But he was quick to point out that nearly two hundred unauthorized immigrants in Austin had been charged with aggravated forgery in 2009 and 2010, and many people had decided that they didn’t want to risk having their families hopelessly separated.

  Even among those who decided to stay in the United States, many had still chosen to move on to other parts of the country. With the increased scrutiny on QPP, jobs were harder to come by, and life in Austin had just grown too hard. One group had gone to Arcadia, Wisconsin, to work in the Ashley Furniture plant. Another group had gone, ironically, to Postville, Iowa, where the Agriprocessors raid had occurred barely four years earlier. And a final group had gone to St. Joseph, Missouri. A consortium of hog producers from Minnesota and Iowa had recently opened a plant there under the name Triumph Foods. Back before Select Foods went up in Albert Lea, Triumph had considered building their plant there, but management decided to construct their mega-facility—one of the largest in the United States—in Missouri instead. They were concerned about Albert Lea’s support for workers and their history of successfully organizing into unions.

  Part Five

  Chapter 13

  A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH

  Before I could even set foot outside my truck and onto the gravel surrounding the New Fashion Pork hog confinement facility, Emily Erickson, the company’s animal well-being and quality assurance manager, was at my door, handing me a pair of stretchy white plastic footies to put over my shoes. It was a blustery day in September 2013—the sky threatening snow, the slate-gray blanket of overhanging clouds betraying the first hint of winter, when cold, dry air stabilizes viruses and biosecurity becomes a topmost concern. With recent outbreaks of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) devastating herds across the Midwest, Erickson didn’t want to take any chances. I had to put on footies, and then additional layers of bioprotective clothing, if I wanted to be allowed anywhere near New Fashion’s pigs.

  And the company couldn’t spare a single animal. Hormel, the buyer for all of New Fashion’s gilt hogs inside that particular confinement outside Jackson, Minnesota, would soon post record profits, up 18 percent for 2013, on the strength of export sales of Spam to Asian markets and the expansion of their corporate operations in China. But Jim Snee, Hormel’s head of international sales, announced that the company was making an even greater push, to firmly establish Spam in Chinese grocery stores before products from competitor Smithfield Foods, purchased by Shuanghui International (now WH Group) that June, could elbow them out. As a major supplier to Hormel’s Spam plants in Minnesota and Nebraska, New Fashion Pork was racing just to keep pace with demand. The last thing they could afford, Erickson told me, was an outbreak.

  To me, the hog industry’s vigilance against external pathogens seemed strangely at odds with their out-of-hand dismissals of concerns about their facilities’ effects on human health. Large producers like New Fashion insist that the enormous, concrete-reinforced waste pits under each confinement—many with a capacity of 300,000 gallons—effectively prevent contaminants from leaching into the surrounding soil. They repeatedly assure the public that the waste is carefully managed by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) under a series of laws aimed at accounting for all manure at all times. But everyone at New Fashion was also aware of the mounting research suggesting that an unprecedented boom in Iowa’s hog industry has created a glut of manure—and, with it, heightened concerns about the antibiotics, bacteria, and nitrates that the waste, when spread as fertilizer, was releasing into the air, water, and soil.

  These growing doubts about the safety of concentrated animal feeding operations were stoking public outcry in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, where most of New Fashion’s confinements have been built, and causing hog producers, especially within the Hormel supply chain, to clamp down into total media silence. So I was surprised when Brad Freking, the CEO of New Fashion Pork, agreed to allow me to tour one of his facilities with his animal well-being manager as my guide—and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure the visit would actually happen until Erickson led me into the changing room. I zipped into some navy coveralls and slid a pair of clear plastic boots over a second set of footies. Erickson turned the handle to the barn entrance, opening the heavy steel door a crack. The sound of squealing hogs spilled into the room. “If you’ve never been inside,” she warned, her voice rising to be heard, “it’s a lot of pig, it’s a lot of metal, it’s a lot of noise.” I assured her I was ready, and we headed inside.

  Erickson was right: it was a lot of pig. Under the yellow light of a series of bulbs suspended from the wind-rattled roof, a thousand hogs, divided according to size and approximate age, jostled and jockeyed in large holding pens. Their wet snouts pressed through the metal gates, snuffling and grunting curiously, but the hogs scrambled away as Erickson led me down the side aisle. Some, in fits of momentary panic, let out high shrieks, which echoed off the steel ceiling, setting off cascades of squeals and scattering their pen-mates.

  But more than sight or sound, what hit me was the smell—hovering close to the smell of bacon, then veering suddenly into the unmistakable stench of shit. The hogs bolted and reconvened as we walked, their hooves clicking anxiously on the slotted wooden floors; their waste, some still fresh and moist, was spread on the floor and smeared over their haunches and feet, slowly working its way down through the slats into the enormous underground pit. Still more waste had dried and turned powdery, a choking haze swirling in the dim light. And it carried with it a hot, fleshy stink—not just a smell but an astringent, chemical burn. It sears so deeply into your nostrils that it seems terrifyingly foreign and uncannily familiar all at once, as if your senses are somehow living the smell and the memory of the smell at the same time. On the back wall, giant fans did their best to vent the gases that ros
e from the pit below us.

  It was hard not to be awed by the sheer scale and ruthless efficiency of the operation. By the time these pigs had reached this finishing barn, they had been through almost the entire modern hog-farming process: conceived via artificial insemination in sows held in gestation crates; transferred briefly to farrowing crates for milk-feeding; then, at three weeks old, trucked to this wean-to-finish operation, where they had been raised on genetically modified corn and soybeans delivered by automatic feeders. And when those young pigs eventually hit target weight, at about three months old, they were scheduled to be trucked to slaughter at the Hormel plant in Austin. Every part of the system, from temperature and amount of light to time and quantity of feed, was plotted on a rigid schedule and so completely computerized and mechanized that all three thousands hogs, held in the three connected barns, were overseen by a single manager, who checked on the hogs just twice a day.

  Despite what industry advocates say, none of this is the traditional way of things. As recently as the 1950s, the process from birth to slaughter would have been much more time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the quick communicability of hog illnesses would have made trying to raise so many animals in such close confinement a disaster. All of which is why hogs were customarily raised in small groups with plenty of room to move, in lean-to shelters exposed to the elements—to let hogs forage and to let the winter’s cold naturally kill off many bacterial illnesses. But this modern method of raising hogs is the farthest thing from natural; in fact, it is only made possible by massive amounts of antibiotics—used to prevent illness, to promote growth, and to increase fertility in ever increasing dosages as bacteria develop resistance and mutate into new, stronger strains. Many medical researchers and public health advocates now caution that the widespread use of antibiotics has grown reckless and potentially dangerous.