by Ted Genoways
Affirming the passage of the ordinance, even if it means costing the city millions of dollars, won’t stop the influx of immigrants who are willing to make that journey and work jobs at Hormel in return for giving their kids a better life. All it means, Chavez said, is that young people like him, once they’ve received their education and are ready to work and start families, get as far away from Fremont as possible. That was certainly his plan. But, for now, he had to get some rest. Jameson was finally ready for bed, and Jonathan had to be back up and on the road to work by 5 a.m.
He smiled again, but a little wearily this time. “It’s a lot—having a kid and working,” he said. “But I got to pay the rent, right?”
It’s four o’clock in the morning when Raul Vazquez rises from bed in Schuyler and begins readying for another day’s shift at Hormel. He puts the coffee on and gets dressed—always in a sweater to keep off the chill of the refrigerated ham department. He fills his thermos and then starts out on his predawn rounds, checking in on his wife’s cousins, picking up another cousin who works on the kill floor. The streets in Schuyler are still dark—but they are anything but abandoned. Headlights hunt down the side streets and out onto Colfax; they crawl across the overpass—the grain elevators and the city water tower floodlit from below—and then jog east onto Sixteenth Street. Most mornings, when Raul reaches Highway 30, the clock on his dash reads just 4:50 a.m., but already a phalanx of cars stretches out before him, snaking toward Fremont.
This sunrise exodus, uninterrupted by the passage of the ordinance, is daily proof of just how completely the immigrant workforce brought in to work on the line at Hormel—and other plants in the area like it—has changed the face of rural Nebraska. In May 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the ACLU’s appeal of the ruling handed down by the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, thus allowing both the E-Verify portion of the ordinance and the housing permit portion of Fremont’s ordinance to stand. “It’s final now, and Fremont’s victory is complete,” Kobach said. More than that, he said, the decision gave a “bright green light” for other cities to pass similar measures. Soon, he predicted, there could be similar ordinances introduced in other towns in Nebraska, or in Minnesota and Iowa, or in Arkansas, Missouri, and the Dakotas. “It is beyond question that every city in the 8th Circuit has the ability to adopt the Fremont ordinance, word for word.”
But unresolved are rather potent and polarizing questions: Who will determine the face of small-town America? Will it be a de facto decision made by the unstoppable tide of changing demographics or will it be preordained and enforced by decree? Will ordinances sprout up, as Jim Crow laws did across the rural south, to forestall the inevitable? Whatever happens, Raul Vazquez hopes to stay in Schuyler, to one day have his business loan paid off and be making enough to quit his job on the line and spend his days with Miguela behind the counter at the liquor store. But for now he still has to rise before dawn to make the journey each morning to the south edge of Fremont and trim the fat from bins of hams at Hormel for another employee to gather for cans of Spam. It’s awful work, but his family depends on the job to pay the bills, and he doesn’t want to be late.
Chapter 17
INSPECTION
In May 2013, the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report with the decidedly bland title “Inspection and Enforcement Activities at Swine Slaughter Plants.” But the findings of the report proved a flashpoint for the agency. OIG concluded that, after more than a decade, enforcement by FSIS of food safety protocols in pork processing plants participating in the experimental HIMP project was so lax that, between 2008 and 2011, three of the plants included in the pilot program were among the ten that had received the most noncompliance records of any plant. That’s out of 616 nationwide.
The identities of the plants were not included in the report—but several could be matched to their violation history from the descriptions provided. Most noticeably, one of the worst offenders was described as “a plant in Nebraska that slaughtered about 10,600 swine per day.” Only two plants in Nebraska—the Farmland plant in Crete and the Hormel plant in Fremont—fit that general description. And the only location in Nebraska listed among “all sites visited” in preparing the audit report was Fremont. Still, all branches of the USDA steadfastly declined to confirm—or deny—that identification, even after Dan Hoppes, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 293 in Fremont, told me, “Yeah, that’s us.”
But denials didn’t change the stark facts: FSIS recorded a total of 607 violations at that plant, roughly three per workweek, including 50 repeat violations for “yellow fibrous fecal material” on hog carcasses bound for processing and another 39 repeat violations for “yellowish colored residue” and a scum of flesh and fat inside storage vats. A line worker told me he had so often seen “chunks of stinky, rotting meat” inside sausage grinders at the Fremont plant that he had instructed his wife not to buy anything containing Hormel ground meat at the supermarket.
The inspector general felt that these violations should have resulted in a written warning or even a plant shutdown—something the USDA does only about seven times a year in the entire country—but no such actions were taken. Worse still, the report notes an instance where an inspector in Nebraska spotted fecal matter on the hind foot of a carcass that had moved past the plant’s quality control employees “without being detected”—which is considered a “more serious violation” because it “would impact food safety of the product.” The report concluded that investigation “revealed a systemic failure and not a sporadic problem, including recurring zero-tolerance violations.”
The report also never provided any identifying information about the plant that incurred the most violations nationwide from 2008 to 2011—other than to say it was a HIMP plant. However, noncompliance records for 2012, obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by the nonprofit watchdog group Food & Water Watch, revealed that the Quality Pork Processing plant in Austin had far and away the most violations of any HIMP plant. And the portrayal of conditions inside the plant, as collectively created by those records, is sometimes harrowing.
During 2012 alone, QPP received more than 225 noncompliance records, including 60 violations for meat contaminated by fecal matter or intestinal contents. More disturbingly, FSIS inspectors noted eight separate instances where carcasses had to be condemned for disease after having been approved for butchering by plant quality assurance auditors. In March, inspectors found an undetected four-inch cancerous tumor. In April, they found full-body inflammation from bacterial infection in one hog, lesions from tuberculosis in another, malignant lymphoma in a third. In June, another carcass with a “grossly enlarged thymic gland” was determined to be cancerous. In August, one hog showed signs of muscle degeneration; in September, another was determined to have septic arthritis after a bloody fluid was noted discharging from its joints. Several of these were classified as “stumble-on” records—that is, chance findings past critical control points, which should therefore be considered zero-tolerance violations. In many cases, these violations were discovered so late in the process that the reports conclude with some variation of the same comment: “Had the inspector failed to retain this carcass, it would have entered commerce.”
The inspector general warned: “Since there are no substantial consequences for plants that repeatedly violate the same food safety regulations, the plants have little incentive to improve their slaughter processes. It is critical that plants work towards preventing violations from occurring in the first place because recurring, severe violations may jeopardize public health.” Stricter enforcement, the report concluded, is necessary to ensure that “the nation’s commercial supply of pork is safe and wholesome.”
When the inspector general’s report was released, Philip Derfler, deputy administrator of the FSIS, told me there was no cause for alarm, that the additional violations were only evidence that inspectors in HIMP plants were conducting more thorough che
cks in the kill area. “Given the fact that we’re looking at it a lot more intensely,” he said, “it’s not surprising that we find more of it.” And inspectors spotting cancerous growths and lymph nodes swollen with tuberculosis only proved, he said, that visual inspection, followed up by microbiological testing, is an adequate tool for identifying disease.
But I couldn’t help wondering: if the HIMP model of inspection is truly superior, why then has the public been kept largely uninformed of the results of this decade-long government study on food safety—and blocked from knowing the identities of the participating plants? Even leaders at Local 293 in Fremont were unaware of the OIG report—and, after I asked about the inspection record at the Hormel plant there, national UFCW leadership hastened to provide me with data showing that meatpacking plants under union control generally have better records of worker and food safety.
They pointed to statistics showing that the Hormel plant in Fremont has tracked at or below industry-wide numbers for rates of injury and illness since the advent of the HIMP inspection model. But the overall statistics conceal the fact that plant workers still suffer major lacerations and amputations at a rate of 1 percent per year—slightly more than one major injury per month. For workers who work at any meatpacking plant for five years, their chances of suffering a serious injury are nearly fifty-fifty. And an extensive study of packinghouse workers conducted by the University of Iowa in 2008 suggested that the actual number of injuries may be significantly underreported. In the last decade, the large numbers of undocumented workers hired by the industry have demonstrated a reluctance to report injuries or file workers’ compensation claims. The Iowa study revealed that Hispanic workers are almost half as likely to report an injury as their white counterparts; one would assume that the rate of reporting is even lower among undocumented Hispanic workers, who often underreport for fear of firing or deportation. “The speed of work is causing an epidemic of quietly crippling injuries,” Darcy Tromanhauser, program director for Immigrants & Communities at Nebraska Appleseed, told me. “People who work in meat and poultry make tens of thousands of repetitive motions each shift that cause permanent damage to their nerves, tendons, and bones, often leading to multiple surgeries and chronic pain.”
Mark Lauritsen, director of the UFCW Food Processing, Packing, and Manufacturing Division, said, “It’s not so much the speed; it’s how many people are put on that job.” Today, he said, it was no longer plant supervisors who monitored production speed with a watch. Now every plant has a union-hired industrial engineer, who walks the plant floor with a stopwatch around his neck, counting the cogs in the chain to monitor the number of carcasses per minute. If the speed starts to creep up, the union is pushing for additional workers on the line.
In Fremont, for example, Hormel bought property adjacent to the plant and, in May 2011, announced that they would be expanding the Spam facility and adding more jobs. Industry critics such as Tony Corbo at Food & Water Watch complain that Hormel has simply been rewarded for running one of the most unsafe plants in the country and now intends to shift more of its production there, but Lauritsen countered that the expansion is a positive development for workers and consumers alike. It not only creates additional jobs but also ensures that there are more hands to keep pace with the line, reducing the likelihood of accidents and increasing the cleanliness of the process. Workers in pork processing plants should be grateful, union officials say. While other industries have been fighting slow sales since the recession, Hormel has seen soaring earnings on the strength of sales of Spam. Meeting that demand through government-sanctioned increases in their line speeds and increasing market share means job security and opportunities to advance.
Tromanhauser told me she understood why the union didn’t want to discourage anything that created jobs but cautioned that line speeds in meatpacking plants are now “dangerously fast.” And rather than improving job opportunities, “what we hear from people across Nebraska and the country is that line speeds are increasing while staffing ratios are decreasing.” The Hormel plant in Fremont, for example, has increased the speed of its lines by roughly 50 percent in the last decade—while their workforce has increased by about 20 percent.
Derfler said that FSIS doesn’t have time to watch out for—much less document—risks to worker safety. If a violation is observed, he said, inspectors will report it to OSHA, but “the focus is on the safety of the food.” Hany Sidrak, director of FSIS’s Recall Management Staff, underscored this point by conceding that injuries and amputations are inevitable—that, in fact, he had personally witnessed such incidents while conducting site inspections—but his attention remained solely focused on food safety. “In such an incident, FSIS will deal with it as a sanitary issue and will stop operations to make sure that all human blood is completely cleaned off and that all product is protected,” he said. “FSIS will not release the area or the line unless all products are identified as protected and cleaned—or whatever needs to be condemned is condemned because it cannot be made clean.”
The reassurances of FSIS officials hark back to a famed passage from The Jungle. Sinclair vividly described the government inspector of hogs, “who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for tuberculosis.” He showed no signs of worry or fear that diseased carcasses might slip past his examination. In fact, if you struck up a conversation with this inspector, Sinclair wrote, he was only too glad “to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.”
Likewise, today, it seems that we are not so much concerned with safety as promoting an illusion of safety. We feel assured that we are protected from illness, when, in fact, the real illness is the pretense we, as Americans, must collectively agree upon—in order to maintain the mirage of safe food, a safe workplace, well-treated livestock, a healthy environment, a strong economy, and a cohesive and equitable culture. In the case of Hormel, the disconnect is only so stark because the goal, producing greater and greater quantities of Spam, seems so absurd.
One late afternoon at the Labor Center office in Austin, I asked Dale Chidester if he ever stepped back and marveled at all this—the unyielding forward motion of production, all the people injured in the name of constant growth and increased output.
Chidester smiled and asked if I knew the formula for Spam. I shook my head.
By volume, he said, Spam is more than 27 percent fat. Two slices equals roughly half of your recommended intake of saturated fat for the entire day. The formula established by Julius Zillgitt in the 1930s as a way of getting rid of trimmings was now difficult to meet, because specially bred and genetically engineered hogs were getting leaner and leaner to satisfy buyers of pork chops and hams. “Do you know they have to truck in fat from other plants?” he asked. “Think about that.”
Every day, all across the Midwest, hogs were—and are—being herded up ramps and shipped to the loading docks at QPP and Hormel in Fremont to match the relentless pace required to process 5 million hogs a year. Still more trimmings from millions more animals are loaded and brought in. And why? All because seventy-five years ago, the company established a corner on a niche market for cheap canned meat, and they have been holding on for dear life ever since. And to keep the whole production structure in place for times of prosperity when people are buying pork chops and hams, Chidester told me, in lean times like these when there’s high demand for Spam, the company gives away those quality fresh cuts to the United Way and as part of international aid packages, just for the tax break.
I slumped back in my chair at the thought of this. “How do you go to work in the morning?” I asked. Chidester just laughed. You don’t think about such things while you’re working on the line, he explained; mostly you try not to think about anything at all. Your muscles remember and repeat. “It’s like tying your shoes,” he said, and that was that. You do what you’
re told, and at the end of the day, you go home to your family.
In January 2014, Hormel announced that the company would be shifting production of its bacon bits from the Tony Downs Foods plant in St. James, Minnesota, to the relatively new plant that Hormel had built in Dubuque, Iowa. Industry insiders were unsurprised; Hormel had been complaining for some time that the overhead in maintaining a specialized plant was too high, while the Dubuque plant, operated under the name Progressive Processing and originally designed to expand Hormel’s line of microwaveable dinners, had been running below capacity because of flagging sales of high-cost, ready-made meals. Even at the plant’s grand opening in 2010, CEO Jeffrey Ettinger acknowledged that the recession had caused sales to dip, so initial plans for two microwave meal production lines had been ditched in favor of turning one of the lines into a meat canning line. This meant that the Dubuque plant was well positioned to take over any of Hormel’s high-demand canned meat lines, including bacon bits.
So company executives had approached Dubuque’s economic development team to see if the city would offer incentives for expanding and adding as many as one hundred new jobs. City and state officials approved a $4.1 million incentives package, including state tax benefits, the extension of an existing tax increment financing agreement with the city of Dubuque, and a jobs-training partnership with Northeast Iowa Community College. Hormel accepted the offer and soon announced the expansion, but the press statements included an intriguing mystery. The city said that the bacon bits line was just the first of “two new production lines sought for the plant.” Mark Seckman, vice president of national marketing for Greater Dubuque Development Corporation, would only elaborate by saying that he felt the deal “favorably positions us for Phase 2.”