by Ted Genoways
After careful study, medical investigators had unanimously concluded that inhaling aerosolized brains had caused workers’ immune systems to produce antibodies. Because porcine and human neurological cells are so similar, the antibodies didn’t recognize when the foreign cells had been eliminated. Even when Garcia’s body had eliminated all of the hog tissue he had inhaled, Dyck explained, the antibodies kept fighting the infection, destroying Garcia’s own nerve cells.
The explanation made sense, except that, according to company officials, QPP had been blowing brains, off and on, for more than a decade. So why did workers fall ill now and not earlier? The answer offered by the Mayo Clinic is complex but boils down to one key change: increased line speed. Garcia told me that he had been having trouble keeping up with the breakneck rate of production, making the already grisly job of blasting brains ever messier. To match the pace, the company did what they always do: turn to automation. They switched from a foot-operated trigger to an automatic system tripped by inserting the nozzle into the brain cavity, but sometimes the blower would misfire and spatter. Complaints about this had led to the installation of the Plexiglas shield between the worker manning the brain machine and the rest of the head table. When further increased speed had caused pig heads to pile up at the opening in the shield, and the jammed skulls had cracked the plastic, more mist had been allowed to drift over the head table. And the longer hours worked in 2007 had, quite simply, upped workers’ exposure.
But Dyck had some good news for Garcia. The investigators were not in total agreement. He and Lachance diverged from the description of the disorder favored by the Minnesota Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in one small but critical way. MDH was calling the disorder progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN)—and the designation would catch on with the media, which liked the linguistic rhyme between the tingling, pins-and-needles sensation that signaled the disorder’s onset and the acronymic shorthand—but the Mayo team rejected this name because the doctors there didn’t believe that the disorder was progressive. Now that QPP had halted harvesting pig brains, Dyck told Garcia, he believed his condition should improve.
But the future for Garcia and other sick workers was much more difficult than that—not only physically but psychologically. After the removal of the brain machine, Garcia was taken to his new workstation, mere feet from his old spot at the end of the head table. Seeing the blood on the floor and the hog parts sliding by on the conveyor, he started to panic. He was afraid that he would again be exposed, that his condition would return and worsen. He couldn’t catch his breath; his chest tightened. He begged to leave and called his social worker. She secured Garcia a different job, away from the head table, but even with light duty, he struggled to maintain full-time hours for the better part of 2008.
More than a year after his diagnosis, Garcia still had burning in his feet, his knees clicked when he walked, and his bowel and bladder problems persisted. Not yet twenty years old, he was catheterizing himself four times per day. In a follow-up examination, Lachance found a suspicious spot on a nerve at the base of Garcia’s brain and would eventually diagnose it as a nerve-sheath tumor. Soon even Dyck and Lachance would have to concede that several of the most severe cases were showing halted function of the sweat glands, a clear indicator of nerve death. Matthew Garcia and others were suffering from permanent, irreversible damage.
Part Two
Chapter 4
LITTLE MEXICO
Every afternoon, when the last bin of untrimmed hams is emptied out, deboned, injected with a sodium solution, and sent down the line to be cooked, Raul Vazquez walks out of the Hormel plant on the outskirts of Fremont, Nebraska, crosses the abandoned avenue to the employee parking lot, and heads west out of town. He drives for the better part of an hour along Highway 30—a thin ribbon of blacktop, shadowing the Union Pacific tracks and the tortuous Platte River—until he comes to the exit for the town of Schuyler. Vazquez lives there and owns a modest off-sale liquor store, set up in an old shop front along Twelfth Street, one of the brick roads in the historic downtown. His wife, Miguela, works in the store all day and every night has a simple dinner waiting when he arrives. They eat together with their five children in the back room before Raul gathers the kids and drives them back to their house for homework and then bed. Miguela stays at the store until closing, rarely making it home before midnight.
To see them at the store, you wouldn’t guess how hard Raul and Miguela work, how little time they have together as a family. When I first visited them one Friday evening, the two oldest boys sat behind the counter, entranced by the Disney Channel—its laugh track nattering from a tiny picture tube atop the refrigerator case. Their wily three-year-old brother teased his baby sister, kicking a balloon around the aisles and snatching it away. Miguela grinned with resignation amid the din but laughed away any suggestion that the chaos ever got to her. Even Raul, fresh from his shift at Hormel and the hour commute, seemed content running the register—ringing up a customer, who was picking up a bottle of Jose Cuervo on his way home from a long week.
It seemed the perfect tableau of immigrant determination and upward mobility, but the liquor store in Schuyler was actually an act of compromise. When Raul first came to Nebraska, his brother had a job at Hormel and said he could get work for Raul and Miguela there, too, until they got on their feet. They already had enough put away to qualify for a loan to buy a house in Fremont and take in renters to cover the mortgage until they established credit for a business loan. Once that happened they expected the booming Hispanic population would provide a steady clientele to support a restaurant, a bakery, maybe even a small grocery store. But six months in, Miguela couldn’t take the work at Hormel. She was spending all day cutting meat away from the necks of hogs that had been shackled up and split open; the work left her sickened and exhausted, and she was barely making enough to pay for babysitters for the children. She finally quit to be with the kids full-time, but the family struggled to get by on Raul’s salary: only after a year on the kill-floor, hitting hogs with a double-prong prod to stun them for slaughter, was he finally promoted to “sticking”—plunging a sharpened steel blade into each pig’s jugular, sending geysers of dark blood coursing over the white tiles of the abattoir. But worse than the hard work and the scant wages was the darkening political climate.
In late 2006, when the housing bubble burst and the economy began to falter, the scarcity of jobs seemed to bring simmering anti-immigrant resentment to a boil. Nebraska’s Democratic senator Ben Nelson, who was in the midst of a reelection campaign, saw an opportunity to run to the right of his ultraconservative Republican opponent, Pete Ricketts, former CEO of Omaha-based TD Ameritrade, when Ricketts proclaimed support for the controversial stance that illegal immigrants should “self-deport” and then be allowed to return with temporary worker status. Nelson pounced, telling NPR that the United States needed “a hard barrier” between itself and Mexico. It wasn’t enough to apply pressure and expect the flow of immigration to reverse itself, much less grant a path to citizenship; people without proper documentation had to be found and forcibly removed. The coldhearted rhetoric helped Nelson secure reelection in a landslide.
During that same election season, a half dozen local jurisdictions around the country, seeing the Republican hardline anti-immigration platform devolve into just another empty campaign promise, decided to tackle the matter in earnest for themselves. In places as diverse as Riverside, New Jersey, and Escondido, California, municipal measures sought to oust undocumented workers by imposing local penalties on businesses and landlords who employed or rented to people without proper proof of citizenship. Half the cases stalled in the blocks, due to poorly written proposals riddled with plainly unconstitutional language, but the other half, with the aid of the politically ambitious attorney Kris Kobach, who had cut his teeth under U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, were more cleverly composed and seemed headed for long court battles. The t
owns spotlighted in these cases—Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Valley Park, Missouri; and Farmers Branch, Texas—garnered a trickle of negative national press, but they also became rallying points for anti-immigration activists, who soon went looking for other towns with their own rapidly changing demographics.
Outside Raul’s liquor store, on the streets of downtown Schuyler, the change in the makeup of that part of Nebraska is apparent everywhere. Each night, the illuminated sign above his store blinks to life, lighting the words: Liquor San Miguel. The store is named in honor of the patron saint of Raul’s birthplace, Chichihualco, a farming village in the mountains of southern Mexico’s state of Guerrero. All of Schuyler has become a haven for immigrants from Raul’s hometown, and, drawn by the meatpacking industry’s arrival in rural Nebraska, their mass migration has largely accounted for an explosion in the area’s Hispanic population—from fewer than 1,000 in 1990 to nearly 16,000 today, roughly 20 percent of the population in the state’s northeastern corner. On one block in downtown Schuyler, there’s La Paleteria Oasis Mexican ice creams, La Gloria Spanish-language greeting cards, the convenience store Variedades Fredy’s, and El Paisano’s cell phones and calling cards. The next block over, Los Amigos auto sales is across the street from Chabelos custom detailing and not far from El Pueblo Tires and Corral’s Car Repair. The old location for Didier’s Grocery, across the street from Raul’s liquor store, has been converted into a dance hall called the Latino Club, and on Saturday nights the thumping bass of Tejano tunes throbs through the cinder-block walls. When Clarkson TV & Appliance vacated, Raul’s wife’s cousin opened a market called La Tienda Chichihualco and packed its tight aisles with Mexican foodstuffs.
No wonder some Nebraskans have taken to calling towns like Schuyler “Little Mexicos.” For many older residents of those small towns—who take pride in their Norman Rockwellesque image, where people greet each other in the Wal-Mart parking lot and go to church together on Sunday, and where the streetlights flicker out at midnight—the arrival of this immigrant population is a threat not just to the status quo but to their sense of self and their very way of life. Many remember when a spot on the line at Hormel was the most coveted job around. But ever since the union-busting of the 1980s and the reduced-inspection agreements of the 1990s and 2000s, those jobs have been largely taken over by a workforce of undocumented immigrants willing to work twice as fast for lower pay—a fact that many old-timers blame for the swift decline of Fremont and surrounding communities.
Throughout 2007, as Raul and Miguela worked at Hormel, made mortgage payments on their house, and struggled to put aside money to start a bakery in Fremont, there was a growing rumble among longtime residents that their town, like other small towns across the country, should take matters into their own hands.
Hormel opened its plant in Fremont to meet swelling demand for meat after World War II. During the war years, the company had cranked out so many Spam-filled K-rations that by 1945 fully 90 percent of the output from the facility in Austin, Minnesota, was purchased by the U.S. military. When founder George A. Hormel died in June 1946, he left his son, Jay, with a remarkable challenge: maintaining sales now that Americans GIs were back home. But Jay made a characteristically savvy gamble: he wagered that returning vets, as they reentered the workforce and enjoyed new buying power, would want more meat.
He guessed right. In the first quarter of 1947, meat consumption nationwide rose by more than 20 percent—a real increase of more than 1.7 billion pounds. Prices climbed so high on upsurging demand that New York’s mayor called for a congressional investigation. But the New York Times concluded that it wasn’t price-fixing that was driving prices; it was scarcity of supply. “Americans are meat-hungry,” the reporter explained. “There are just more persons consuming more meat than ever before in the history of the country.” To ease high prices, the federal government began subsidizing corn as feed and petroleum to cut the expense of getting livestock to market. This allowed Hormel to improve their margins on quality cuts of meat for American dinner tables while showing record profits by exporting canned goods to war-crippled Europe.
The acquisition of the Fremont Packing Company, a small plant thirty-seven miles west of Omaha on the Burlington and Union Pacific railroads, was meant to help Hormel keep pace with the runaway demand—but the move was also more than simple expansion. The nation’s largest meatpackers were just beginning their generation-long migration away from urban centers, in favor of setting up shop in small towns. Hormel hoped that establishing rural direct-buying stations would allow them to negotiate lower prices than they paid for animals brought to auction at sprawling stockyards. Also, at the very moment of the Fremont expansion, major packinghouses in Omaha were in the grip of a walkout by striking stockyard workers. Faced with the real possibility of running out of supply, those plants—including Swift, Armour, and Wilson—were forced to negotiate higher wages and better hours with the United Packinghouse Workers of America. By opening their plant outside of Omaha, Hormel was closer to farms and feedlots and farther from union bosses and the solidarity of fellow workers.
But no one in Fremont was worried about such things in 1947—especially after Hormel announced plans, almost immediately upon opening, to expand the production line from roughly one hundred workers to nearly six hundred. At a time when the average farm operator was earning just under $2,000 per year, the arrival of five hundred new jobs (which, on average, paid $3,000 each) was an unbelievable godsend. Overnight, nearly 15 percent of Fremont households saw their income jump by a third. And their increased earnings soon brought shared prosperity to Fremont’s Main Street as well.
At the same time, the U.S. government announced the extension of the Bracero Program. Literally meaning “strong arms,” the initiative had started as a short-term agreement with Mexico to import seasonal workers after President Franklin Roosevelt’s signature on Executive Order 9066, authorizing the establishment of internment camps, emptied fields of Japanese immigrants in 1942. Now, with the program extended to the postwar era, rural families who claimed continued labor shortages were able to keep their farms running cheaply on Mexican labor and then send their sons, newly home from Europe and the South Pacific, from the front lines to the factory lines.
Best of all, company bosses had pioneered what was referred to as the “Hormel experiment”—a salary system that removed seasonal uncertainty for workers, who previously had been given long hours during summer and fall, when fattened animals were brought to market, then laid off during the winter and early spring. For Hormel, paying salaries saved costs on training at the beginning of each season and reduced the transience (and mobility) of its workforce. For workers, the loss of flexibility was an easy trade-off. At the time the Fremont plant opened, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Most Hormel workers own their homes and have cars, refrigerators, well-dressed, well-fed, well-educated children.” For decades after, wages there held firm at 20 to 30 percent above the average for a manufacturing job, regardless of what was happening in the larger economy, and many in Fremont came to regard the plant set just outside the city limits as the benevolent giant that provided for the community.
Then in 1978, the Fremont chapter of UFCW, Local 22, accepted the same contract—and wage cut—that had been given to workers in Austin as part of the new plant agreement. Within five years, new CEO Richard Knowlton issued his infamous demand for a second pay cut, slashing hourly pay by 23 percent and pushing Hormel’s wages below the industry average for the first time in more than ninety years of doing business. You ask anyone in Fremont and they’ll tell you the same thing: for all those years, the guys who worked on the meatpacking line had nice houses with boats in the driveway and pools in the backyard. Suddenly, after generations of prosperity and job security, the future for Hormel workers looked uncertain.
Harold Harper was working the night shift on the bacon slice at the Fremont plant when Knowlton first proposed the wage cut, and he remembers exactly how the union responded: �
�Of course, we said, ‘Bull-shit.’” Harper is retired from Hormel now, after more than thirty-three years working on the line. He started in 1968 as an executive trainee but asked to be moved to a line job after just a few months because, in those days, the work paid better and was more secure. He and his wife, Linda, still live in the same house on the north side of Fremont where they raised their two boys. They were able to save up for a few upgrades, like a sunroom with an electric fireplace, and they vacation for two weeks in Hawaii every February now, but there is otherwise little trace of the upper-middle-class existence that Hormel workers once enjoyed.
Harper told me that the union at Hormel had tied one hand behind its back when they trusted Knowlton in 1978 and accepted his new contract. The agreement bound the union to the no-strike provision and production standard established in the Austin plant but without benefit of a new plant in Fremont or promises of reduced workloads there. It was, in Harper’s estimation, a misplaced show of good faith in the new corporate leadership—the result of a generation of union presidents who had never faced significant conflict with management.
