by Ted Genoways
Worse still, at exactly this time, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union, moving to widen its sphere of influence, merged with the Retail Clerks International Union to form the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). The goal was to match the expanding vertical integration of the food industry by organizing workers on every link of the supply chain. But the UFCW bosses didn’t stop at recruiting meatpackers. Focused on building membership and consolidating power within the AFL-CIO, they expanded their ranks to include barbers and beauticians, then retail workers and insurance agents. The butchers and grocers had resented the comparatively high wages of the packinghouse workers right from the start, Harper told me, but barbers and insurance agents were even less interested in protecting the take-home pay of people they considered overpaid factory grunts. So when Knowlton proposed the steep cut in pay, Hormel workers, both in Austin and Fremont, were ready to walk out as soon as their no-strike clause expired, but their union brothers were not. “Amalgamated Meat Cutters lost their teeth,” Harper said.
When UFCW Local 22 in Fremont formally rejected the wage cut, Hormel simply informed the union that the company intended to close the plant. The clause requiring fifty-two-week notice of layoffs was still in effect, so Hormel sent out registered letters to each individual production employee. The UFCW national leadership refused to intercede. So the Fremont local gave in and agreed to a two-tier wage scale. Under the compromise, new workers would start at $8.25 per hour as Knowlton had requested; workers with seniority would get $9 per hour with the promise to increase wages to $10 per hour in a year. (Knowlton later claimed that the idea for this arrangement came to him in a dream, waking him “in the middle of the night from an uneasy sleep.”)
Austin workers, however, refused to accept the cut. They walked out on August 15, 1985, the very day the no-strike clause expired, and Hormel temporarily shut down the Austin plant, expecting that all parties would be able to reach a quick agreement. Instead, the negotiations dragged on—and tensions rose to new heights on October 26, when Hormel first made a public announcement that it had posted a record quarter despite the strike and then reopened some parts of production with management manning the workstations. On January 20, 1986, with still no resolution in sight, Knowlton decided to fully reopen the plant, welcoming in union workers who wished to return and filling any vacant positions with strikebreakers, many of them young farmers who had been pushed by the farm crisis to look for work in the cities. Within twenty-four hours, tensions and threats of violence had spiraled so out of control that governor Rudy Perpich called in the National Guard.
The P-9 leadership in Austin decided to mount a company-wide strike of Hormel workers without the sanction of the UFCW. They sent out roving pickets with the intent of closing down one plant after another. They arrived first in Ottumwa, Iowa, where Dale Chidester was working, and formed a picket at the plant gates with members of UFCW Local 431. Almost all of the Ottumwa workers honored the line—and Hormel responded the next day by firing 478 union members and locking the factory doors. When P-9ers arrived in Fremont in the early hours of the next day, they were called back by leaders in Austin, who had just learned of the mass firing in Ottumwa. But not everyone got the message. A small P-9 picket was established at the Fremont gates, but Local 22 issued a warning to members that workers who stayed out might simply be fired as they had been in Ottumwa. Most members of Local 22, including Harold Harper, reluctantly decided to cross the picket. Of the sixty-five workers who honored the line, some fifty were fired. In the end, the UFCW stepped in and ended the strike, arguing that it was the only way to save jobs for all workers at Hormel.
Less than a year later, however, Hormel announced the total closure of the Ottumwa plant and the shutdown of nearly half the Austin plant. Hormel would continue to run the refrigerated packaging side there, but the cut-and-kill operation would be taken over by a new company called Quality Pork Processors Inc., which would pay its workers $9 per hour. In August 1988, Hormel, citing “poor profit margins,” informed the UFCW Local 22 in Fremont that the company would likewise lay off 324 cut-and-kill workers—more than 40 percent of the plant’s total workforce—unless the local union agreed to another reduction in pay, matching their hourly wage for new workers in the warm room to QPP’s pay-scale. Wounded and abandoned, the Fremont local acceded to the wage cut without a word of protest.
Those were dark times for the Harper family. Harold remembers wondering if the Fremont plant would be next in line for closure. Linda told me that because of the first wage cut she had started babysitting neighbor kids after school, turning their house into an unofficial day-care center to pick up a few bucks; after the second wage cut she had to go to work full-time, eventually finding a job at the 3M plant, down the road in Valley. Through it all, their younger son, Blake, was suffering from a series of unexplained illnesses, which eventually landed him at the Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha. Doctors there prescribed a potent dose of antibiotics that killed off the infection but also left him with severe-profound hearing loss.
Meanwhile, Hormel’s corporate profits were soaring. Between 1983 and 1993, sales doubled on increased output. But more tellingly, earnings rose more than 350 percent, and the stock price among investors bullish on those numbers went from $4 per share to $24. Soon, the only way for Hormel to further improve the bottom line would be to find a cheaper workforce.
“I didn’t know anything,” Raul Vazquez told me, remembering the day in 1991 when he began his long journey from the sierras of Chichihualco to the rolling prairies of the Midwest. “My mom, she make some call to my cousin and we go.” Vazquez’s father, already living in Chicago and working toward obtaining legal status, had been advised by his attorney to bring his wife and two sons across the border before Raul, then sixteen years old, became a legal adult. The process would be much harder after that. So they took the winding mountain road through the Sierra Madre down to Chilpancingo, where they could catch a northbound bus to Mexico City. From the capital, they took another bus, thirty-six hours to Ciudad Juarez. At last, within sight of the U.S. border crossing, the coyote hustled everyone through a hole in the corrugated steel fence and down the embankment into the concrete containment chute that channels the Rio Grande between Juarez and El Paso, Texas. At the shift change for the border guards, Vazquez and the others were pulled across the river, one by one, on an inner tube tied between two lengths of rope. From there they were told to go to a city park, where they were given their false identification and bus tickets north.
Vazquez and his family were part of a first wave of people to make the arduous trip from Chichihualco to the United States with the hope of becoming citizens. When they were children, Raul’s parents had worked as braceros, picking their way from the lettuce fields of California to the cherry orchards of Washington State each year at harvest time, but it was only after the multiple economic crises and devaluations of the peso in the 1980s and President Reagan’s declaration of general amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants in 1986 that they began thinking of returning and settling permanently north of the border. But if immigrant families like the Vazquezes were going to be able to put down roots, they could no longer rely on seasonal jobs in the fields; they needed year-round employment. They found those steady incomes in the meat processing plants all over eastern Nebraska and Kansas.
The work is strenuous and dangerous, especially compared to the supporting industry of Chichihualco—making soccer balls. All over the town, people sit on their patios hand-stitching balls and chatting with neighbors, but the piecework, a few pesos per ball, rarely adds up to more than $40 per week. So the risky journey to the United States and the backbreaking and dangerous labor in the meatpacking plants (Vazquez lost the index finger on his right hand working in Chicago) seem small sacrifice given the relatively high pay of $500 per week—$25,000 per year. For those who work even two years sending half their paychecks home, they can return to Chichihualco with the equivalent of fifteen year
s of savings. Or for those, like Raul, who decide to stay, they can set aside enough to buy a house and even a small business.
By the late 1990s, it wasn’t just Hormel attracting illegal immigrant labor to Nebraska; there was also Fremont Beef (next door to the Hormel plant), Cargill-owned plants in Schuyler and Columbus, Tyson plants in Madison and Norfolk, and Wimmer’s in West Point. Caravans of minibuses made the pilgrimage from Chichihualco to Chilpancingo every month, driving north from Mexico City through Monterey to Piedras Negras, just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. “After a rest and once their supplies are set,” Business Mexico magazine reported in 2003, “it’s only a few hours through the desert mountains of southern Texas to the safe house—a motel where the groups split off either to Schuyler or Fremont in Nebraska or Liberal or Dodge City in Kansas.”
In an interview with the Herald Mexico in 2005, Chichihualco’s mayor Leopoldo Cabrera estimated that nearly $250,000 flowed into the town each month from Nebraska and Kansas. With those funds, Vazquez told me, the highway into town was paved, the narrow main thoroughfare was widened into a tree-lined avenue, and new homes were built among the old tin-roofed adobe huts. And the annual festival for the town’s patron saint, San Miguel, now features a Migrant’s Day celebration. A group of Tlacololeros, the traditional dancers of the sierras, collects cash at the Labor Day parades in Schuyler and Columbus, and then sends the money home to pay for a rodeo, hire a band, and give soccer balls to the local kids. “That day everything is free,” Vazquez told me.
Ironically, the newfound prosperity in Chichihualco has created a younger generation less driven to make the northward journey—especially knowing that their only reward is long days of relentless work. The improved highway opened the city to easier commerce with Chilpancingo, making it much simpler to bring in farm equipment and get crops to market, but it also ushered in the drug cartels, which have muscled out corn growers in favor of planting fields of pot and poppies. And many locals in Nebraska—and, indeed, in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration—worry that the well-worn human smuggling routes into the United States may open the way for drugs and weapons and gangs bent on gaining control of the Midwest (still relatively virgin territory, where meth, low-potency marijuana, and other homegrown drugs dominate the black market trade). By 2012, more than 1,500 people in the highlands of Guerrero had been displaced by fighting between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas gang. And a new cartel, calling itself El Cartel de la Sierra, had emerged.
This latest group of narcoterrorists has adopted the particularly chilling practice of leaving their assassination victims in public places, dismembered into tidy, blood-drained pieces. The cuts are expert, made with sharp blades and practiced hands—intended not for disposal but display. As you look at the neatly cut corpses arrayed at the entrance to the grade school in Chilpancingo or on the sidewalk outside the city’s science museum, it’s hard not to wonder if the butchers of the sierras learned their skills on the kill floors of eastern Nebraska, whether the humanity squeezed out of workers slicing apart more and more bodies every day hardened their souls to this grisly task. “It’s not a slaughterhouse of pigs,” Alfredo Velez, owner of Tienda Mexicana Guerrero in Fremont, said of Hormel. “It’s a slaughterhouse of people.”
Some white residents of Fremont and Schuyler express fears about such violence arriving in their sleepy neighborhoods, but more often anti-immigrant rhetoric focuses on how much money is hemorrhaging from the local economy, how Mexicans are stealing American jobs. But Raul Vazquez told me that Hormel and other packers almost always have vacancies. “They have a big sign: tell your friends, tell your families,” he said, but, with white workers refusing to apply for jobs at decreased wages and the increased line speed permitted by the HIMP agreement with the USDA, the workforce at the Fremont plant is now more than three-quarters Hispanic. “The owners learned that the Hispanics work harder,” Vazquez said. Another Hispanic worker at Hormel said that in his time on the line, he watched the speed increase from 5,000 hogs to 9,000 hogs per shift—made possible by employing a greater and greater percentage of immigrant workers. “They don’t ask for breaks. They don’t ask for raises,” he said. “They just work harder and harder, because they need to work.”
But then in May 2008, Bob Warner, a member of Fremont’s city council, taking his cue from other small towns passing anti-immigration laws, introduced a local ordinance with the goal of preventing illegal immigrants from working or renting inside the city limits. Though Vazquez and his family were all legal citizens now, the renters they depended on to help make their monthly mortgage payments were not. When word of the proposed ordinance spread among the workers at Hormel, Raul’s tenants, already two months behind on their rent, cleared out without warning—or payment. He searched frantically for new tenants, but it seemed everyone was fleeing. Within two months, Raul defaulted on his loan. One of Miguela’s cousins, the one who owns Tienda Chichihualco in Schuyler, told him about the liquor store coming up for sale, so Raul and his family picked up and left town, too. “My plan was to do something else,” Raul told me. “My plan was to live in Fremont.” But now, he was again at the vanguard of a mass exodus.
The ordinance’s architect, for one, was pleased. “When they find out that Fremont is not a haven for illegal immigration,” Warner said at the time, “they will leave.”
Chapter 5
THEY THREW ME AWAY LIKE TRASH
By March 2008, four months after the Minnesota Department of Health’s visit to Quality Pork Processors and the immediate removal of the brain machine, the most acute sufferers from the neurological disorder now known as PIN were still convalescing and getting by on short-term disability, waiting for their workers’ compensation to kick in. But then each worker, one after another, began receiving single-line letters from QPP’s insurer, American Home Assurance Company, a unit of American International Group (AIG), informing them that their claims had been rejected for lack of information—essentially asserting that there was still too little evidence to certify that PIN was a workplace injury. The workers were stunned; QPP itself had guided them through the application process and submitted their forms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had issued a preliminary report, finding that, after testing ten confirmed or suspected patients, researchers had developed the hypothesis that “worker exposure to aerosolized pig neural protein might have induced an autoimmune-mediated peripheral neuropathy.”
Workers appealed to QPP to contact AIG on their behalf. What they didn’t know was that QPP’s company attorneys were already engaged in a protracted argument with AIG over long-term workers’ compensation liability. Worker benefits—which in a case like this could cost millions, mostly in medical claims—were covered by QPP’s policy, but the deductible clause contained ambiguous language, stating that QPP as policyholder had $600,000 of liability for “Each Accident or each Person for Disease.” QPP argued that the outbreak constituted a single “accident.” AIG responded that PIN was a disease, and, therefore, QPP was responsible for $600,000 per person. With thirteen claims already filed and the Mayo Clinic and the Department of Health discussing ruling in the cases of a dozen more workers, QPP was facing possible liability of $15 million or more. Worst of all for QPP, a successful claim—in which the injured party can receive wage-loss, medical, and rehabilitation benefits—is not dependent on employment eligibility or immigration status. Even if an employee were found to have been working without proper documentation, QPP would still be held responsible, because the company had screened applicants and hired and employed the worker. So QPP contested the claims. Six months after Kelly Wadding’s grand gesture of removing the brain machine and presenting it to the investigative team from the Department of Health, QPP told AIG that there was still no definitive proof that PIN had originated from within its plant.
Susan Kruse retained attorney Ray Peterson of the firm McCoy, Peterson & Jorstad and sought out an independent medical evaluation by a board-certified
neurologist in the Twin Cities. The doctor concluded that exposure to aerosolized brain matter was “a substantial contributing factor to the development of the disease.” The finding was vindication for Kruse—but also galling. The story of an unexplained neurological disorder among QPP’s workers was, by then, becoming a national story. Carole Bower told the New York Times that it was nurses in the medical department who had first noticed a pattern emerging and alerted doctors. During the fall of 2007, she said she had seen three workers complaining of “heavy legs.” After a fourth came in with the same symptoms, she had realized, “Something is out of sorts.” This version of events not only contradicted the accounts of the doctors at the Austin Medical Center and Mayo Clinic but also made Kruse wonder why her case had never caught Bower’s attention. Kruse told me she went to the nurse’s department every week for six months to collect her short-term disability check. “Not once did any of the nurses tell me that other workers from the head table were having the same symptoms and were getting sick,” she said. She told me that she thought the company was stalling for time, hoping that workers would improve or quit before they found each other. In early April, she filed suit against QPP.
Kelly Wadding publicly blamed the denial of coverage on poor sharing of medical information among the Mayo Clinic, MDH, and CDC, and he said that some workers still hadn’t been interviewed, so the medical research remained in process and, therefore, inconclusive. “Once it’s determined that they’ve contracted the illness at work, they’ll be eligible for workman’s comp,” he told the Austin Daily Herald. This statement was a stark contrast to Wadding’s comments for national news stories, in which he always portrayed QPP’s medical staff and upper management as fighting on behalf of workers, without waiting for final findings from MDH. “It’s a new disease,” he said now, “so there’s a lot of things they need to determine.”
