I wrote a little while ago about Agriprocessors and the various reactions from the Jewish community. At the end af my article I said that I wasn’t calling for a ban on Agriprocessors. In part my reasons were selfish – it is so hard to find kosher meat in this area without having to drive to Maryland that I take what I can get. In part I also simply didn’t want to rush to judgment. An affidavit is one thing, a conviction is another. After hearing this story on NPR last night I’m starting to reconsider. In response to the deportation of the illegal immigrants they had been hiring, Agriprocessors turned to a third party to do some recruiting for them to fill their obvious labor shortage.

The new workers, some of whom were recruited from other slaughterhouses and know what they’re doing, have been complaining of worker abuse as well. Ali Shira, (who used to work in a Turkey slaughtering house), reports that there were no safety locks on the machines. Twice while he was inside a machine cleaning it (apparently one of the most dangerous jobs in a slaughterhouse), a mechanic started the machine and almost killed him. He quit after a week. Rickey Rapier from Indianapolis reports that the packing plant provides “housing”. He sleeps on a mattress on the floor in a small basement with 6 other people with no furniture, a leaking ceiling, rotting wood, and no working shower. For this he has $100 a week deducted from his paycheck. Now I don’t know what the average rent is in Postville Iowa, but I’ve paid rent in the midwest before, and I know that $2800 a month (7 people, $400 each), for a very crappy apartment is a complete ripoff. It is strongly reminiscent of company towns in the early 1900s where the corporations would charge so much for their living facilities that employees were only a half step up from being slaves. While hiring illegal workers doesn’t get me angry, worker abuse does. There were allegations of worker abuse in the initial affidavit as well, but it’s easy to ignore when you’re only hearing one side of the story. The fact that even after supposedly cleaning up their act, hiring a compliance officer, and being “inspected” by the RCA, these stories are still coming out means that this is a pattern and not an exception. If even half of what has been alleged in the initial allegation and the current allegations are true, then Agriprocessors is an abusive corporation committing a hillul hashem and I have no desire to continue to support such an enterprise.

Update: My friend Chaim sent me an article from this weekend’s New York Times where Agriprocessors has gone to court to try and stop their employees from unionizing. Their rationale is that the employees are… (wait for it)… illegal immigrants! Talk about a double standard. If you want to hire illegal immigrants because you either believe in the right to contract, or are trying to provide subsistence for a marginalized group of people, then that’s fine with me. But in either case you have to then also believe that the workers have the right to unionize with that. If you don’t think they have the right to unionize, then you are essentially saying that illegal immigrants have less right than other citizens. That is a fine position to take, but if you do, then consistency demands you alsodo not employ them illegally, because working is a right which society has also deemed is only available to legal residents.