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Postville and the lessons of the Hormel strike.
On May 12, 900 officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security descended on the small northeast Iowa community of Postville (population 2,200), home to Agriprocessors, Inc., the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the United States. They raided the plant, arresting nearly 400 immigrant workers, men and women, most of them indigenous Guatemalans. Few spoke English; few even spoke Spanish. They were charged with felony "aggravated identity theft," placed in chains, and taken to a tent encampment in the fairgrounds of the nearby town of Waterloo. There, they were advised to plead guilty, processed rapidly by judges in yet other tents, sentenced to five months in prison, and carted away.
Many of the women were placed under house arrest and outfitted with electronic ankle bracelets. They became prisoners, unable to work but expected to care for dieir children, and dependent on die generous support proffered by local churches, neighbors, and labor and faith-based sympathizers from miles away. They were also told that, at the conclusion of the men's sentences, husbands and wives would switch positions (from prison to house arrest, and vice versa), and then all would be deported at the end of ten months. With felony convictions, they would forever be denied re-entry into the United States.
The ICE raid in Postville and similar raids across the country, and the horrendous working conditions at the plant that have since come to light, are among the most pressing challenges facing the labor movement today. But the seeds of the current situation for migrant workers in the United States were sown years ago, in the breaking of unions in the meatpacking industry and the neoliberal restructuring of the global economy.
Twenty-five years ago, U.S. labor activists like me thought we were enmeshed in a struggle against concessions, fueled by a process of deindustrialization and capital flight. In the Midwest, the epicenter of that formation was the Hormel strike of 1985-86. Hormel management wanted to reorganize everything about the work in their new flagship plant in Austin, Minn., from the calculation of wage payments to the sharpening of knives, with the aim of replicating diese strategies company wide. They pushed veteran...