A Kosher Meat Plant And Exploitation

Rabbi Aaron Rubashkin, owner of AgriProcessors (Aaron's
Best™, Rubashkin's™, Shor HaBor™, etc.), and his
son Rabbi Moshe

POSTVILLE, Iowa — The animals slaughtered here at the nation's
largest kosher meat packing plant have been the object of nationwide
sympathy since an animal rights group released videos from the kill
floor in December 2004. But a tour of the mobile homes and cramped
apartments just outside town, where AgriProcessors' immigrant
workers live, quickly shifts a visitor's attention to a more striking
concern: the impoverished humans who do the factory's dirty work.

Danger

One of those workers — a woman who agreed to be identified by
the pseudonym Juana — came to this rural corner of Iowa a year
ago from Guatemala. Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour
night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting hand is swollen and
deformed, but she has no health insurance to have it checked. She
works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and stopping at $7, that
several industry experts described as the lowest of any
slaughterhouse in the nation.


Juana and other employees at AgriProcessors — they total about
800 — told the Forward that they receive virtually no safety
training. This is an anomaly in an industry in which the tools are
designed to cut and grind through flesh and bones. In just one
month last summer, two young men required amputations; workers
say there have been others since. The chickens and cattle fly by at
a steady clip on metal hooks, and employees said they are berated
for not working fast enough. In addition, employees told of being
asked to bribe supervisors for better shifts and of being
shortchanged on paychecks regularly.

The Rubashkins would fly in workers from New York. That
changed as the Eastern Europeans were replaced by a flood
of Hispanic immigrants, who required little in the way of
recruitment by the Rubashkins. Today, more than half of
Postville's 2,500 residents are Hispanic, according to most
estimates. Indeed, there is a widespread sense, as one
26-year-old man from Mexico said, that "there is
somebody outside waiting to take your job — so you just
keep working, or else."

The Hispanic immigrant workers are also less educated than the
Eastern Europeans, and several people who have dealt with both
groups claimed that plant management has given the newcomers
less respect.

See Illegal Alien labor = Big $$$ to Zionists and
Elitists. That's why they want them to keep
coming. Do you Pro-Illegals really think
they care about Mexicans !


They destroy our Nations culture and
exploit Illegals. All for personal profit.


Plant not too Kosher