the rix mix

Iowa city hopes slaughterhouse sale turns its luck
By Nigel Duara

POSTVILLE, Iowa (AP) Life in Postville wasn't easy before federal agents raided the area's largest employer and detained 389 people on immigration charges.

The May 2008 raid on the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse came as the nationwide recession was deepening and the city was struggling to cope with some of the long-term economic problems many rural Midwestern communities face.

The string of bad news that followed - bankruptcy, the arrest of senior managers, the exodus of hundreds of other immigrant workers and a failed attempt to keep the plant running with out-of-state workers - left both town and plant as shadows of their former selves, with Postville's population about half its pre-raid size and the kosher slaughterhouse's staff about one-tenth its former size.

There is cautious hope that the expected approval Wednesday of the sale of the plant to SHF Industries, a subsidiary to Canadian plastics maker Hershey Friedman, will bring people back to fill the city's vacated storefronts and homes.
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The immigration raid - the largest of its kind in Iowa history - tore deeply at the city's social fabric, which had been a unique blend of longtime white residents, Latinos from Mexico and Guatemala, and Hasidic Jews. The raid separated families as workers were jailed and then deported, and it led to the departure of many Latinos who had lived in Postville for years.

Many residents who remain have no interest in slaughterhouse work because of their age or a simple distaste for the often repetitive and messy jobs.

What the matter with unemployed Americans & their families? They won't uproot themselves & relocate to Wherethehellami USA for disgusting, low-paying jobs with no future. & I don't mean just blue collar workers. There's plenty of available labor with out-sourced white collar skills & antiquated college degrees, hanging on by threads to devalued suburban homes mortgaged to the roofs, aging SUVs in the driveways. Yeah, many of them voted Repug for years, screw unions & OSHA & FDA. Let the illegal brown folks pluck the chickens & wade through cattle offal. But if we catch 'em, ship 'em back where they came from. If there's nobody to replace them, use prison labor at 25 cents an hour, or those women with the kids named Kaneasha & DeShawn.

Hey, all work has dignity, right? It's only certain types of people who don't deserve dignity, like the ones who will do anything to gain a foothold in the United States, who do the shitwork & dream the dreams so their children can make the dreams real.