Immigrants in Factory Farming

Kharielly Gonzalez June 6, 2010
Eng 103 Professor. Alexander

Throughout this cluster we have been reading a lot about food industry and how they pack there meats or how they even make them. We have also been learning something that caught my attention and it was Factory Farming and the way they treat their workers. Did you know that many of the workers that work in factory farms are illegal? Do you know how they are treated? Do you also know the injuries they suffer? In this essay I would be talking about how unfairly illegal immigrants are treated in factory farms. Something has to be done about these unfair treatments we can’t allow managers to treat their workers like nobody just because they are illegal.
If you were a factory owner how would you treat your workers? Would you treat them unfairly because they’re illegal? Or would you treat all your workers the same? The use of illegal immigrants is very common especially in factory farms. Immigrants are afraid to stand up for themselves thinking they are going to either loose their jobs or get deported back to their country, that they put up with a lot of non sense. It’s not easy as an illegal immigrant to come to a new country where they believe they are going to be treated fairly. Less do they know those people who pretend to help them are the ones abusing their rights, rights they don’t know anything about. We have to find a way to stop this unreasonable treatment against people who come here for a better way of life.
Throughout the years this has been a big problem in the United States and in other countries. This has been a widespread phenomenon. According to a book titled “The New Public Health” by Theodore H.Tulchinsky, Elena Varavikova , Many immigrants and there families move with seasons for farms or other temporary work. Immigrant leave there belongings aside and other things in their country to come work in the United States at factory farms where they don’t even get paid well. Immigrants are often dependent on exploitative employers willing to provide only subsistence wages, and a possibly hostile surrounding community (The New Public Health pg 280). Immigrants do not complain about their wages because they are afraid of being deported to their country. Many of them are spoken in a very nasty way and can’t or even try to defend themselves.
Illegal aliens are easily subject to exploitation since they have no power to assert their rights. They have no way to file complaints against employers who abuse and mistreat them in a manner which violates federal labor law. The ones who do so stand a good chance of being caught and turned over to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) for deportation. Recognizing that illegal aliens must maintain anonymity employers pay their undocumented workers substantially lower wages and subject them to much harsher working conditions (Ronald Reagan and the politics of immigration by Nicholas laham). Its not right to treat the people who work there butt off like animals without giving them at least the little amount of rights they deserve even if they are here illegally. Many people think that illegal immigrants are here to take away their jobs or steal their health insurance, but in reality most of them don’t even know that they can get help because they are afraid.
Managers at factory farms have the same mentality they have for the animals they kill as they do for workers meaning they treat them with out any type of value. Managers don’t care weather or not their employers ate or cut them selves, all they care about is the job getting done fast for the companies profit to keep going up. They know most of the people, who work their need the job and would do anything to keep it, that they have their rules that have to follow if not your getting fired. According to Food Inc when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle there was a beef trust that weald in an enormous power, Immigrants from Easter Europe were being abused in the absence of any government regulation. IBP is one of the companies that still uses this bad way of treating workers (Eric Schlosser, Food Inc). When you listen to things like this you wonder well, what has the government done about it? Teddy Roosevelt took on the beef trust and labor unions slowly organized meat packing workers and turned it to the best industrial job in the United States (Food Inc). The government did do something to try and help these workers but unfourtantly wasn’t enough because everything went back to how it was. These companies started getting bigger and in order to serve the need of there meat packing industry they started cutting wages and making sure there weren’t any union and also speeding up production.
The majorities of immigrants that work in these factory farms are from Mexico and had to come to work here because they lost their jobs. Many of them used to work in corn fields but lost their jobs because of NAFDAC (National Agency for FDA control). NAFDAC led to a huge flooding of Mexican corn selling it as cheap American corns which lead to Mexican workers to loose there job (Food Inc). So these companies took advantage and brought many of those immigrants to work for there factories. So when you think about what’s going on you ask yourselves why, why if they bring them to work here when they don’t need them anymore they call immigration on them to take them away. The government should be doing something about this. There isn’t a way that the government doesn’t know what’s happening to these poor working people.
I have always thought of immigrants as the hardest working people in the United States. Many times you see how hard they work and don’t know how much they are getting paid. I have heard people say they would hire a Mexican immigrant to do their yard job or to work at there restaurant instead of an American Citizen because they know the immigrant won’t ask for a raise or more money. It’s sad that even sometimes we as a society think this way towards them, that even we abuse the rights they should have a hard working human beings.
Workers are vulnerable to injury from machinery, illness from constant exposure to fecal bacteria and animal borne diseases. Due to the nature of this work and because it is so low paying, the people performing these duties are mostly undocumented immigrants easily exploited because of their precarious legal status.
Besides the fact that workers in factory farms have to deal with bad treatments they also have o deal with bad working conditions. Immigrants that work in Slaughter houses for example suffer from many injuries and many of those injuries have been loosing their fingers or even there own life’s. According to “The Most Dangerous Job” by Eric Schlosser one of the workers lost two fingers due to one of the machines. When he was back to the following week his supervisor told him “If one hand doesn’t work use the other”. When hearing something like this you wonder if its true, you would never think there are so many cruel people in this world. A supervisors job or even a managers job is to protect their workers to make sure nothing happens to them and if something does happen make sure they get the proper care. Many of these workers get injuries and are sent home just to heal but aren’t able to visit a doctor. Most of the times if the workers are considered useless they a persuade to quit.
There exists a specific law which allows farmers to recruit people in other countries to come to the US to perform farm work. Often referred to as a “temporary worker program,” or the H-2A program, this law provides visas for up to 45,000 agricultural jobs a year. This program protects immigrant workers’ rights to fair wages, benefits and transportation, and regulates minimum-work guarantees, working conditions and housing for foreign workers. It even stipulates that workers who complete a farm season must be provided with transportation back to their home country. While this program seeks to protect both U.S. and foreign workers from abuse, violations of the law persist. Many of the immigrants that are working in these factory don’t know about this law that does protect them from all this injustice.

In conclusion Immigrants come to the United States to work very hard and deserve the same respect that other workers get. Managers from factory farms and other factories treat there workers just like they treat animals. Workers should stand up for themselves and stop being afraid of what might happen to them . Many of them have been loosing their lives and their family get nothing in return. The government should act and do something more about it before this problem becomes bigger then it already is.