Vibrant Fort Morgan today
Posted by Ann Corcoran on January 10, 2016
It all boils down to the fact that ‘Big Meat’ doesn’t want to pay higher wages and so they have become completely dependent on refugee labor. In the meantime, they are changing the face of rural America.
We reported the Ft. Morgan Cargill plant’s woes here as Somalis walked off the job with demands for special accommodation for prayer breaks.
Now here is the news that Cargill has changed its re-hiring policy to get many of those fired Somalis back to work. (While having given CAIR an opportunity to press for sharia workplace compliance!).
From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Cargill will change its hiring policy — allowing employees to be potentially rehired 30 days after termination, not 180 days — in response to a walkout by Somali workers in Colorado.
After a dispute over Muslim prayer time, about 150 employees at Cargill’s sprawling Fort Morgan, Colo., plant didn’t show up for work for three days — grounds for termination. They were fired. Some of those workers claimed they weren’t allowed to take prayer breaks, while Cargill claimed that it was still following its policy allowing the breaks.
Minnetonka-based Cargill said in a statement Friday that it will change the hiring policy at all of its North American beef plants, allowing former employees terminated for “attendance violation or job abandonment” to be considered for rehiring 30 days after being fired. The workers would have to reapply for their jobs.
“We believe the change in our beef business policy related to how quickly a former employee may be eligible to reapply for positions at our beef plants is a reasonable update to something that’s been in place for quite a few years,” Cargill Beef President John Keating said in a statement.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been representing many terminated Somali workers, said it welcomed Cargill’s change in hiring policy, though it criticized Cargill’s prayer break policy as ambiguous.
Now see at the very end, the admission that ‘Big Meat’ is changing America by changing the people.
They can get away with cheap wages as long as the federal government (and their resettlement contractors) continue to bring them fresh refugee laborers every year. While they get away with paying low wages, you supplement the refugee family’s income with welfare payments! What a business model for the meatpacking industry.
Over the past few decades, U.S. meatpacking plants — including in Minnesota — have increasingly relied on immigrant communities for labor. About one-third of Cargill’s workers at Fort Morgan are immigrants, or come from immigrant families from Africa, and are predominantly Muslim. Much of the rest of the workforce there is of Hispanic descent.
Here is an interesting map showing Cargill meatpacking and other facilities in North America.
To learn more about how refugees have changed Fort Morgan, click here where we have an extensive archive going back several years.