Today's Stories

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Solidarity Forever

Raiding the Packing House

By PATRICK IRELAN

Early in May, federal immigration agents raided a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, where they arrested almost 400 illegal immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico. This sort of thing happens frequently throughout the Middle West. The only thing new about this raid was that many of those arrested were sentenced to five months in prison for illegal use of social security cards.

Whenever anyone asks why companies like this one hire illegal immigrants to work in their plants, the bosses always say that native-born Americans won’t work in packinghouses. This statement is a lie and an insult to every worker in the United States. Let me tell you a story.

In 1962, I got a job at the John Morrell and Company packinghouse in Ottumwa, Iowa.  The man who hired me wore a crisp gray suit that summer morning.  He told me he hoped I wouldn’t join the union, by which he meant Local 1 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA).  He also said the company would pay me $2.50 an hour. By the standards of that distant era, two-fifty an hour was good pay for a kid like me.

I didn’t tell the guy that three of my uncles worked there and that all of them belonged to the union. I didn’t mention my father and all my other relatives who worked for railroads and other industries and that all of them belonged to unions. I didn’t want to get fired before I had even begun, so I kept all those statistics to myself.

Off I went into the belly of the slaughterhouse, a clandestine union sympathizer surrounded by over three thousand union members.  I worked first in one place, then another.  Sullen foremen gave me the least instruction possible, then went away and seldom came back.  In the bacon department, all the workers were woman.  After the foreman (a man) walked away, a middle-aged woman took a motherly interest in my welfare.  “Watch out,” she said.  “You’re getting too close to the saw.”

I was getting too close because the blade of the band saw moved so fast I couldn’t see it.  A band saw slices bacon as neatly as you like, but it can also slice fingers and thumbs.  The nice lady then showed me what the foreman hadn’t, the safe way to slice bacon with a band saw.  That short, plump, brown-haired, fair-skinned woman in a white dress, wearing the required hair net, sent me home that night with the required cap on my head and my fingers and thumbs still on my hands.

I never worked in any department more than two or three days.  The noise level usually prevented conversation.  Finally I arrived in the canned-ham department, which stood on the top floor of one of the many interconnected buildings that formed the plant.  During my brief career as a packinghouse worker, this huge room was the only place I recall that admitted natural light.  Every other department could have instantly become as dark as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher’s cave simply by turning off the lights.

The foreman was an agitated little man of about my own height and weight, but twenty years older.  He led me to many stacks of cans on many pallets, located at the head of the five-pound-ham line.  While speaking faster than I thought humanly possible, he said, “Keep the conveyer belt full of cans.  Never drop one on the floor.  If you drop it, throw it away.  Sanitation laws.  They’re expensive.  Don’t drop them.  Don’t stack.  Keep the belt full.  Got it?”

I started to say I got it, but the man had already turned and walked away.  I began my task.  The belt started and stopped for reasons I never learned.  I kept it full.  Didn’t stack.  Didn’t drop.  Didn’t throw away.  Noticed sharpness at top edges of unsealed cans.  Noticed cuts on hands.  Foreman returned.

“Faster,” he said.

I looked at the belt.  “It’s full,” I said.

“No, no!  Like this.”  He picked up three cans in each hand and shoved them onto the end of the conveyer belt.  A few feet down the line, two or three cans fell off the belt.

I’d worked at the packinghouse over a week by then and had begun to doubt the judgment of the foremen.  “You told me not to drop them on the floor,” I said.  “They’re expensive.”  I picked up the cans and started to throw them into a trash hopper.

“Stop!”

“They were on the floor.”

He ignored my concern for the clean food and drug laws.  “You can’t throw that many away.”

I took this opportunity to raise another issue.  “I’m getting these cuts,” I said, showing him my hands.  “Can I wear gloves?”  I took a pair of jersey gloves out of the back pocket of my jeans.  Since I never knew what job I’d have when I got to the plant, I always brought a pair of gloves.

“No cloth gloves.  Rubber gloves.”

“Where can I get them?”

“Company store.  Down front.  Look!  More cans!”

I looked at the belt.  A tiny beachhead had opened.  I filled it and turned back toward the foreman.  Vanished.  I’d have to find the store on my own.

The line stopped for lunch at about eleven o’clock every day.  In addition, each worker got a number of short breaks each day.  You knew your turn had arrived when a man appeared at your side and said, “Piss break.”  The women in the bacon department didn’t use that vulgar term, but there were no women in the canned-ham department.  The union and the company had negotiated all these arrangements for the functioning of the human bladder, and the contract spelled everything out.  I don’t know how the contract spelled the part about the pee breaks.

When the line stopped for lunch, I gulped down the food my mother had prepared, then ran downstairs and found the company store.  An old guy with thin gray hair commiserated with me about the cuts and fixed me up with a pair of black rubber gloves.  I don’t remember how much they cost.  I returned to the canned-ham department, after which my blood no longer added its flavor to the hams.

* * *

The next day, I arrived at the canned-ham department with my rubber gloves, only to learn that I no longer needed them.  The foreman led me to the end of the room, where the line curved around and stopped someplace that I never saw.  He pointed at four men, all of whom were older and larger than I.  “Work with them,” he said.  “They’ll show you what to do.”  He walked away without making introductions.

Before the belt started to move, the tallest of my four comrades, a middle-aged man with an authoritative voice and manner, showed me what to do.  “We cut the hams,” he said, “and push the pieces down the cutting board to you.  You take a can off the belt, put the pieces in like this, put in a scoop of this brown powder, and put the can back on the belt.”  He demonstrated all this with perfect clarity.  From my new vantage point, I saw that five-man crews stood all along the line, ready to do exactly what we did.

I told my workmates my name, they told me theirs, and I promptly forgot them.  At the cutting board on my left, the man who’d shown me what to do stood beside me.  Another middle-aged man, shorter than the other, stood beyond the first one.  On my right, a short stocky black man about thirty stood closest to me.  A younger man—tall, lean, and white—stood beyond him.  At exactly seven o’clock, the belt started to move.

Each of the four men beside me made a variety of cuts on an entire ham.  No one made the same cut repeatedly.  So no one developed carpal tunnel syndrome, unlike the men and women in today’s disposable-worker packing plants.  The men worked steadily but without frenetic haste.  Each piece of meat reached me in the perfect size and shape.  I had the easiest job and managed to keep up with my coworkers.  The foreman maintained a studious absence.

As we got into the rhythm of the day, the two older men on my left began to talk.  Among other things, they talked about union matters. They were proud of their union and didn’t hesitate to say so. It turned out that the man who had shown me my job was the union steward in that department. He, not the foreman, was the most powerful man in that department, and I cannot begin to tell you how much joy it brought me when the steward later ordered the foreman to get out of his sight and never come back.

I subsequently learned that many of the workers at the plant were the children or grandchildren of coalminers. When John Morrell sent his nephew, Thomas Foster, from England to Ottumwa to open a packinghouse in 1877, Foster hired out-of-work coalminers because he knew they would work hard. He forgot or never knew that they were also rabidly pro-union. For example, John L. Lewis was born in a coal camp near Lucas, Iowa. Lewis eventually became the leader of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and later the CIO. Ottumwa really isn’t a good place to tell someone that American workers refuse to work in packinghouses.

The strike of 1948 is one of the most memorable events in Ottumwa’s union history. The strike was long and sometimes violent. On one occasion, when hundreds of workers, both men and women, blocked a boxcar loaded with meat, the company asked the county sheriff to use fire hoses on the strikers. But Sheriff Everett Orman, a Republican, refused.  “These are human beings,” he said. (Shelton Stromquist, Solidarity & Survival, University of Iowa Press, 1993, pp. 185-86)

But for the most part, Morrell could rely on all the elements of state power to side with the company. Nonetheless, for Local 1, the strike confirmed the wisdom of its faith in worker solidarity. For better or worse, many packinghouse workers across the country regarded Local 1 as the most militant local in the history of the UPWA. Nothing, however, could save the plant from ultimate extinction. It was too old and inefficient, the owners said. They wanted packing plants that were new, shiny, and more profitable.

In 1973, Morrell and Company closed the Ottumwa plant forever.  One thousand seven hundred men and women lost their jobs.  The company had already laid off hundreds of others.  By 1979, after two union mergers, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) represented all Morrell retirees in Ottumwa and other cities in the United States.  On January 25, 1995, after finding a loophole in its contract with the UFCW and making its case in court, the company cut off all health and life-insurance benefits for over three thousand retirees nationwide, including those for my last surviving uncle and hundreds of other retirees in Ottumwa. 

The Morrell Retirees Club in Ottumwa sought an injunction against the company’s actions, but failed to get it.  A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate by Tom Daschle of South Dakota failed to pass.  One elderly man in Ottumwa shot himself to death.  He did this, his son told the Ottumwa Courier, when confronted with hundreds of dollars in monthly prescription-drug costs he couldn’t pay.  John Morrell and Company won its final battle with the veterans of Local 1.

* * *

In 1974, Hormel built a small packinghouse near the remains of the old one and hired 120 production workers. The workers soon organized a union local, and by the early 1980s, employment had risen to over 800. For new workers, the starting pay was about $11 per hour. After a long dispute later in that decade, the union granted wage concessions, but Hormel soon asked for more. In 1985, workers at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, went on strike to protest these new company demands. The following year, Ottumwa’s workers, always faithful, struck in sympathy with the workers in Austin.

Hormel responded by firing 507 workers in Ottumwa. When an arbitrator later ordered Hormel to rehire the fired workers, Hormel hired some but not all. Instead, after many threats and delays, it announced that it would close the Ottumwa plant in 1987.

This event led directly to the arrival of Excel, which leased and eventually bought the Hormel plant. Excel is one of the “Big Three” packinghouse companies that now dominate the industry. Like ConAgra and Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), Excel obtains high profits by paying the lowest wages possible, opposing unions with fanatical zeal, and using high-speed production techniques requiring repetitive motions that often lead to cuts, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other injuries. Meatpacking is now one of the most dangerous industries in the United States.

Despite all this, when Excel advertised 450 jobs, over 3000 local workers applied. Although the workers successfully organized Local 230 of the UFCW, Excel threatened to close the plant if the workers asked for too much, which effectively reduced the union’s bargaining power. In the fall of 1988, the union and the company ratified a new contract. This contract rewarded workers with starting pay of $6.80 per hour and two weeks of vacation after three years on the job.

Faced with these wages, work without end, and repeated injuries, most workers found it impossible to continue by the time they reached middle age. Workers at Excel have told me that the company makes it as difficult as possible for employees to win benefits for injuries on the job.

Despite its frequent threats to close the plant, Excel continued to hire more employees. By 1998 over 1000 people worked there, although low pay, few benefits, and approximately 1000 injuries per year maintained a brisk turnover in the work force. Excel announced that it wanted to hire between 500 and 700 new employees. (Wilson Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride,” University of Iowa Press, 2000, pp. 123-131) Then the big lie went to work in Ottumwa.

Excel (now grandly renamed “Cargill Meat Solutions”) complained that Ottumwa had too few workers. By this time, the news media had already convinced millions of people in the United States that our workers would no longer take certain jobs. Something was wrong with our workers. We were all spoiled and lazy. Times had changed.

The big lie always reminds me of the history of the Morrell plant in Ottumwa, which at one time employed almost 4000 men and women, most of whom were either black or white, just like the people who had once mined the coal of southern Iowa. But now, suddenly, no one would work.

Paul McCrory didn’t know that no one would work. On November 16, 2005, McCrory, age 41, was on the job at Excel in Ottumwa. At about 9:20 AM, the overhead rails of a conveyer belt collapsed, fell on McCrory, and trapped him where he lay.

The paramedics, police, and fire fighters all arrived quickly, freed McCrory, and carried him to the Ottumwa Hospital, where at 10:03 AM, doctors pronounced him dead. (Ottumwa Courier, Nov. 17, 2005)

McCrory was married and had one child. He coached T-Ball, Little League, and Babe Ruth baseball. He loved music. The Iowa Department of Labor eventually fined Excel $80,000 for safety violations associated with McCrory’s death. (Ottumwa Courier, Feb. 10, 2006) I assume the company had no trouble finding another worker.

Because of the alleged labor shortage in Ottumwa, Excel said it would have to begin recruiting elsewhere. According to the Ottumwa Courier (Nov. 13, 2007), Randy Zorn, general manager of Excel, later said that the company had done its recruiting primarily in the U.S. Southwest. As a result, Ottumwa now has a new Latino population of between 2000 and 3000 people. I’ve talked to many Anglos in Ottumwa, and they all agree that the Latinos are hard workers.

But other statistics come to mind. Excel began recruiting in 1998 when it had about 1000 workers. (Wilson Warren, p. 130) It now employs about 2300 people, and about 30 percent of those are Latinos. (Ottumwa Courier, Nov. 13, 2007) If you do the arithmetic, you’ll see that the workforce now includes about 690 Latinos and 1610 black and white locals.

In other words, Excel now employs 1610 Iowa natives who allegedly won’t work and 690 Latinos who will work. What do the 1610 natives do all day, fry bacon for supper? It’s all part of the big lie, and one goal of the lie is to prevent a unified labor movement that includes both the locals and the Latinos. The bosses in this country want the black and white workers to blame the Latinos for their problems. If the workers want to win concessions from the companies, they have to resist this trick and build union solidarity.

The claim that working-class Americans won’t work is a lie. But they don’t want to die of injuries received on the job. They want jobs with safety, good pay, and good benefits. The lie was invented by industries that want huge profits and a surplus of throw-away workers.

The only thing that will correct this problem is a strong union movement that includes workers of all colors and ethnicities. A federal government sympathetic to the rebirth of healthy unions would help, but don’t sit around waiting for it to arrive. Now, as always, workers have to take control of their own lives.

Welcome to Iowa, amigos.  Venceremos!

Footnote: A portion of this essay first appeared in A Firefly in the Night, Ice Cube Press, 2007.

Patrick Irelan is a retired high-school teacher. He is the author of A Firefly in the Night (Ice Cube Press) and Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family (University of Iowa Press). You can contact him at pwirelan43@yahoo.com.

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