Blog Entry 19

                                  “The New Industrial Migrants”

Summarizing Part l:

      According to the article “The New Industrial Migrants” from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, it is stated that people from Mexico since 1980s, Central America and Southeast Asia started to come to the america to the rural area of Colorado.However, here meatpacking jobs were offered. It is clear that slaughterhouse offers thousands of jobs, but they randomly have people quitting or being fired. In recent, 75 percent of people working at the plant in Greeley. They don’t speak English and most of them are Mexicans who live in the developing areas close to the slaughterhouse. Generally, slaughterhouse pays $9.25 per hour, a third lower than forty year ago. In addition, they only offer health insurance to workers by establishing condition like who have been working more than six months, and also vacation pay after a year. In 1980s, Arden Walker explained some of the “advantages” of the high turnover. He said, “insurance, as you know, is very costly. Insurance is not available to new employees until they’ve worked there for a period of a year or, in some cases, six months. Vacations don’t accrue until the second year. There are some economies, frankly, that result from hiring new employees.” Finally, Meatpacking turnover makes difficult to maintain the work force unionize but much easier to control.

Summarizing Part ll:

           In the article it is explained that, IBP company begins to recruit migrant labor and they are the  first companies who recognize that new immigrant would work for lower salaries. This company has recruited poor people in the country among them who are homeless from New York. Recently, IBP established a labor office in Mexico City, where it makes advertisements by radio media by offering jobs in the United States. They send all the recruited people by bus from rural areas in Mexico to the America. The Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] estimates that there are 25 percent of the meatpacking workers in states like Iowa and Nebraska are not legal. But IBP disagreed that they are still hiring or looking for non-legal immigrants.However, they also explain that they are might not American people but if they don’t get the job than who would take that type of job. Moreover, immigrants or poor people health insurance can be very low-cost, so slaughterhouses such as IBP take advantage of it in order to make more money.