Chop Stop

[July 25th, 2007]

Three cars belonging to workers swept up in the June 12 immigration raid at Fresh Del Monte Produce remain parked outside the North Portland plant six weeks later.

The cars, which haven't moved since the raid, are an oddly stationary reminder of the 167 undocumented Del Monte workers whose lives remain in limbo (See "Chopping Block," WW, June 20, 2007, and "Chop Shop," May 2, 2007). Some workers have already been deported. Others are on house arrest or in detention.

Back inside the Del Monte food processing plant, the staffing agency that provides workers for the site has changed twice since mid-June. New workers come and go, and production has slowed to a small fraction of what it was months earlier, when the plant was open all day every day.

As of mid-July, only about 80 men and women worked at the plant, which once operated with five times as many workers, almost all of whom were Latino. The new workers are black, white, Asian, Latino and Native American, and they now earn a starting salary of $8.25 an hour, 45 cents more per hour than the largely Latino workforce they have replaced.

I know this because on June 27, two weeks after the raid and nearly two months after the publication of "Chop Shop," I applied to work at Del Monte to understand how the business was now operating.

I filled out a job application with the Remedy Intelligent Staffing office on Hayden Island, which had to move into a larger office to staff Del Monte, branch manager Dawn Inlow said this week. I listed my work history but didn't tell Remedy that I was a WW intern.

They did ask me for two forms of ID. But I began work on a Friday despite having no formal safety training and never having watched what was supposedly a mandatory safety video. During my four days at Del Monte, where the motto is "say yes to the best," I was asked to sign something saying I had watched the video anyway.

I worked from 5 pm until midnight on my first day. My assignment: to clean the equipment that dices up to 40,000 pounds of onions in one eight-hour shift.

I worked alongside six others who had all been hired after the raid. No one was quite sure how long they would last. One of them, a 20-something father of two, worried aloud that he might not be able to stand the work. He was already considering working at a gas station or convenience store instead.

Though I'd earned $10 an hour cleaning equipment on the swing shift, I called the Remedy office again and asked for an $8.25-an-hour assignment cutting fruits and vegetables. When I returned to the plant for my second day, assignments for what appeared to be a couple dozen food-processing tasks seemed to change several times, creating chaos among the relatively new workers.

Though the work remains the same, the culture in the plant has changed. Broccoli stalks, known as "bones," are collected in giant plastic bins the size of hot tubs. Before the raid, small handwritten signs with the Spanish word huesos, or bones, used to be attached to those bins for the non-English-speaking Latino workers.

And the food cart that used to sell non-alcoholic sangria, steaming tamales and $1 beef tacos no longer serves lunch from Del Monte's parking lot.

According to a class-action lawsuit settled last August for $400,000 against Del Monte, workers regularly worked overtime without extra pay. But my co-workers were continually frustrated by the fact that they were unable to get 40 hours of work per week. In the four days I was there, I worked one eight-hour shift. On another day, I worked four hours.

Despite the lack of work now, Remedy's on-site manager, Eddie, whose last name I never learned, told me that within a month and a half there would be 380 people working at the plant—about the total before the raid. Sandwich boards outside the plant now invite prospective employees—in Spanish and English—to apply for those positions. Remedy's Inlow says a second shift is scheduled to begin next month.

Meantime, a "for rent" sign sits in the window of American Staffing Resources—Del Monte's staffing

agency before the raid—on North Lombard Street in St. Johns. The U.S. attorney's office continues its investigation of American Staffing Resources and Del Monte.

Del Monte did not return calls seeking comment.