Chop shop

The knives cut through the air like paper fans on a hot day. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

One after another, gleaming green heads of broccoli are held out in sacrifice. Suspended above stainless-steel worktables, they look like wedding bouquets about to be tossed ceremoniously into the air.

Instead, they are briskly trimmed into precise one-and-a-quarter-inch pieces. The florets drop. The piles build. In a matter of hours, more than 2,000 pounds of broccoli will meet this fate.

Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Pause. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

No one speaks.

Across this cavernous warehouse, which sits in an isolated industrial section of North Portland's St. Johns neighborhood, another two dozen workers hack at pineapples, cantaloupes, honeydew and watermelons. Using swift repetitive motions, workers diligently shave the rinds off the fruit. Mixed together and tossed in a bin the size of a hot tub, the rinds smell like a fruit smoothie. Naked, the watermelons resemble giant pink lungs.

Like the other fruit, the watermelons are soon reduced to bite-sized chunks. Uniform. Rindless. Convenient. Contextless. Within days, these chunks will sit on the shelves of Oregon's Wal-Marts, Costcos and Fred Meyers—on party platters bound for Cinco de Mayo celebrations, 40th-birthday parties and corporate meetings across Portland, the state and beyond.

It's been a long journey from the farm to this Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in North Portland, where raw produce arrives on trucks in 600- to 1,000-pound boxes and leaves in plastic containers stacked into new boxes. On one recent afternoon, the broccoli was from California, the fruit from Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico.

Curiously enough, the workers were from equally distant locations: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. Men and women, they included teenagers and those in their twilight years, people who had traveled thousands of miles to end up here.

Some might call their journeys decisions born of courage and limited economic options at home. Others would call them illegal aliens, lawbreakers exploiting a shattered immigration policy in their adopted land.

However you categorize them, it's undeniable that the forces that draw them here are as real as they are invisible. And those forces can be summed up in three simple words: the global economy.

The phrase may ooze sex appeal. Yet there's nothing sexy about this particular outpost of the new international order. This isn't a Las Vegas-style casino in Macau, drawing tourists and their money from Dubuque to Dubai. Nor is this the Portland arm of Intel, where New Delhi-trained engineers develop products that are made in China and sold in São Paulo. Nonetheless, this North Portland plant is as much an expression of the global economy as other more vaunted enterprises.

But here, on the tip of the peninsula formed by the Columbia and Willamette rivers, the plant reveals a grittier side of that economy, one that depends on breaking laws to sustain the rules created by others.

One year ago on May 1, Mexico's Labor Day, major American cities, including Portland, experienced massive rallies intended to draw support for pro-immigrant legislation. "Un día sin inmigrantes" it was called, as workers in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and elsewhere walked off their jobs. It was all part of an effort to show everyday Americans what would happen to the U.S. economy without the 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in this country.

Even President George Bush got the message; four months after the rallies, at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, he said, "People are sneaking in here to do jobs Americans aren't doing."

But as American lawmakers, including the president, struggle to figure out what to do about the immigrants who seek to fill our jobs, the economic engine driving them to our country pushes more of them here. "When our American firms set up operations in Mexico and Central America, they are helping create the conditions for the emigration of poor workers to the United States," says Saskia Sassen, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of the book A Sociology of Globalization. "These corporations produce commercial products for our market, and in that process they displace local farmers, who must move to the cities to survive. Many of those displaced farmers then become immigrants to the United States. And those immigrants may well wind up working in firms that are processing the goods that were imported from their own countries."

Less than 10 miles north of downtown Portland, the Del Monte plant is an illustration of this peculiar cycle and a little-noticed reminder that Portland is not built on the backs of the creative class alone.

Says Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, an assistant law professor at Willamette University who has fought on behalf of Del Monte's North Portland workers: "There are so many steps from the field to the table that it's easy to lose sight of the workers who feed us."

It's close to freezing cold inside this football-field-sized warehouse in North Portland. I know because I've spent three days working at the plant, and on a recent Friday at 8 am the thermometer registers 36 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm regretting not having brought a hat to wear under my green hairnet. I can see my own breath and the respiration of the other 24 workers beginning their eight-hour shifts.

A highly unpleasant odor, which will cling to my jacket for days, hangs in the air. It's the smell of freshly diced onions tinged with chlorine, and my eyes sting from the fumes. It's so loud inside the plant that, once production is fully under way, many of the workers will resort to flinging bits of fruit and vegetable at each other to catch someone's attention. When all of the conveyor belts, washing machines and industrial-strength produce dryers are on, it sounds as if a plane were about to take off overhead.

Two weeks ago I was hired as a quality assurance supervisor at Del Monte, which means I'm monitoring the size, sweetness and expected shelf-life of the chunks of fruit taking shape on the plant's production floor. I'm also watching to make sure there's enough chlorine in the water to kill any potentially dangerous microbes when the produce is washed in the large tanks that run across the production floor.

For this, I earn $8.50 an hour, 70 cents more than Oregon's minimum wage. I am white, and the only other workers on the production floor who aren't Latino are four other women who also work in the quality assurance department. Three of them are Ukrainian, and the fourth is from Rwanda. I earn more than the workers cutting and packaging the produce, and some of my work can be performed from the comfort of the company's lab, where there's heat and samples to nibble on. In one day, between 200 and 300 production workers—chopping everything from green peppers to carrots to pineapple—will clock in and out at the plant.

Not one of the production workers appears to speak fluent English, which is a hint, although hardly proof, that their arrival in the United States may have been clandestine. Three of them volunteered to me on our lunch break that they don't have papeles (papers), a sort of polite shorthand for saying they are illegal immigrants. Despite this, one of them tells me she has been cutting broccoli for Del Monte for four years. The cold and the repetition bother her, she says. But her friend from a neighboring village in Veracruz tells me there are too few jobs for women in Mexico. "We have to take care of the children, but they don't pay us for that there," she jokes in Spanish.

At Del Monte, the men and women earn starting salaries of $7.80 an hour, Oregon's minimum wage, another 19-year-old worker tells me. If he worked 40 hours a week, his annual salary of $16,224 would fall nearly $1,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. If those three family members were U.S. citizens, they would qualify for food stamps.

For some of the workers, though, this salary is enough to support relatives in the United States and send money to family at home. One laborer, a man in his 20s, tells me he has worked at Del Monte for three years. He says he earns about $600 every two weeks and that he and his wife, who works as a waitress, send $500 back to Mexico every 15 days. He, too, volunteers that he doesn't have papeles. Indeed, four years ago he came to the United States by walking across the desert with a coyote, a paid guide, he says. Once inside the country he rode in a van to Los Angeles, where his family paid $1,000 to the coyote, who then allowed the man's release.

It's cold inside the plant because lower temperatures extend the shelf life of the fruits and vegetables passing through.

To make it through their shifts in the cold, the workers are all wearing winter hats under their hairnets. They have warm liners on under their blue rubber gloves. Under their white lab coats, they're wearing bulky sweatshirts, winter jackets and multiple layers of pants and socks. Many of them are also wearing blue plastic aprons, which cost $1 at the plant and are generally reworn until they're damaged. And while an older woman hands out the disposable gloves for free from the sprinkler room that doubles as a supply closet, the liners cost 75 cents a pair and are nonetheless required, according to the employee handbook.

As they work, water that's being used to wash the fruits and vegetables overflows from bins in every direction and runs down the sloped floors of the factory. There are drains running the length of the production floor. Yet moisture creeps up my pant legs, making me uncomfortable and chilly despite the fact that I'm wearing two pairs of socks under rubber Land's End rain boots, as well as a double layer of long underwear.

I got a job at the plant by filling out an application with the staffing agency that hires workers for Del Monte in St. Johns. I used my real name but I didn't tell them I was a reporter. Under the "work history" section of the application, I listed my job last year at a food co-op and a babysitting gig during graduate school three years prior. I didn't mention graduate school—or college, for that matter.

Nearly two months after submitting my application, I hear nothing from the staffing agency. But when I return one Tuesday morning and ask for a job again, an employee there offers me two options: a receptionist position at a salon in the Pearl District or the quality assurance job at Del Monte.

That Wednesday, at my interview at the plant, my soon-to-be supervisor asks me if I completed high school and whether I'm good at math. She then tells me a few of the plant's rules: no makeup, no jewelry, no fake nails. I start the next day at 7:30 am.

I quickly learn that the cold inside the plant attacks workers' toes and fingers first. Our noses run. But nowhere in the three safety videos I'm asked to watch on my first day is there any mention of this unsanitary problem. In one video, a man with a striking resemblance to a young-looking Jerry Seinfeld instructs me in proper hand washing. I'm left to my own devices to figure out how to wipe the snot running down my face without contaminating the rubber gloves I've just cleaned with soap and water.

Last August, the Oregon Law Center (a legal aid group that receives no federal funding and can therefore represent any client regardless of his or her immigration status) announced that Del Monte had agreed to a $400,000 class-action settlement with workers who had been employed at the North Portland plant between 2003 and 2005. According to the suit, an estimated 1,800 workers over three years allegedly had been denied their full wages, including overtime, in a battle that involved the local plant's former staffing agency. That agency, Quality Manual Labor Inc., is now out of business, and a new staffing agency, American Staffing Resources, has taken over the job.

According to court documents, several workers complained to Quality Manual Labor in December 2004 about inadequate safety measures at Del Monte, including the lack of proper gloves for workers who routinely handled cold, wet produce. All eight were fired, and in response they sued Del Monte and the staffing agency.

The class-action settlement grew out of that first dispute. It further alleges that Del Monte and the staffing agency failed to give workers adequate breaks, didn't pay workers while they were putting on and taking off their protective clothing (which is required under Oregon law) and didn't pay overtime wages when workers put in more than 10 hours in a single day. Regardless of the total number of hours worked in a week, food-processing workers who log more than 10 hours in one day must be paid overtime, according to Oregon law.

In the settlement, Del Monte denied wrongdoing, and the company turned around and sued Quality Manual Labor for breach of contract, arguing the staffing agency was responsible for the employees. Nowhere in the dispute was the possible hiring of undocumented immigrants at issue.

Still, the allegations seemed to point to the fact that there was a sweatshop—albeit a cold one—operating in Portland, a city that professes to care both about its food and liberal causes such as worker rights.

My three-day experience suggests that the work at Del Monte is mindless, boring and repetitive. It requires standing largely in one place for eight hours a day. And it clearly depends on the compliance of a large group of relatively powerless workers.

Yet I saw no one get verbally abused or injured. Workers were given two paid 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute unpaid lunch each shift.

It is, nonetheless, a violation of Oregon regulations to charge workers for mandatory safety equipment. And I noticed several workers put on their lab coats and hairnets before clocking in, although putting on required safety gear is considered work, too, under Oregon law.

That means employees should be suiting up while on the clock, according to Cunningham-Parmeter, who represented the workers in the discrimination case and the class-action suit.

Mark Griffin, executive vice president of North Carolina-based American Staffing Resources, says workers are supposed to do that on the clock. He also says his company doesn't require employees to pay for protective gear, but he questioned whether glove liners would be considered "protective" under the law. Cunningham-Parmeter says they are and that he's concerned workers might not be earning their full wages.

As if to make sure no one is ever late to the floor after a break, the clock in the lunch room is five minutes faster than the clock on the production floor.

Del Monte, whose corporate headquarters are in Coral Gables, Fla., owns 10 fruit and vegetable processing plants across the U.S., according to its website. But the company's plant in North Portland, situated several hundred feet off Lombard Street and surrounded by trees on a four-acre lot, is the biggest. It also processes the widest variety of products, my supervisor tells me.

It has operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week since 2000. Its sliced green peppers are shipped to Pizza Hut. Chopped onions, lettuce and tomatoes are sent to Taco Bell. Fruit cups from Del Monte appear on the menus of local Jack in the Box restaurants, and its sliced tomatoes garnish sandwiches at KFCs.

Surprisingly little of the work at the plant is automated. Strawberry tops are sliced off individually. Celery stalks are cut by hand then bagged one at a time by workers. All of the fruit is peeled and chopped by real people wielding regular kitchen knives.

"Food is unique," says Elizabeth Ransom, an expert on globalization who is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. "In many other industries, we're able to mechanize to the extreme. But despite the efforts we've made in trying to make, say, pineapples uniform, there's no such thing as the same exact-sized pineapples coming out of the fields. As a result, it's really hard to mechanize all aspects of production."

Because of the added cost of processing the food in the United States, companies such as Del Monte rely on low-cost sources of fruits and vegetables. Often, the least expensive items come from Central America, even when the cost of transporting them is considerable.

"We all don't play under the same international rules," says Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union in Washington, D.C., speaking about producers in the United States and abroad. "As long as trade agreements continue to go down the road without requiring [that all trading partners have] the same environmental, labor and health and safety standards, we're always going to be the highest cost producers."

Occasionally, I'm told, workers do cut themselves and the production lines have to stop to clean up blood spills. Bits of slimy fruit that fall on the production floor prove to be slip hazards. But many workers' greatest fear of seems to be getting run over by the forklifts whizzing across the production floor as they bring in 1,000-pound boxes of raw cabbage and haul out equally heavy containers of diced onions and other products. One woman recently broke a toe when her foot was run over by one such forklift, another worker tells me.

Despite these conditions, the female workers at least try to maintain some feminine dignity; hanging over the quarter-inch slits in the stalls in the women's bathroom are carefully folded strips of plastic bags, which shield from view the women using the toilets behind the peach-colored doors.

President Bush appears to have gotten it half right when he said immigrants fill jobs Americans don't want. What he failed to mention was the economic conditions creating those jobs.

Increasingly, American consumers demand fresh fruits and vegetables year-round—and at the lowest possible prices. North Portland's Del Monte plant exists because of this insatiable appetite.

Del Monte declined to comment on its hiring practices, but American Staffing Resources' Griffin says all employees must go through an intensive application process intended to ensure they have all required documentation proving their eligibility for employment. "I can't say that things don't pass through," Griffin says. "If that's the case, then someone is defrauding us."

Del Monte clearly benefits from its arrangement with the staffing agency. Del Monte imports the produce, and the staffing agency imports the workforce.

Yet the flow of foreign produce to this country is infrequently linked to the movement of labor here. And one year after the massive May Day marches, this aspect of the global economy remains largely ignored.

"These are two circuits that are rarely put together," says Sassen, the globalization expert. "And what happens if we actually look at them at the same time? How could this change our thinking about immigration?"

Del Monte Fresh Produce is not the only food processing plant in Portland. A similar business, Duck Delivery, operates in Northeast Portland.

Del Monte prides itself on the company's "vertical integration," which means it grows some of the food it processes, such as pineapples from Costa Rica.

Del Monte's worldwide operations enjoyed net sales of $3.2 billion in 2006, according to the company's website.

Local cabbage and onions are processed at the St. Johns plant, but much of the produce comes from outside of the state and the country.

WWeek 2015