Jobs Lure Farm Workers to Midwest : Employment: Meatpacking company with a history of safety violations has recruited 200 employees from Ventura County.

More than 200 Ventura County residents, most of them farm laborers unable to find work because of the recession, have accepted job offers over the past six months to work at a Midwestern meatpacking company with a history of safety violations.

Last month, officials from meatpacking giant IBP Inc. came to Oxnard’s unemployment office to recruit workers for their Dakota City, Neb., beef slaughter and processing plant. It was the latest in a series of recruiting trips by the firm to Ventura County.

“The agriculture is very difficult these days, and we can’t find any landscaping jobs, either, because there’s no water,” said Salvador Ortiz, 25, as he waited in line at the state Economic Development Department’s Oxnard office for an interview with IBP officials.

“They say it’s very nice up there,” said his friend, Hermilio Zamora, 23, who also wants to relocate. “We’ll have to put up with the cold, but one has to fight.”

In November, 1988, IBP paid $975,000 to settle $5.7 million in fines leveled by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for allegedly ignoring safety hazards and failing to report more than 1,000 injuries and illnesses in its Dakota City and Joslin, Ill., plants, which employ about 4,800 workers.

Company officials say IBP has vastly improved working conditions at its plants, and state officials say they are satisfied with the meatpacking firm’s recruitment practices in California.

But critics say the company is preying on people who are desperate for work without informing them of its safety record.

“A lot of people take these jobs because they’re desperate, but they find out real quick that Nebraska ain’t Southern California,” said Joe Kinney, a former livestock consultant who now heads the Chicago-based National Safe Workplace Institute.

“The work is grueling and hazardous, the towns are very small and anglicized--Mexicans and Chicanos aren’t readily accepted,” said Kinney. “IBP hires these people because they’re exploitable and don’t ask questions. They are workers with very low expectations.”

Since IBP began recruiting in California a year ago, about 1,000 Latino fieldworkers--at least 200 from Ventura County--have made the move, company officials said.

Workers are offered starting pay of $6 an hour--a more than $1 an hour increase over the average wage for farm workers here--travel expenses and five days of free housing. They also get health and dental insurance, steady hours and full-time employment, none of which migrant workers normally receive.

IBP officials say they are recruiting in California because the labor pool in the Midwest is too small to accommodate their expanding operation.

“The baby boom is over, and the number of people entering the work force is shrinking,” said IBP spokesperson Gary Mikelson.

“Since we couldn’t meet our needs within our local region, we looked at where unemployment was high and came to California. We found a lot of people who were interested. It was a match made in heaven.”

But complaints against IBP--the largest beef and pork processing company in the country with 17 plants in eight states--prompted the Iowa Legislature last year to pass a law protecting slaughterhouse employees from out of state. IBP has seven plants in Iowa.

The Iowa law requires that meatpacking companies pay for return tickets for workers who decide to go back within four weeks of their first day of work. It also requires that companies with more than 10% non-English-speaking employees hire interpreters and liaison officers to provide information on social services.

Employers also must keep a job-information sheet signed by each employee recruited outside a 500-mile radius. The sheet outlines minimum work hours, health risks and job responsibilities.

“IBP has been very good at recruiting Hispanics,” said Mike Peters, a former Iowa assemblyman whose legislative committee championed the bill last year.

“But when they arrive here, they find out that this is extremely hard, sometimes crippling work. You might cut 200 pieces of meat the same way in an hour for eight hours a day. Your wrists become numb, and you could become partially disabled. I would not recommend workers from California or anywhere else in the country do this kind of work for $6 an hour,” he said.

As part of the 1988 OSHA settlement, IBP agreed to launch a three-year program at all of its plants to reduce on-the-job injuries--many of which have been caused by repeated hand, wrist, and arm motions.

Mikelson said IBP was unfairly singled out by OSHA for problems prevalent throughout the meatpacking industry. Moreover, company officials said, IBP has made strides in improving workplace conditions in the past two years.

“Our effort is to adapt tools and work methods to our employees, in order to reduce physical stress on the job,” said IBP vice president Ron Goodrich. “Some changes won’t happen overnight. However, we believe our efforts are on course.”

In 1989, IBP spent more than $7 million on safety improvements including equipment redesign, revamped employee-training programs and a new medical management tracking system, Mikelson said. That year, IBP’s efforts earned the company 18 of the top 29 safety awards handed out by the American Meat Institute, an industry trade organization, Mikelson said.

Steve Bjerklie, the San Francisco-based editor of Meat and Poultry Magazine, said the awards are deserved. “IBP has invested serious dollars in safety programs,” he said. “They’ve made good progress in correcting the serious problems they had.”

Bjerklie sees nothing wrong in IBP’s efforts to recruit California farm workers. “Meat processing is a tough job, but I can’t see how picking fruit is any better,” he said.

Workers at the meat-processing plants must perform fast, highly repetitive motions with meat-cutting knives and hooks. Sometimes they must cut into frozen carcasses. Workers also pull, push, and throw heavy sections of meat onto fast-moving conveyor belts.

“It’s a very tough job and most people are not accustomed to it,” said Frank Casaday, president of Local 222 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, to which Dakota City IBP workers belong. “A lot of people come here after working in the fields, and they find out this is an entirely different ballgame. Some of them stay, but the majority leave.”

The California immigrants now in the Dakota City area are straining local resources, Casaday said.

“There’s a housing shortage, there’s medical problems, dental problems, and the health-insurance program at the plant does not kick in until after the 60-day probation period. We try to do what we can, but the community’s human resources are stretched to the limit.”

More than half of IBP’s recruits quit before their probation period is over, Casaday said. IBP officials would not disclose the company’s turnover rate.

“Turnover is higher than in other industries, because this is not glamorous work,” Mikelson said. “But we are taking steps to retain as many workers as possible.”

IBP cannot retain local employees because of the low wages, Casaday said. “Ten years ago, wages started at over $10 an hour, but the pay has gone down dramatically. When they go out and hire farm workers in California, it doesn’t help our position. If they paid enough money for local families to stay in the Midwest, there would be no need to hire people from out of state.”

Wages in the industry plummeted in the 1980s, IBP officials said, when packing companies began to adopt assembly-line techniques--which require mostly unskilled labor.

“The whole industry has changed,” Mikelson said. “Ten years ago, you needed a higher-skilled person (and the pay was higher). Most of the work we do now at the plant was being done at the local butcher shops.”

IBP operates with a 1% profit margin, Mikelson said, and it cannot afford wage increases. But the union, whose contract with IBP is scheduled to expire in July, says the company can and should pay higher wages.

“That 1% profit margin gets rolled over at least 15 times,” Casaday said. “Our sisters and brothers in Canada are getting paid $14 an hour.”

California EDD officials say IBP is hiring people who otherwise would be unemployed.

“We have no problem with IBP,” said spokeswoman Suzanne Schroeder from EDD headquarters in Sacramento. “We’ve had no complaints . . . and our department takes and solicits complaints from our offices around the state.”

Moreover, Schroeder said, “we have received several letters from workers thanking us for the IBP jobs.”

But Claudia Smith, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance in San Diego, said: “We’re talking about a company with a checkered history, and it’s hard to believe that in two years they’ve turned it around.

“They are picking recruits out of a very vulnerable segment of the population,” Smith said, “and we want to make sure they are not stranded in the Midwest without a support system.”

Smith has sent several letters to the EDD office in Sacramento demanding that IBP include in its recruitment pitch information about workers’ compensation rights and the Iowa law protecting out-of-state workers.

IBP agreed in late December to develop a new recruitment package including workers’ rights information. It decided the protection granted in the Iowa law would be extended to workers at all of its plants, said Lavada Desalles of the EDD’s Job Service Division.

But three months later, the new recruitment package was still being developed. “We’re working on it,” Mikelson said.

Meanwhile, during IBP’s March 5-15 recruitment trip to Ventura County, 11 men and one woman--most of them unemployed farm workers--were invited to a hiring seminar at the Oxnard EDD office.

Through an interpreter, IBP recruiter Susan Hewitt told candidates that Dakota City is a small town in Nebraska, about 1,400 miles from Los Angeles. “It’s cold in the winter, but it rarely snows in April.”

The slaughterhouse, she said, “is hot, humid, smelly and very bloody.” The processing plant is “damp and a little bit cold.”

As for the work itself, Hewitt said: “You will be very sore during the first three or four weeks. After that, it’s a lot easier.”

Then she went on to list the perks--a week’s vacation each year, bus service for $15 a week, salary increases every few months, overtime, health insurance and nine paid holidays. Workers can make as much as $9.43 an hour after several years of employment, Hewitt said.

The recruits then watched a video showing smiling men and women wearing IBP uniforms, white hats and plastic safety armbands.

Although some of the workers were shown hacking at carcasses with knives and saws, only soothing music could be heard. “All we need is popcorn,” Hewitt joked.

No mention was made of workers’ compensation or paid return trips if things did not work out.

“Sounds good?” Hewitt asked.

Most of the recruits nodded and smiled.