CrowTankieRobot [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2020

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  • After the raids in 2006, the company needed to replenish its work force fast. Swift executives set up a war room where they posted maps on the walls and circled target cities for recruitment. The company’s H.R. team advertised on the radio and in local newspapers. They bought space on billboards. They sent representatives to job fairs and set up a recruitment station at unemployment offices. But few workers would bite. Finally, Swift started offering free bus service to Cactus from Amarillo. Somali refugees began to apply, and in 2007, after JBS acquired Swift, it stepped up the hiring of refugees to maintain production.

    It’s surprising that this story actually reveals one of the key problems of industrial agriculture, the vertical integration and monopolization which has grown exponentially since the '80s–particularly through M&As and finance capital buyouts. The working conditions in these plants are often beyond description, and the article only obliquely mentions the latest work hazard: Covid. A family member lived in Sioux Falls, SD during the worst of the pandemic years, and they told me of the panic that spread through the community as workers at the Smithfield plant there got sick and died. It turns out that Covid spreads best in cold, damp conditions, which makes meat processing plants uniquely dangerous. Then there was the spectacle of Donald Trump insisting that the plants stay open during the worst of the pandemic, which resulted in huge spread of Covid outside of the confines of the plants and the predictable deaths of workers from the virus.


  • What a joke of an article. These “think” tank morons just phone it in, every damn time. FEE has to be among the very worst, with seemingly no standards for what kind of garbage gets posted on their site. I recall that another FEE “writer” was featured on a Chapo episode some time ago, and their prose read exactly like this Jon Miltimore idiot. I wish I could remember more details–but I do know that the individual in question was a college dropout who had basically bounced around from marginal job to marginal job and somehow ended up at FEE. That seems to be how they find these people–I’m guessing that the pay is lousy and they prey on not-too-bright recent college grads or dropouts who have run out of options. I also noticed that Miltimore is affiliated with “Intellectual Takeout”, which is a really lame project run out of the Center for the American Experiment, a regional right-wing “think” tank in MN. “Takeout” exists basically to provide prefabbed term papers with right-wing themes which lazy students can copy in order to “pwn” their supposedly Marxist professors. However, colleges now use sophisticated anti-cheating software, and this is a really great way to get blackballed from higher ed by being expelled for plagiarism.