Feds accuse SC poultry plant of illegal hiring
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The company that runs a South Carolina poultry plant knew its managers were hiring illegal immigrants at a facility raided in October, federal prosecutors said in an indictment released Thursday.
U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins added Columbia Farms Inc. to an indictment that already charges plant manager Barry Cronic and personnel manager Elaine Crump of illegally hiring workers at a processing plant in Greenville.
In the indictment, handed down by a federal grand jury earlier this week, Columbia Farms Inc., is named in nearly 30 charges. Through Crump and Cronic, the company knowingly continued to employ 29 illegal immigrants, the first of whom was hired in November 2001, prosecutors said.
The managers had been accused of telling employees to use falsified documents and could face both fines and prison time if convicted. Columbia Farms itself could face additional fines.
North Carolina-based House of Raeford, which owns the plant, said Thursday it doesn't knowingly hire illegal immigrants and is cooperating with investigators. The parent company has not been charged.
"For nearly a year Columbia Farms Inc. has cooperated and will continue to cooperate with the Federal government in every step of their investigation," Dave Witter said in a statement. "Columbia Farms contends that it has followed all state and federal employment laws and looks forward to vindicating the Company's position in a court of law."
An attorney for Columbia Farms did not immediately return a message.
The investigation into the company first broke in June 2008, when federal agents arrested five plant supervisors after finding what appeared to be false information on employment records. A month later, personnel manager Elaine Crump was arrested and charged with telling employees to use falsified immigration documents.
The situation intensified several months later, when scores of federal agents descended on the plant in October and detained more than 300 suspected illegal immigrants. Witnesses said employees screamed and scrambled to get away, but agents blocked the entrances.
That raid came close on the heels of others across the country. In August 2008, more than 600 suspected illegal immigrants were detained at a Mississippi transformer plant in the largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.
And several months before, federal immigration officials swept into Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant, in Iowa, detaining nearly 400 workers and seizing dozens of fraudulent permanent resident alien cards.
In the aftermath of the South Carolina raid, prosecutors said a review of immigration paperwork for 825 employees showed more than 775 contained false information. Most of the illegal workers swept up in the raid were quickly deported, but others pleaded guilty and are serving time in prison for criminal charges like using illegal documents and false Social Security numbers or re-entering the country illegally.
The following April, Cronic, the plant's manager, was indicted with knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Prosecutors said Cronic began hiring illegal immigrants at Columbia Farms in 2000 and kept hiring them until the October raid.
Crump, Cronic and the company itself are scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Greenville later this month.
Also the news story appeared on WSPA
What Did They Do?
What did the company do to upset the Feds? There's more to this. Check the company's competition, maybe they're politically connected.
Nothing like taking care of your friends by enforcing the law.
A business owner should be able to hire
whoemever he/she wants. These immigrations laws are tyrannical.
This is in response to the arguement that comes after this post
I agree with atrickpay on most counts, HOWEVER, i believe both of you fall short in an unstateed endorsement of all things industrial.
I believe people should be able to work some of the abundant land in whatever country they live. Many in sweatshops would not think it a better option at ALL compared to the agricultural ways of their forefathers where 1) sustenance is easier and 2) healthcare is better and 3) the land is not polluted in the name of gross materialism.
The problem here is that the corporations have already destroyed the "contractual landscape" and "bought up" all of the land that used to be farmed by many of the indigenous people who now find little choice but to work in "sweatshops." I am not one to say that "nobody" would want to work in a sweatshop, but i'd bet good money that at least half of the employed under these types of conditions would go back to farming if they had a choice. At least half.
The best health care is plant medicine and common sense - it is quite inexpensive, too. As an aside, i wish more Americans would stop associating the "cost" or "price" of their healthcare with its quality.
Yeah Right!
Requiring business owners to,
1) pay at least minimum wage
2) have safe working conditions
3) pay time and a half for overtime.
This is real tyranny. It's common practice to fire Americans and replace them with illegals who can't and won't complain no matter what. This is what happens in the real world that isn't libertarian make-believe.
I completely agree
Those 3 things are tyrannical. They are the jurisdiction of the contract between the employee and employer not of the State.
Got it!
At least one libertarian wants to bring back sweatshops.
You got that right, John!
Actually, some of these youngsters don't really know what they want..
they just love to complain...
and their supposedly older and wiser elders
just go along for the ride.
It's all very sad...
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It is good and proper to respect the U.S. flag, perpetuated with the blood of American heroes. It is a fatal mistake not to recognize those who wrap themselves in the same flag to cover up their crimes against the American people.
~ Sherman H. Skolnick
. @ @ . Power to the People!
@ O @ -----> PEOPLE
. @ @ . NOT Corporate Entities!
In a libertarian world, you wouldn't have corporations.
This is where sweatshops come from. As do the reasons for your three examples.
They only exist because government granted them permission to. That is an intervention into the free market. Small, local business are more responsive and responsible than corporations BY DEFINITION. Competition would drive any idiot who tried to be unfair to his workers out of business. Many libertarians refuse to accept this, but it is as true as self-ownership.
Corporations are permission to do business in a limited liability capacity. That is not natural. It is an intervention into the market that is a distortion of natural market and legal forces. It skews behavior. Eliminate that, and businesses are truly competitive again, not just for product sales but for labor as well. As long as corporations exist, you must have massive regulation and a draconian tort system to try and correct the imbalance created by the very existence of the limited liability nature of the corporation in the first place.
Wouldn't it just be so much easier to stop chartering corporations and make people to be held accountable for their actions?
Lol sweatshops in developing countries are actually a good thing
See:
a) Why Are Wages Low in Developing Countries? by Art Carden
b) How "Sweatshops" Help the Poor by Tom Dilorenzo
There's nothing funny about sweat shops.
I understand about free market ideology. I went through my Ayn Rand period. Does the free market always come before human decency? There are times when we need to rise above our ideology and just do the decent thing. But the true ideologue can never make an exception.
Did you read those articles?
Sweatshops help and are a positive thing for people in poor developing countries.
Cut the vague rhetoric John. What is your argument? Are you saying that sweatshops are not helpful and beneficial to people in developing countries? Don't beat around the bush.
If memory serves I've read the one by DiLorenzo.
What's vague about opposing unsafe working conditions to achieve economic progress? Why do I need to read economic arguments I've seen before? I know the routine.
The idea that we should always come down on the side of economic progress and the free market, with no exceptions, is ideology.
Most sensible people pursue their self interest, not some political code.
This is why a libertarian party is doomed to failure because of a general lack of common sense.
Not sure what you are getting at John...
Nothing's vague about that. I never said that was vague...I was referring to your lack of putting forth your argument.
Absolutely. I never said it wasn't.
And don't forget that you're idea that we should sometimes side with concerns beyond economic progress and free-markets is also ideology.
Now, I'm still not sure what you are getting at John. I agree with both points you raised here. So where do we disagree?
Different standard for tyranny
Your standard kicks in at a lower level than mine.
Having actually worked once in a sweat shop where two men in separate incidents died because of unsafe working conditions, I realize that employers don't always act in their own economic best interest.
At the start I said being required to maintain safe working conditions is not tyranny. You disagreed.
OK, I think I see where the confusion came in
OK, I think I see where the confusion came in. I think you made a typo. You listed 1,2, and 3, and then said:
From your post here, it sounds like you meant to say that that is not real tyranny.
Well, I believe in liberty. And as one who believes in liberty (ie. a libert-arian) I have a very low threshold. I think that is completely normal. Are you implying that you are fine with a 3rd party group (ie. politicians) coming and violating the voluntarily agreed upon contract between two individuals? That sounds like what you are implying. If so, you are not very libertarian. The right of contract is a fundamental derivative of the principle of liberty.
So do I. Employers are imperfect and make mistakes.
Voluntary Agreement (Contract)
We have a difference of opinion about what is a voluntary agreement. I believe we both would agree than if Man A confronted Man B and said, "your money or your life", and Man B gave it up, this would not be a voluntary agreement.
But what if Man B was starving and Man A offered employment with pay insufficient to end his starving condition? Is Man B making a voluntary agreement if he accepts? If Man B can't walk away is it voluntary? Doesn't voluntary require the possibility to accept or reject?
It's been a long time since I read "Grapes of Wrath", but as I remember that was the dilemna of the Okies. The Companies played them against each other to keep wages to a minimum.
I suppose to a libertarian the agreement is voluntary, and that is why I am not one of them. Libertarianism needs to be tempered by some moral system.
Absolutely, the starving man
is making a voluntary contract:
Yes.
No, of course not. But in this situation, he can walk away (and keep going hungry). So, it therefore fulfills the conditions of being voluntary.
On the verge of death
Yes you can claim he can walk away and accept death as his counter option to the contract. But at that level the contract could also be called voluntary if a man put a gun to his head and said, join my company or die. In fact our corporate system essentially does this in many respects, by giving government grants of exclusive privilege (private landholdings).
Children born into the system are largely forced to play by the rules of the existing powerbrokers to have any chance to accumulate capital and direct their own lives, regardless of how unfair and misguided those powerbrokers are. With the agglomeration of capital into the hands of less and less people, options for better deals become much more slim.
With exclusive right to land, (an intrinsic source of food and shelter) should come some responsibilities to the rest of humanity. Particularly, living wages to employees and not harmfully polluting surrounding areas.
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Con.man is my newly invented epithet for Congressional representatives; particularly those disinterested in the people's freedoms, rights, and divinity. Try it yourself, you'll find it serves you better than your Rep. ever did.
What's with these arguments?!
Are you guys socialists? These are the same arguments that people like Thom Hartmann use ("a hungry man isn't free"--meanwhile he never defines the term 'free'.)
Where the hell do you get that? What's your definition of the term 'voluntary'?
"Living wages"? What, are you, a Marxist?
Truthfully I am a realist
I respect your ideology, however I believe all ideologies ignore the myriad of mitigating factors of our real world due to the inadequacy of the human brain to hold all of reality proper in it's head.
Consequently I believe that we should try to compromise between the variety of perspectives present in our society, and whenever possible mediate via local government or no government.
Mostly, I am just presenting that their are other ways of looking at the problems of human misery without simply spouting "freer market". Freedom doesn't solve every issue, and full fledged freedom can invite force and mistreatment too (though it has the upside that a vengeful response is more possible than when facing off against a government army).
IF anything of our own doing will "solve" our problems, it will be intelligence married with action and animated by divine grace. It will not be a catchall ideological phrase.
OK that's fine,
but you didn't answer my question on what your definition of the term 'voluntary' is.
My ideal sense of voluntary
Something that is done not out of necessity, not coerced by another person or entity, not simply a demand of biological need, not entreated by addictions, and not goaded by psychosis:
an action done as an expression of pure love, in the service of God, humanity, or certain high ideals (such as freedom). Voluntary inherently entails joy.
If you are not joyous in your act, your mind is not in a voluntary state.
An old Muslim philosopher once said (roughly), "it would be better than a man happily take alms before the temple, than work without love in his heart."
OK, we have different definitions
I don't like you're definition of voluntary because if it's adhered to consistently I think it could be used to justify massive government interventions.
A business owner CAN hire whomever they want unless
they are contracting with the Federal Government, they are the Federal Government (or a Federal Corporation) or they have ELECTED to be treated as one of those by attempting to follow immigration law that is only written for such employers.
Congress has no authority to tell private companies who they can and cannot hire on any basis. The exception being that if they are doing business on a government contract, people employed ON THAT CONTRACT must meet federal regulations just as if they were working for a Federal Corporation or for the government itself.
Look up the definition of "employer" and "employee" in the immigration title and this will be readily apparent. Participation for private employers is 100% voluntary.
So, you're saying that
the widespread belief is false?
precisely.
many people accept what they are told without verifying it for themselves. Much of what people complain about isn't that Congress actually regulates them, it is that they haven't bothered to check if Congress really did make that law apply to their circumstance. Following a law you aren't required to is just plain dumb. Complaining about it is worse. If people and companies stopped following laws that weren't written for them voluntarily, then a whole lot of mess would be cleaned up in a hurry.