Lincoln didn’t free all of the slaves
One of the nation’s largest food processors has been treating mentally handicapped workers as virtual slaves, paying them as little as 37 cents per hour:
Last month, FBI agents, social services and health department officials in Iowa converged on a 106-year-old bunkhouse. It’s where dozens of mentally retarded men lived when they were not working for as little as 37 cents per hour gutting turkeys in a processing plant, according to news reports and documents released by state officials.
Some of the men had been working at the plant and living at the company-owned bunkhouse since the 1970s. The arrangement grew out of a Depression-era federal law that allows employers to pay disabled workers less than the minimum wage. Roughly 400,000 workers are currently covered by the law.
The 21 men in question are Texans who work for a company called Henry’s Turkey Service. According to reports in the Des Moines Register, Henry’s took advantage of a section of the labor law that allows the company to pay lower than minimum wage to disabled workers – and to deduct their living expenses from their pay.
Henry’s, a Texas company, in the 1970s started taking the deinstitutionalized men to Iowa, where they worked at a plant owned by West Liberty Foods, one of the nation’s largest turkey processors.
West Liberty released a statement to the Register saying it had an “agreement” with the turkey service and played no role in housing the men or paying their wages. Turkey service owner Kenneth J. Henry declined to comment but referred ProPublica to his attorney.
Because we have laws that protect most workers from this kind of abuse, it’s easy to forget that there are still plenty of evil people who live among us, eager to take advantage of any legal loophole that would enable them to abuse and exploit their fellow men. And there are always blood-sucking lawyers willing to defend these demons:
The men were treated well and the bunkhouse was comfortable, Iowa attorney David Scieszinski said. Further, he said the furor over the men’s situation is simply “politics” on the part of legislators who have never set foot in the bunkhouse.
“[Politicians] don’t know,” Scieszinski said to ProPublica. “But they start making political statements.”
But the worst part of the story is that officials have known about abhorrent conditions for workers at West Liberty Foods for at least 10 years:
In 1997, the county social department fielded complaints that the men had sustained bruises and unhealed fractures. But officials failed to act, with one official noting in an e-mail that he didn’t want Muscatine County to be left “holding the bag” for Texas’ residents.
A Labor Department inspector general’s report (page 20) shows that department staffers knew that in 1998, Henry’s Turkey Service claimed to pay about 50 men $5.65 an hour, but after deducting rent and board, ultimately gave them each $60 per month.
The company’s justification? It had to keep $60,000 that year to recoup the cost of renovations to the men’s bunkhouse that had been completed in the 1970s.
Last month an Iowa fire marshal noted the profusion of space heaters in the building and declared it unfit for habitation. Iowa social services officials moved the men from the home.
So the loophole that allows handicapped workers to be paid less than the minimum wage isn’t the only problem here. If federal and state officials had enforced current laws, this sorry practice would have ended a decade ago.
