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Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

 
Nebraska beef company
fires 200 Somali workers
 
BY FRANK FORRESTAL  
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska—Somali workers report that almost 200 of their coworkers were fired by JBS Swift in a dispute over the company’s refusal to give them time to pray during the Muslim month of Ramadan. The firings of the workers came on the heels of a week of protests and walkouts at the meatpacking plant here.

This is not the first time that Somali workers have fought for prayer breaks. In early September, at a Swift slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, hundreds of Somali and other Muslim workers walked off the job for similar reasons. Swift then fired about 120 meat packers. In May 2007 more than 100 Somali workers at the Grand Island plant walked off the job to protest company denial of prayer breaks.

In 2005, 300 workers walked out at the Tyson beef plant in Norfolk, Nebraska, after the company fired 10 workers for “unauthorized breaks.” Later United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 271 won the right to two 10-minute breaks for all workers, which would allow Muslim workers time to pray.

The two-shift beef slaughterhouse in Grand Island employs about 2,500 workers—the overwhelming majority of them Latino immigrants. In the aftermath of the December 12 immigration raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which resulted in 252 arrests of mostly Latino workers, the company began hiring African workers, especially Somalis, but also Sudanese and other Africans, to meet the labor shortage. A large part of the plant is now composed of African workers, of whom the big majority are Somali. The workers are represented by UFCW Local 22.

After several hundred Somalis walked off the job September 15, Swift altered the break on second shift so that Somali workers could make their final daily prayers at sunset. But the new schedule required other workers to start their break 15 minutes earlier. Swift also reduced their hours and forced them to work on Saturday. These workers then walked off the job.

Many of these workers also raised other demands, including better facilities for handling workplace injuries, the need for sanitary bathrooms, better parking, and “being treated with respect as a human being instead of being treated like a machine.” In discussions with workers as they left the plant, a good number of Latino and Sudanese workers expressed anger at what they considered preferential treatment given to the Somali workers. But two older Mexican workers said that they had no problems working with the Somalis and that the dispute had been blown out of proportion.

At the Somali community center, which is located in Grand Island’s Latino community, Abdi-Qader Hirsi said, “Our conflict is not with the Latinos, the company is the one making the divisions. They refused to come up with a just solution.”

To fill its growing labor shortage, Swift is bringing Cuban workers from Miami to Grand Island, according to the daily Independent.  
 
 
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