New Policy Brief highlights important links between trade policies, immigration flows and labor conditions in the Meatpacking industry

In sum: Industry giant – Smithfield is winning and workers are losing.

Between 1993 and 2000 some 2.3 million people left agricultural jobs in Mexico.[1]Currently undocumented workers make up more than a quarter of the work force inanimal slaughter in the U.S.[2] Why the exodus from Mexican farm labor to the slaughterhouse shop floor? Though it might be convenient for us to believe these workers came for their piece of the American Dream, a new policy brief, “Hogging the Gains from Trade; The Real Winners from U.S. Trade and Agricultural Policies” connects the dots to reveal a far darker reality where food sector titans profit while workers bear the burden of forced migration, exploitation and criminalization. Timothy Wise andBetsey Rakocy’s report uses the meatpacking industry as an example to paint a clear picture of how “the confluence of agriculture, trade, immigration, and labor policies has pushed cheap commodities south and driven people north.” Industry giants benefit from the subsidized feed prices, tariff-free imports and exports and a favorable investment climate in Mexico that the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA solidified in 1996.

Since its passage Smithfield - the world’s largest pork producer – saved an average of $284 million/year from low feed prices.[3] While all these real economic perks are ending up in the hands of multinational companies, Mexican farmers undermined by the flood of cheap feed from the U.S. are forced off their land in search of work elsewhere. Where? The very samelarge meatpacking companies like Smithfield have been found actively recruiting undocumented Mexican workers knowing that they can pay them exploitative wages because of their precarious legal status. [4] The increasing criminalization of undocumented immigration keeps Smithfield’slargely immigrant workforce vulnerable to deportation if they speak out against injustice and the likelihood of labor organizing low. As if to add insult to injury, minimal penalties for labor law violations and lax enforcement on the whole make unionizing even more difficult for workers.

As Wise and Rakocy point out, “Government policies inevitably create winners and losers. It is clear that Smithfield and other large livestock firms stand with the winners.” This policy brief offers avaluable reminder of the ways in which our past policies have rigged the game for immigrant workers in the food system. Armed with this poignant analysis, the task of immigration reform is an opportunity to re-assess our priorities as a nation and to reshape the rules of the game. by Zoe Brent Download full report here.