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| Immigration agents raided Glenn Valley Foods on June 10. (ICE photo via Nebraska Examiner) |
After Immigration and Customs agents arrested roughly half its labor force, meatpacking company Glenn Valley Foods in Nebraska is looking for ways to start over.
The company had religiously used the federal system, E-Verify, to cross-check employees' eligibility to work in the U.S., but federal agents still arrested 76 workers "who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification," reports Eli Saslow of The New York Times.
Before the raid, Glenn Valley Foods was expanding with "new hires, new manufacturing lines, and new sales records [as] one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest," Saslow writes. "But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70%. Most of the workforce was gone."
Now, the company is piecing together a new workforce with a new human resource manager, Alfredo Moreno, who believes "the only way to truly prevent fraud is to scrutinize IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they aren't fake, and then interview each potential employee in person," Saslow reports. "The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen."
The raid cost Glenn Valley days of business, but slowly, a barebones crew formed, and some lines restarted. Meanwhile, Moreno and his tiny HR staff are still using E-Verify along with their additional verification measures to try to hire as quickly as possible. Still, almost none of their applicants are U.S. citizens.
Since the raid, the company's owner, Gary Rohwer, has "received phone calls from strangers who accused him of 'stealing American jobs,'" Saslow writes. "But Nebraska [has] a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. . . . 'There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,' Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. 'We’re caught up in a broken system.'"
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