Iowa I Opener: Postville and Agriprocessors

On my first day in Iowa, I drove through Postville. The name sounded familiar--but I was almost in Decorah before I remembered why the place was significant: Agriprocessors. But a dark recess of my brain prompted me to pull over just north of town to capture this sunset scene. I knew I'd need a photograph--I just didn't know why.

In 1987, Aaron Rubashkin a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, purchased a shuttered meat processing plant in the small northeastern Iowa town, renamed it Agriprocessors, and turned it into a kosher slaughterhouse. The residents of Postville, mostly of German and Norwegian descent, were at first put off by the 250 ultra-Orthodox Jews who settled in their town, who among other things, brought their aggressive New York driving habits with them.

As I wrote in my Guttenberg post, Iowans are suspicious of outsiders--they viewed my father, a Chicagoan of Irish descent, as Al Capone.

The plant was initially very successful and was soon the largest Kosher slaughterhouse in America. Postville's population increased by a third, many of the new jobs went to Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants. Quite a few of them, it turns out, were in the country illegally, which is something Agriprocessors management pointedly reminded them when the United Food and Commercial Workers began its organizing efforts in 2005. Funny, they weren't concerned about the immigration status of their workers earlier. Such threats are common in the meat processing business--a woman I used to run with in a marathon training group says the "deportation card" was used by management at the Nebraska meat packing facilities she tried to organize for that same union.

Among the complaints about Agriprocessors included low pay, dangerous workplace conditions, inadequate training of staff, sexual harassment by management, illegally employing juveniles, and forcing workers to use filthy bathrooms. Remember--we are talking about a food processing plant.

In 2008, Immigration Custom and Enforcement raided Apriprocessors, its largest raid at that time. By then it's believed that Postville's population was half Hispanic; prior to the opening of Agriprocessors, it was negligible. Nearly 400 people were arrested, over a third of the workforce, on various immigration charges. In a cruelly ironic move, ICE processed the suspects at a cattle fairground in nearby Waterloo. Most of the workers served five month prison sentences, then they were deported. That fall Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy.

Several Agriprocessors supervisors were found guilty of fraud and immigration law violations, including Shalom Rubashkin, the son of its owner. He is serving a 27 year prison sentence and was ordered to pay $27 million in restitution.

Last year a Canadian Orthodox Jew purchased the plant, it now operates as Agri Star. The new management recruited many Somali refugees living in Minnesota to work there--the melting pot churns again. But if the jobs paid better, certainly people would relocate from Cedar Rapids and Dubuque to Iowa's upper right hand corner.

I drove through Postville on its main drag, Lawler Street. I saw a group of Hispanics standing in front of a Mexican restaurant, and a group of blacks, presumably Somali, doing the same in front of a laundromat. Well, perhaps Postville is just a pot. But the sun hasn't set on the town yet.

To be sure, Postville will find itself in the national news once again. Hopefully, it will be a charming human interest story. Or maybe I should return for a follow-up report.

The "Welcome" sign for Postville declares itself to be the "Hometown to the World." That's an interesting boast, if not a persuasive one.

Next: Wyatt Earp

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Dodge City has got khat

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