Stillmore: Crider Poultry employing homeless, felons instead of illegal aliens

In September, ICE raided the Crider Poultry plant in Stillmore, Georgia, which resulted in hundreds of illegal aliens leaving the city. That resulted in pro-illegal immigration propaganda from Russ Bynum of the AP, Reason Magazine, and Patrik Jonsson of the CSM, as well as a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group indirectly linked to the Mexican government.

Now comes the news that Crider is hiring the homeless as well as felons on probation from the Macon Diversion Center; the homeless are provided by a local mission which is trying to recruit more workers for the plant. And, both Crider and the AP are still trying to buck the (legal) market for labor:

...To fill the gap, Crider also has been outsourcing jobs in its raw deboning plant to Alabama, has raised wages to attract new workers and has turned to an outside company to hire about 100 cleaning workers. The plant has seen its processing slow down because of the smaller workforce, officials said.

Purtle said the company is also spending more on hiring _ paying to bus in the probationers, for example _ and on training, because many of the new hires have poor attendance and quit quickly...

Desperate third world illegal serf laborers do indeed tend to work hard and without complaint, don't they? However, if Crider wants to abide by our laws, they'll have to learn about the legal employment market. At some wage or benefit level, they will find that attendance and retention improves dramatically. (That makes the somewhat questionable assumption that they're telling the truth.) If they have to rely on desperate third worlders to pluck their chickens, then perhaps that's a sign that they should go into another line of business or automate. The article also contains this bit:

Pastor Ariel Rodriguez said some people have gone back to Mexico, while the majority went to Kentucky, following a priest who used to live near Stillmore.

I wasn't able to find out who he's refering to, but hopefully the ICE will be hot on his heels.

Immigration · Mon, 11/27/2006 - 04:33 · · Importance: 1