The Los Angeles Times is reporting today on the termination of 200 food processor plant employees at Overhill Farms (motto: The kind of food mom would make, if she had a 225,000 square foot kitchen and 800 helpers). The plant is located in Vernon, California, an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. The workers were fired in connection with an Internal Revenue Service audit that found that 260 employees had provided "invalid or fraudulent" Social Security numbers. Many of these workers had served Overhill for over a decade without any scrutiny.
Most notable for what is being called a "computer raid" is that the Government took no action against the workers. It was Overhill Farms that swung the hatchet: the company issued pink slips on May 31, 2009.
None of the affected parties are too thrilled about this.
"This is not something the company planned to do, it's not something the company initiated and it's not something that benefited the company," said Alexander Auerbach, a spokesman for Overhill, which dismissed about a quarter of its 1,000-plus workforce. "Quite the contrary. We lost very good, very loyal employees."
As for the fired employees, facing unemployment in a down economy,
"We killed ourselves on the assembly lines for years, many of us have injuries from repetitive motion," said Bohemia Agustiano, 38, a mother of four from Huntington Park. "Now we're worth nothing. We're out on the streets. This is unjust, no one should be treated this way."
Food processing and agricultural labor is heavily undocumented. Now that Overhill faces the loss of 260 of "mother's 800 helpers", it should be instructive as to who their replacements will be. Will American workers step forward and take up this dangerous work, or will the firings set spinning a revolving door for hiring the same undocumented labor, using different documentation?
As for the Administration's goals of attacking illegal immigration, will squeezing employers like Overhill in turn lead undocumented workers -- men and women who have toiled in this country for years, raised kids here, and made the United States their home -- to give in, pack up and go back to their countries of birth?
The approach here seems a bit misguided, to say the least. Because of their impact on our clients' rights, Daniel Shanfield, Esq. Immigration Defense will continue to follow these immigration enforcement activities.
