VERNON, California – Teresa Robles starts her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor four miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours amputating her three legs, a repetitive move that causes her constant joint pain, but also earns $17.85 an hour to support her family.
So in early June, when 1,800 workers started whispering that the facility would close soon, 57-year-old Robles hoped it was just a rumour.
“But it’s true,” she said sadly at the end of her recent shift, “and now every day is a little closer to my last.”
The 436,000-square-foot factory, which dates back nearly a century, is scheduled to close early next year. Virginia-based owner Smithfield Foods said it would be cheaper to supply the region from factories in the Midwest than to continue operating here.
“Unfortunately, the escalating costs of doing business in California necessitated this decision,” said Shane Smith, Smithfield’s chief executive officer, citing convenience rates. benefits and voter-approved laws that regulate how pigs are raised.
Workers and company officials see a bigger economic lesson in the impending shutdown. They just differ in what it is. For Ms. Robles, it’s proof that despite years of often dangerous work, “we only do them once”. For the meatpacker, it’s a case of politics and regulation overriding commerce.
The cost of doing business in California is a perennial point of contention. It was quoted last year as Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that is Silicon Valley’s success story, announced that they are moving their headquarters to Texas. “There is a limit to how well you can scale in the Bay Area,” said Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla.
As with many economic arguments, this argument can be partisan.
Around the time Tesla pulled out, a report by the conservative-leaning Hoover Institute at Stanford University found that California-based companies were leaving at an accelerating rate. In the first six months of last year, 74 headquarters were moved out of California, according to the report. In 2020, the report shows, 62 companies are said to have relocated.
Dee Dee Myers, senior adviser to Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, countered by pointing to California’s continued economic growth.
“Every time this story comes out, it is always refuted by the facts,” said Ms. Myers, Director of the Governor’s Office of Economic and Business Development. According to Ms. Myers’ office, the nation’s gross domestic product grew at a 2% annual rate for the five-year period through 2021, while California’s grew 3.7%. The state remains the technology capital of the country.
However, production in California fell faster than nationally. Since 1990, the state has lost a third of factory jobs – which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, now number about 1.3 million – compared with a 28% drop nationally.
The Smithfield factory was an icon of California’s industrial golden age. In 1931, Barney and Francis Clougherty, two brothers raised in Los Angeles and sons of Irish immigrants, started a packing business and soon settled in Vernon. Their company, later named Farmer John, became a household name in Southern California, recognized for producing the beloved Dodger Dog and pastor al sizzling at meals. backyard cooking party. During World War II, the company supplied rations to US troops in the Pacific.
Nearly 20 years later, Les Grimes, a studio painter in Hollywood, is commissioned to paint a mural at the factory, transforming a bland industrial structure into a pastoral setting where young children chase the young the pig looks like a cherubic. It has become a sightseeing destination.
More recently, it has also been a symbol of the state’s social and political turmoil.
In explaining Smithfield’s decision to close the plant, Mr. Smith, chief executive officer and other company officials pointed to a 2018 statewide vote bill, Proposition 12, which requires meat. Pigs sold in the state must be from breeding pigs raised in spaces that allow them to move more freely.
This measure has not yet been enforced and faced a previous challenge United States Supreme Court This waterfall. If it is not overturned, the law would apply even to packaged meat outside of the state – in the way that Smithfield now plans to supply to the local market – but company officials say that in any In some cases, its passage reflects the unsuitable climate for pork production in California.
Animal rights activists have condemned the detention and treatment of slaughtered pigs inside the factory. Protesters pecked and provided water to pigs with snouts sticking out of bars when trucks arrived.
In addition to opposing Proposition 12, Smithfield maintains that per capita utility costs for pork production in California are nearly four times higher than those of the company’s 45 other plants around the country, even though they are from declined to say how it got there. estimate.
John Grant, president of United Food and Commercial worker Local 770, which represents Ms. Robles and other workers at the plant, said Smithfield announced the closure as soon as the parties began negotiating a new contract.
Mr Grant, who worked at the factory in the 1970s, said: “A total punch and quite frankly a shock.
He said raising wages was a priority for the union when it came to negotiations. The company offered a $7,500 bonus to employees who worked through the closure, and increased hourly wages, previously $19.10 at the top of the table, to $23.10. (Rates at the company’s consolidated Midwest plants are still slightly higher.)
But Mr Grant said the factory closures were an affront to his members, who have weathered the pandemic as essential workers. Smithfield was fined nearly $60,000 by California regulators in 2020 for failing to take appropriate measures to protect workers from coronavirus infection.
“After everything the staff did during the pandemic, now they are suddenly running away? They are ruining lives,” Mr Grant said, adding that the union was working to find new jobs for workers and was hoping to help find factory buyers.
Karen Chapple, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, said the closures were an example of a “greater de-industrialisation trend” in areas like Los Angeles. “It probably doesn’t make sense to be here from an efficiency perspective,” she said. “It was the end of a long migration.”
In fact, the number of food production jobs in Los Angeles County has dropped 6% since 2017, according to state data.
And when those jobs are cut, workers like Ms. Robles wonder what will happen next.
More than 80 percent of the employees at the Smithfield plant are Latino – a mix of immigrants and first-generation natives. Most are over 50, union leaders say. Union leaders say security and entitlements have kept people in their jobs, but the nature of labor has made it difficult to recruit young workers with better alternatives .
On a recent overcast morning, the air in Vernon was thick with the smell of ammonia. Workers wearing surgical masks, goggles and helmets entered the factory. The sound of forklifts humming outside the high fence.
Large warehouses spread across the streets of the area. Some sit vacant; others produce wholesale local pies and candies.
Ms. Robles started working at the Smithfield factory four years ago. For more than two decades, she owned a small farm-selling business in downtown Los Angeles. She loved her job, but when her brother passed away in 2018, she needed money to fulfill her wish to have his body taken from Southern California to their hometown of Colima, Mexico. She sold the business for several thousand dollars, then started working at the factory, earning $14 an hour.
“I am so proud,” she said, recalling her first months at her new job.
Ms. Robles is her family’s sole provider. Her husband has a number of health complications, including surviving a heart attack in recent months, so she is currently shouldering a $2,000 mortgage payment on their Watts home , Los Angeles. Sometimes her 20-year-old son, who just started working at the factory, helps cover the costs.
“But this is my responsibility – I have to deliver,” she said.
Robles has long said the Our Father every night before going to bed, and now she often finds herself repeating it throughout the day for extra strength.
“They’re kicking us out with no answer,” she said.
Other workers, like Mario Melendez, 67, who has worked at the factory for a decade, share that feeling of not being bored.
It’s an honor, he said, to know his hard work helps feed people across Southern California – especially around the holidays, when factory ribs, ham and sausages will be part of the celebration. of everyone.
But the factory was also where he contracted the coronavirus, which he passed on to his brother, who died of the virus, and so did his mother. He was devastated.
“A terrible shock,” said Mr. Melendez, who said he felt betrayed by the company.
So did Leo Velasquez.
He started working the night shift in 1990, earning $7 an hour bagging and packing bacon. A few years later, he switched to days, working 10-hour shifts.
Mr. Velasquez, 62, said: “I have dedicated my life to this place.
Over the years, his body began to deteriorate. In 2014, he had shoulder replacement surgery. However, he still hopes to continue working at the factory until he is ready to retire.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Where do I go from here, I don’t know.”
