SIDEBAR: AFRICAN-AMERICANS
New hires, most black, find a grim daily grind
By Dahleen Glanton
Tribune national correspondent
Published December 11, 2006
WRIGHTSVILLE, Ga. -- Eighteen-year-old Tamara Gregory is earning more money than ever. Her $8-an-hour job at the Crider Poultry plant pays for her tidy one-bedroom trailer and keeps her in nice outfits to wear to the dance club on Friday nights. But after Christmas--if they hold out that long--she and her friends plan to quit.
It is not the 45-minute ride to and from the plant in Stillmore on a $10-a-day shuttle that has turned them against the jobs they landed after federal agents raided the plant and drove away the illegal Mexican workers. It's not even that they never see daylight, leaving for work at 4:30 a.m. and getting home after 6 p.m. What they hate is the job.
"My knuckles are sore from pulling the guts and hearts out of chickens," said Kalisha Oliver, 19. "It's not a good sight, and I'm not going to spend the rest of my life doing this."
Crider officials are scrambling to find workers. Over the last decade, the company gradually replaced African-American employees with Hispanics. Now the company has again turned to blacks and anyone else it can find, including about 40 felons from a detention center and 30 homeless men from a mission, to keep running.
An investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement found about 600 of Crider's 1,000 employees had illegal documents. Crider officials said they had been unaware of the problem and before the raid began firing those who could not produce legal documents.
To rebuild its workforce, the company increased starting wages by 40 cents an hour. Most employees earn $7 to $8 an hour plus bonuses and overtime. Still, officials have recruited only about 450 employees.
As Gregory and Oliver see it, Crider is a brief stop on their journey out of Wrightsville, a rural town about 40 miles from Stillmore. Gregory would like to be a teacher or a pediatrician someday. Oliver wants to be a director of nursing. But neither has a diploma, having failed the high school graduation test.
The problem with Crider, they said, is supervisors don't treat them with respect.
"They say the Mexicans can fill up a truck in 20 minutes and it takes us 45 minutes to an hour," said Oliver, who gave up a job as a nursing home aide to work at Crider. "They want us to be like the Mexicans, working for little or nothing and not complaining. But we won't take it."
The women are aware of the company's dilemma and take advantage of it, sometimes going to work late, or not at all.
"The rumor is that they are going to pay for the Mexicans to come back and help them get a green card so they can let all of us go," Gregory said.
"One day all of us are going to be hanging on the line instead of the chickens," said Oliver.
When James Stanford, 29, heard Crider was hiring, he left his home in Douglas and moved 100 miles to Stillmore. After three months, he quit.
"I was hanging out on the porch when a guy came by and told me about the job," said Stanford, a welder who had been out of work a year. "He said they had rooms for us and I was thinking at least a Holiday Inn. But when I got here, it was a different story."
The man who hired him was a private contractor, and the free room turned out to be in barracks owned by Crider. Inside the filthy two-bedroom units, men and women sleep on mattresses on the floor and toilets overflow. Crider officials said they plan to shut the barracks.
The barracks used to be filled with illegal immigrants. Now the tenants are all African-Americans. "When we pulled in here, I felt like I would be used and discriminated against," Stanford said. "I felt degraded. I've never lived like this and I can't wait to get out."
