At the farthest end of the Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market, just past Chow Trading Co. and Lancaster Quality Pork, an inconspicuous black-and-white sign marks the presence of a very conspicuous tenant.

The building houses the local warehouse for Agriprocessors, the largest kosher meat producer in the country. Agriprocessors is best known for its slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, which was raided in May in what authorities have called the largest single immigration raid ever. The raid has been followed by intense scrutiny of the way Agriprocessors treated the nearly 400 undocumented immigrants who were arrested.

But Agriprocessors’ legal collision with immigrants began long before the raid, here in Brooklyn, where dozens of workers move palettes of meat between refrigerated rooms and trucks that take the beef and poultry to stores and restaurants around New York. The company has been locked in legal battles for the past three years over its immigrant workers, who wanted to unionize the warehouse because of what they described as mistreatment.

“We were treated like garbage,” Joel Garcia, a former truck driver at the Brooklyn warehouse, told the Forward. “We were doing a lot of work for not a lot of money. And if we said anything, we got fired immediately.”

The company declined to comment on specific conditions at the warehouse.

Workers at the warehouse eventually voted in September 2005 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has also been involved in a scrappy battle to represent the workers at Agriprocessors’ Iowa slaughterhouse. After the election in Brooklyn, the company came back with an unusual argument. Lawyers for Agriprocessors said that the company had determined that 17 of the 21 workers who had voted were undocumented immigrants. Their status had not been brought up before, but after the union vote the company said that the immigrants were not eligible for employment, much less union membership. The workers went on strike and were soon replaced.

Since then, three rounds of judges have ruled that Agriprocessors must recognize the union, pointing to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision that granted undocumented immigrants protection under the National Labor Relations Act. The company has appealed these decisions, and at the end of June, lawyers for Agriprocessors petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. The company’s petition argues that “if the votes of illegal workers are counted in union elections, unions may have an incentive to encourage illegal aliens to conceal their undocumented status.”

Experts in labor law say that the Agriprocessors case is not likely to be heard by the Supreme Court, due to the 1984 ruling, but the case has already succeeded in maintaining the status quo at the Brooklyn warehouse for three years.

“Every day that goes by is one day less that they have to negotiate” for a contract, said Alvin Blyer, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that has overseen the Agriprocessors case. “This delay is certainly very financially beneficial.”

Beyond the legal issues, the situation in Brooklyn opens a window onto the way Agriprocessors has treated workers outside its flagship Iowa slaughterhouse, and suggests that the complaints about working conditions that have arisen in Iowa were not isolated.

Full Story: http://www.forward.com/articles/13997/