Making consumption political...

An event that I felt compelled to write about was a panel discussion that I helped to organize related to the recent labor/human/animal rights violations in Postville, Iowa. In the past few decades, Postville has come to be known for the hybridity of its community; the town is an amalgamation of white, Christians individuals, the Orthodox Jewish community, and Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants. More recently, Postville has been the subject of controversy when immigration officials raided a kosher meat processing plant, Agriprocessors this summer, in which 388 workers were imprisoned in a federal penitentiary and/or deported – as one of the panelists noted, this incident marked the first federal criminalization of illegal immigration in the U.S.

The panel consisted of Professor Rachleff from the History Department, Rabbi Morris Allen of Beth Jacob synagogue, Melissa Rudnik from Jewish Community Action (JCA), a local non-profit committed to affordable housing, immigration justice, and racial justice, and Abby Seeskin, a junior at Macalester who interned with JCA. I was impressed by the variety of perspective and critique that these panelists provided, and I think that each was able to couch the argument uniquely within the framework of a social responsibility to engaging these issues. As the panelists established, what occurred in Postville affords us the opportunity – or serves as a microcosm, a crucible so-to-speak – to dissect a host of issues related to globalization, migration, labor rights, animal rights, and adherence to Jewish dietary laws. Though the intersections between these issues may seem a bit unclear, I think that the panelists did a phenomenal job of putting these systems into dialogue with one another.

Professor Rachleff framed what occurred in Postville as emblematic of shifts in labor and labor rights, especially within the meatpacking industry. The meatpacking industry has become more decentralized so that plants reside not in their traditional locations – Omaha, Kansas City, Saint Paul – but in small Midwestern towns like Willmar, MN, and Postville, IA. Beyond location, the experience of workers in the industry have changed with regard to unionization and wages. The level of engagement between union organizers and management has decreased in this process of decentralization, and real wages have dropped by 44% – the result is that employees are working in harsher, more dangerous conditions for longer periods of time with less pay. Furthermore, the high numbers of immigrants from Latin America illustrate how globalization operates both within and outside the United States – both a deterioration of jobs in the industry, a bifurcation of jobs in general in the nation as well as immigration resulting from a variety of political and economic establishments.

What I found particularly compelling about the aftermath of the raid is the way in which people are moving these ideas and organizing around them; a group of individuals from the Twin Cities (working in conjunction with local leaders) traveled to Postville to show solidarity with the workers and their families who had been imprisoned/deported and left without any means of sustaining their families and community economically. Similarly, a local group called Hekhsher Tzedek has been established to examine kosher certification from a labor rights perspective and is gaining visibility in the Twin Cities and across the nation. As the panelists argued, what occurred in Postville serves as an impetus to reevaluate how we consume as a political act – in addition to the traditional importance placed on the animal and slaughtering process. Essentially, the discussion underscored the necessity to break the complicity of the Jewish community (and the larger community) with regard to this issue – to take responsibility for the process by which our food is made and to bring this notion of sacredness to encompass the human dignity of these workers.