Word: alberts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seaboard's solution: recruit Hispanic laborers from other areas of the U.S. as well as from Mexico and Central American countries like Guatemala. Soon the recently arrived immigrants began to stream into Albert Lea--with no money and no place to stay. It was a practice Seaboard would repeat in other towns, in other states...
Rather than overhaul the plant, Seaboard responded in the classic manner of corporate-welfare artists: it began quietly looking around for another town, another state. Alarmed, Albert Lea and Minnesota came up with an additional $12.5 million in incentives to keep the plant. But Seaboard had found a bigger patsy--Guymon (pop. 7,700), in Texas County, Okla. Guymon, the county and the state put together an economic incentive package worth $21 million to entice Seaboard to the Oklahoma Panhandle, a section of the country where hogs and cattle far outnumber people...
...income tax credit with the understanding that it was "unlikely" the company would pay any income tax during those 10 years. The state spent $600,000 to train Seaboard's workers. The company received grants and low-interest loans to finance a waste-pretreatment plant. (Remember the one in Albert Lea?) The company was excused from paying $2.9 million in real estate taxes...
Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, Seaboard's local president was reassuring newspapers that the Albert Lea plant would remain open...
...just Oklahoma's subsidies that persuaded Seaboard to relocate. The Albert Lea work force was unionized; wages had risen to $19,100 a year--still $3,100 below their level in 1983, but too rich for Seaboard's blood. Guymon, by contrast, promised low-wage, nonunion labor. Also, Seaboard had decided it wanted to raise its own hogs for slaughter, not just buy them from farmers. Minnesota banned corporate hog farms. Oklahoma had had a similar ban but had repealed it before Seaboard came along...