Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Little wonder, then, that Yuma is a tad giddy these days. "Bill Gates isn't coming out here to open a Microsoft plant, so we have to use what we have," says Doug Sanderson, Yuma's city manager. "The ethanol operations are a good synergy with our corn, water, waste treatment, hardworking people, our transportation. It's a good...
Beyond that, restaurant owners say they're serving more customers. Tire vendors and diesel-fuel stations are busier, as 100 trucks a day will move through the Yuma Ethanol plant. Land prices are rising. And dealers expect to sell more pickups. Dennis Wagner, the sales manager of MV Equipment, where John Deere tractors cost $100,000 to $250,000, points out that "a farmer will be able to dictate when he can update his equipment, rather than have the economy dictate...
...Many of Beardstown's white residents were pleased by the federal raid on the massive pork-processing plant at the edge of town, owned by multinational meatpacker Cargill Meat Solutions (the April 4 operation targeted a subcontractor that was cleaning the plant, not Cargill itself). The raids netted 62 people, most of whom were sent to federal detention centers that night and later deported. "It's good they got those people," Oscar Cluney, 18, told me as he hung out with his friends in the parking lot of the local Save-a-Lot store. "The whole situation here makes...
...huge new influx of Spanish-speaking workers seems like adding insult to economic injury. But if times are tough in rural America, are illegal immigrants to blame? It turns out that the truly good jobs left Beardstown long before the Mexicans came. In the mid-'80s, the Cargill plant was owned by Oscar Mayer. Walters was the union representative at the plant back then, and he says it offered good jobs and good benefits, but globalization and other corporate pressures caught up with them. The company shuttered and sold the plant in 1987. Five months later, it reopened under...
...first Hispanics didn't come to work at Cargill en masse until years later. And as Cargill likes to point out, more white workers work at the factory than before. The plant has in fact grown, thanks in large part to hardworking migrants, not just from Mexico but from more than 20 other countries. The business seems robust for the time being. The workforce is unionized again. Salaries are creeping up. A new Wal-Mart Supercenter is on the way. Cargill's strength has turned Beardstown into, if not a boomtown, at least a place that investors are paying attention...