Word: seaboards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lesson was about to unfold, all right--a textbook study of the fickle results of corporate welfare. Seaboard was unable to attract enough workers from Albert Lea to run the plant. Many former Farmstead employees had already left the area in search of work. More than 100 had retired. Still others declined to work for Seaboard wages--$4,500 a year less than the plant's 1983 wage, and no vacation the first year...
...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...
...became common for several workers to share a room. Families couldn't afford local rents on a Seaboard wage. Eventually some went on welfare. In short, corporate welfare begot individual welfare...
Meantime, Seaboard failed to invest in upgrading its sewage-pretreatment facility. As a result, its waste began to overwhelm the city's municipal treatment plant. The city normally placed its treated sludge on soybean cropland, but by the second summer, city officials were in search of more land. As Sparks recalls, "We had so much sludge accumulation that...we had to go out in the middle of the summer, buy a crop [for $36,000] and plow it under because our storage capacity was exceeded...
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...