Rahm’s sanctuary policy at work.
A major bakery on the Northwest Side once known for making Little Debbie snack cakes was sold earlier this month after an immigration audit cost the company about a third of its workers.
About 800 employees of the main Cloverhill Bakery on the Northwest Side and the company’s bakeries in Cicero and Romeoville lost their jobs when the audit found many were hired after presenting fake or stolen IDs.
The owner of Little Debbie walked away, saying its orders no longer were getting filled on time by Cloverhill, and revenues fell for the bakery’s corporate owner, the Swiss food conglomerate Aryzta.
Finally, Aryzta had enough and sold the bakeries. Hostess Brands said it’s buying Cloverhill’s Chicago bakery from Aryzta.
Some might see what happened at Cloverhill as a sign of things to come under the Trump administration, with fears in corporate America and among immigrants of increased government crackdowns.
But the story of the 137,000-square-foot bakery in Galewood on the Northwest Side of Chicago appears to be more complicated than that. It precedes the Trump administration and involves tensions between African American and Hispanic workers, according to current and former employees, a former company consultant and a worker activist group.
“They’re being pitted against each other, so they don’t get along,” says Dan Giloth, a community organizer on the West Side. “We believe this is a divide-and-conquer strategy.
“Unfortunately in Chicago, there is a widespread segregationist employment model to contract out most of your production work through temporary agencies and look the other way when they target employees by race or immigration status,” says Giloth, a former union organizer who is project manager for the group Coalition Against Segregation of Employees. “The goal is to create a very vulnerable workforce — and keep the wages low.”[…]
In 2015, under the Obama administration, ICE inspected the documentation of Labor Network’s employees at Cloverhill. In May 2017, the Trump administration sent letters to about 800 employees, saying they weren’t authorized to work in the United States, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
Those Hispanic employees didn’t return to work, leaving the bakery desperate to fill their jobs. So the company turned to another placement agency, Metro Staff Inc., and it provided Cloverhill with workers screened through the government’s “E-Verification” program. Most of those new employees are African American.
Ed French, owner of Elgin-based Metro Staff Inc., says his company became the main provider of workers for the bakery and that about 80 percent of them are black. According to French, workers at the bakery were paid slightly less before his company was hired two and a half years ago — with wages up by about 25 cents an hour, to just above minimum wage.
He says everyone hired through his company is permitted to work in the country and has passed a background check and drug test.
According to a former consultant to the bakery, MSI paid the black workers $14 an hour, versus the $10 an hour the Mexican workers were making through Labor Network.