The Company Used E-Verify on Every Hire
It didn’t help: “It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
Good Morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Trump’s E.U. deal brings a degree of certainty to an uncertain time.
In this week’s Dashboard we discuss some tax-code changes that might really help smaller businesses.
The rise of AI is allowing more retailers to try dynamic and even surveillance pricing.
James Leprino turned a family grocery into a mozzarella empire.
IMMIGRATION
Glen Valley Foods used E-Verify on every hire. ICE still took half the company’s work force: “For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska. ... ‘It’s a wipeout,’ said Gary Rohwer, the owner. ‘We’re building back up from ground zero.’”
“Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of ‘criminal dishonesty’ with the employees he’d known for decades as ‘salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,’ he said.”
“‘I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,’ Rohwer said. ‘We need more people trained and ready to go.’ ‘Trained by who?’ another manager asked. ‘We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.’ ‘Then we pick up our hiring,’ Rohwer said.”
“He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.”
“Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up. ‘They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,’ Rohwer said. ‘But we’re already doing that,’ [President Chad] Hartmann said. ‘How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?’” READ MORE
