Tuesday, February 24, 2009
They're kinda slow, they won't know
They being the mentally disabled workers at an Iowa meatpacking plant, living in substandard housing, owned by the town, who had most of their wages diverted to "living expenses".
Iowa's social-services agency acknowledged Tuesday that it looked into a company's treatment of its mentally disabled meatpacking workers as early as the 1970s, but decided it lacked the jurisdiction or enough evidence to act.Going all the way back to the '70's. I guess it was some kind of local tradition.
State officials say the 21 Texas men lived for decades in a battered house in the tiny eastern Iowa town of Atalissa and were paid little for their work. The fire marshal closed the living quarters Feb. 7, the men were placed in state custody and a state agency is considering criminal charges.
Social workers, however, had looked into the workers' housing situation twice before without taking action: once in the 1970s and again in 1997, according to a 38-page file discovered about two weeks ago at the Human Services Department's Muscatine County office.
The men lived at a 106-year-old house that locals called the bunkhouse. The city of Atalissa owned the home, and city officials recently acknowledged that some of its doors were padlocked, windows were boarded up and the heating system was broken, leaving only space heaters.
The men worked for Henry's Turkey Service, a Texas company that provided labor for a meatpacker near Atalissa in West Liberty. Recent inquiries showed the company diverted much of the mentally disabled men's paychecks and government payments to living expenses, leaving them about $65 a month in wages.
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