David Bacon | The New Plan for Immigration Raids

David Bacon | The New Plan for Immigration Raids: "A year ago, in the middle of the nation's most bitterly fought union organizing drive, management at the Smithfield Foods pork slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, sent a letter to 300 workers. The company, Smithfield claimed, had been notified by the Social Security Administration that the workers' numbers didn't match the SSA database. Come up with new numbers, the company ordered, that could pass the 'no-match check,' or they'd be fired within two weeks. The Smithfield plant, largest of its kind in the world, employs 5,000 people, about half of them immigrants. No one can say for sure how many lacked immigration papers, but as in most meatpacking plants, many undoubtedly did. Despite their status, during the prior year those workers had walked out twice to join immigrant rights marches. They even shut down production lines over the high accident rate. The fear created by the no-match check was an easy way to cut that activism short. For the last two decades, employers have threatened, and often implemented, similar terminations in workplace after workplace. At the Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, California, the hotel threatened no- match firings after workers began demanding compliance with the city's living wage law. At the Cintas Laundry chain, plant mangers fired hundreds of employees last year in no-matc"