Pasco meat workers paid $8.4 million for time spent suiting up

About 800 workers — most of them Latino immigrants — employed at an Eastern Washington beef slaughterhouse in the late 1990s have begun receiving checks for back pay in a recent $8.4 million legal victory against the world's largest meat processor.

Tyson Foods, which inherited the lawsuit when it acquired the Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) slaughterhouse in Pasco in 2001, began making the payments after the U.S. Supreme Court in November resolved all issues in the seven-year legal battle.

The dispute centered on whether employees on the plant's killing and processing floors were entitled to wages for time spent getting in and out of required protective gear before and after their shifts and meal breaks, as well as wages for the time it took to walk between the changing room and production floor.

Nearly all the plaintiffs are Latinos, many of whom entered the country illegally and received amnesty under a 1986 immigration law, said one of their attorneys, David Mark of Seattle.

The case, which illustrates the meat-processing industry's reliance on immigrant labor, comes as Congress debates the issue of illegal immigration.

A bill passed by the House would make illegal presence in the U.S. a felony and would impose criminal penalties on those who employ undocumented workers. A less-punitive measure pending in the Senate would include a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

After private households, the food-manufacturing industry employs the highest percentage of "unauthorized residents," according to a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center. Tyson says it supports a guest-worker program and a process for undocumented workers here to become citizens.

Plaintiff Maribel Tapia picked up her check for $10,900 on Wednesday. Now 30 and working as a machine operator at a mail-processing firm in Auburn, Tapia worked as a packer at the Pasco plant for eight years, beginning when she was 18.

She recently bought a small house and is using the money to pay down the mortgage.

"I'm very happy," said Tapia, who speaks little English.

The case, Alvarez v. IBP, has broad implications.

Already, it has inspired other lawsuits across the country involving thousands of workers — many of them also immigrants — who seek back pay and damages from the meat- and poultry-processing industry.

Tyson didn't respond to a request for an interview for this article, but the company said in a quarterly shareholders report in February that at least four other wage-and-hour lawsuits against it hinged on the Alvarez ruling. The American Meat Institute, the industry's trade association, said it was disappointed by the court's ruling.

The Alvarez case began in 1998, when several workers filed a class-action suit in federal court in Spokane, alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The slaughterhouse pointed to several provisions that it said relieved it of the responsibility to pay its workers for time spent getting in and out of protective gear.

Workers said it took about 10 minutes to put the clothing on and another 10 to take it off.

In 2001, U.S. District Judge Robert Whaley rejected IBP's arguments, and said the workers should be paid for that time. In 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and said the workers also should be paid for a full 30-minute lunch break, because much of it was spent getting in and out of their gear. Tyson appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in November agreed that workers should be compensated for time spent putting on and taking off their protective gear, and also for any walking time that occurs after they put it on and before they take it off.

Since then, attorneys for the plaintiffs have been tracking down about 800 employees who worked at the plant between July 1995 and May 2000. About 80 percent live in Washington, 10 percent in Oregon and 10 percent are scattered elsewhere, said Mark, one of the attorneys.

He said about half are receiving more than $10,000.

Shift began at 5:45 a.m.

Maribel Tapia was one of 10 children born in Los Angeles to illegal immigrants who crossed over from Mexico in the late 1960s.

She later moved to Pasco, where an aunt and uncle worked at the slaughterhouse. When she turned 18, Tapia got a job there, too, working as a packer for $7.25 an hour. Her shift began at 5:45 a.m.

On the plant's vast processing floor, cooled carcasses were dropped onto eight processing belts, where some 400 line workers performed 145 different duties along the meat's journey from meat hooks to small packages.

After standing in line to get a protective frock, Tapia would go to the women's locker room to put it on, along with safety goggles and other protective gear.

Meat packers had to wear even more gear: chain-linked metal aprons, leggings, vests and sleeves, along with Plexiglas arm guards and puncture-resistant Kevlar gloves.

Tapia assumed her station at the end of the fast-moving processing line, where she bagged about six pieces of meat per minute. Employees received a 15-minute rest break after two hours, and a 30-minute unpaid lunch break after another two hours.

Tapia says the breaks were actually shorter because of the time required to take off protective gear, stand in line at the cafeteria or restroom, and then put the gear back on.

After the last piece of meat was processed, workers had to hose down and scrub their aprons, sleeves, rubber gloves, and boots, store those in their lockers and return knives to collection boxes. The cleanup time also was unpaid.

Tapia says she felt cheated out of wages from the first day. Then she met Maria Martinez. "For me, she is my godmother," Tapia said. "An angel, an angel."

Plant job was step up

Martinez had been a meat cutter at the slaughterhouse since 1988.

Like Tapia, she was the daughter of illegal Mexican immigrants and moved to Pasco because of a relative who worked at the plant. She still lives in Pasco but no longer works at the plant.

But back then, for Martinez and others whose only job experience had been picking fruit and vegetables, working in a meat-packing plant was a step up. "When you're an immigrant, you just want a paycheck," Martinez said.

The Latino workers didn't know they had any voice and couldn't communicate with the shop steward of the Teamsters Local 556 of which they were members — a gap that organized labor has only begun to close. For decades, the IBP plant had a chief shop steward position that was part-time union, part-time company benefits clerk, and the largely Latino work force complained that the union wasn't advocating for their interests.

In April 1998, Martinez became the first elected shop steward at the plant and was the only union activist fluent in English. Months later, the workers filed suit in federal court in Spokane.

Martinez said she finally came to realize "it was the workers' union, not the company union."

As time went on, more workers joined the suit.

No longer eats beef

Tapia hasn't forgotten how much she disliked working at the plant.

She doesn't eat beef anymore. She makes sure her son and daughter go to school and do their homework because she doesn't want them ever to work in a processing plant.

Martinez left the plant last year and now works in a health-care clinic that serves those living in the Pasco area

Mark filed a follow-up lawsuit against the plant, seeking back pay for workers who didn't join the Alvarez suit, and for those who did but continued working at the plant after 2000. A federal district judge awarded the workers $11.4 million last July.

Many workers are hard to track, Mark said, because they entered the country illegally and have since left the plant.

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com