Swift rebound: Plant fully staffed

GREELEY – Four months after federal agents swooped in and arrested 261 workers at Swift & Co.’s beef plant in northeast Greeley, the company’s work force is back to full strength and the plant to pre-raid production levels.

On the morning of Dec. 12, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on the plant in a raid that agency officials said was aimed at rooting out workers who had illegally obtained jobs at Swift with fraudulent or stolen identity documents.

The Greeley plant was one of six Swift facilities raided across the nation, with nearly 1,300 workers taken into custody. Most of those detained were eventually deported, while only a few were charged with possessing stolen documents.

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The ICE raids sent shock waves through Swift and through Greeley. Although the company’s operations were shut down completely for only one day, Swift officials said the final nationwide recovery price tag would be about $30 million in lost productivity and the cost of rehiring and training new workers.

But within three months, Swift’s Greeley plant was back to its full staffing of about 1,800 workers and producing the same volume of beef and lamb products as it had before the raid, Swift spokesman Sean McHugh said.

“We’ve effectively replaced all of the lost workers,” he said. “Northern Colorado is a pretty rich area to draw from in terms of its population, plus the proximity of a city like Denver.”

That’s not been the case at Swift plants in other raided communities, McHugh noted, because small towns in rural areas don’t have the population to quickly replace lost employees.

“We’ve been somewhat fortunate in Greeley in that the plant has gotten back on its feet faster than any other plant,” he said.

Silver lining

McHugh said because of the publicity around the raids, word got around quickly that new workers would be sought. “The silver lining for us was everybody knew we were hiring,” he said. “Our application rates were up by 50 to 100 percent.”

McHugh said Swift has used its traditional methods of recruiting – newspaper ads, radio spots in some markets and billboard advertising – to bring its work force back to full measure. It’s also turned to existing employees to help bring in new workers through a hiring incentive program. If the referred applicant is hired and stays for at least 90 days, a $1,500 bonus is paid to the employee who provided the referral, McHugh said.

Raising the starting wage has not been necessary to lure new workers, McHugh said, noting that a raise of 65 cents per hour last fall before the raids brought the current starting wage up to $11.75 per hour.

McHugh said Swift’s hiring process is always in full throttle as the company experiences a 38 percent turnover rate. That’s about 700 positions that must be re-filled each year at the Greeley plant over and above those lost in the raid.

McHugh said the 38 percent figure may sound high, but he points out that it’s far lower than a turnover rate that was close to 100 percent about a half dozen years ago.

“Through our workplace safety and employee retention programs we’ve gotten that down to less than half as much as it was then,” he said. “It’s much better to keep a worker once you have them than to try to go out and find one.”

Although the plant’s work force is now back to pre-raid numbers, operators of Greeley businesses say the economic benefits of full employment at the Greeley plant are hard to discern.

“When the raids happened, the entire city felt that effect,´ said Randy Berman, general manager of the Greeley Mall. “Everybody kind of panicked and went into their shells. The employment increase since then has been so gradual that it’s hard to notice. I can say we’re doing well. We had a pretty strong February and March. When all of a sudden they hire for two full shifts, then we’ll see something.”

Swift has not yet added a second shift, one that was idled three years ago when global market conditions, especially the import ban on beef by several Asian nations, cut sharply into the company’s sales.

Still using Basic Pilot

Prior to the ICE raids, Swift relied on the voluntary federal Basic Pilot Program to check worker identification documents during the hiring process. But flaws in that program were evidenced by the 1,300 arrested workers who had passed through its documentation verification procedures.

A few years ago, Swift tried looking closer at applicants’ documentation and was fined $200,000 by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2001. “I can’t ask for anything more because it’s considered discriminatory,” McHugh said. “You’ve got to navigate that channel between different agencies with different objectives. So we’re still using Basic Pilot, flawed as it may be.”

But McHugh said Swift is fine-tuning its hiring procedures as much as it can under the law, with a “connect-the-dots” approach that looks at identity documents provided by the applicant under the federal I-9 process and sends up “red flags” when something seems amiss, such as a driver’s license issued in a state where the applicant has apparently never lived.

“That allows us to ask some questions that are non-discriminatory,” he said. “We think we have practices now that are among the best in the industry.”

So while some illegal workers can slip through the cracks in the system, McHugh said the company feels confident it is doing the best it can to screen out lawbreakers.

“We think the process we have in place today is as good as we can make it under the constraints in which we operate,” he said.