By: Ray Wallace
The January 25, 2014 front page of Lancaster Farming, a widely respected agricultural weekly, is right to question Perdue's long-term Pa. plans.
Though Perdue bought a chicken-processing plant in Fredericksburg, Pa. in 2011 knowing it needed upgrades, Perdue now appears to be using that an excuse to close the plant and export 600 jobs to nonunion sites out of state. Furthermore, does Perdue's long involvement with China signal its moving chicken-processing jobs there?
Pa. Gov. Tom Corbett has announced he's awarding multibillion-dollar Perdue $8.75 million for a proposed chemical-using and chemical-releasing soybean-processing plant on a sinkhole-containing site along the Susquehanna River. Perdue brags that this hazard will create 35 permanent jobs. That's $250,000 that Pa. taxpayers owe Perdue for each of those jobs.
Meanwhile, for firing hundreds of Pa. workers and permanently removing 600 Pa. jobs, why doesn't Perdue fairly owe Pa. taxpayers 600 x $250,000 or $150 million?
If, under Gov. Corbett, the Pa. Department of Environmental Protection OK's Perdue's application to release the dangerous neurotoxin hexane from a taxpayer-subsidized soybean factory, Pa. farmers and their customers will be forced to pay to breathe Perdue's adding hazardous air pollution to this already polluted area. We need no more pollution dumped on us, our precious soil, water, livestock, crops, and everything else in this agricultural community.
It's time to remind Jim Perdue, Gov. Corbett, and the DEP that we're all fed up with rich outsiders who act like they're entitled to come here, take money from us, and pollute everything -- while claiming to help farmers and create jobs but in fact doing the exact opposite.
"You are what you eat," says a friendly chicken farmer named Jim Perdue in cartoon TV commercials airing locally. Unfortunately for Perdue, we are nothing like the go-along public he treats like other cartoon characters. We do not happily jump up and down whenever he thinks up something new and self-serving to tell us.
We Pennsylvanians are more than the food we produce and eat. We're also what's in our wallets, in our lungs, and in our wombs.
Anyone planning to further poison our very air, families, and way of life doesn't deserve corporate welfare.
He deserves jail.
9 comments:
Maybe Lanc county farmers didn't fall for the "virtures" of contract farming (factory farming really) that Perdue tried to sell them. They prefer to be independent (real true family farmers), free to sell their chickens to whomever is paying the best price, buying feed from whomever is selling it for the best price. That's probably the real reason for the processing plants closing. Lanc country farmers refuse to be slaves to a company who can call all the shots.
They treat their chickens better than they treat their people.
There are still a number of open positions on the Perdue Careers site...a lot have gone unfilled for a while. Since their layoffs of higher skilled folks over the last three years, nobody wants to work for them any more...and are continuing to leave.
Considering they are one of only a handful of 'better' paying employers here on the eastern shore and the business climate of Wicomico county - it's easy to see why folks won't come here to work.
9:22 - if you're dealing with Perdue, it's their way or the highway!
More importantly, get everything in writing now - I've been burned twice by trusting their folks...it ain't worth the paper it ain't signed on.
I wouldn't say they are one of the "better" paying employers 9:28. Many of their employees in the processing plants are receiving at least one form or another of government assistance. I'm all for "corporate welfare" to a point, but if a company gets govt funding it should pay it's workers more. This is what keeps the economy going.
But then the price of goods goes up............so the lowest paid workers are back in the poverty pool.
To Ray Wallace: It's not your money. You're giving lip service. Give me a solution to the problem.
The 8 million plus dollars the state of PA is giving to Perdue doesn't belong to Wallace, a tax payer 11:11?
Why isn't the EPA interested in this?
Anyone want to answer?
I've seen the cartoon commercial Wallace writes about. I think it is out and out wrong that Perdue claims a chicken fed a vegetarian diet are healthier to eat. This is not true. What's healthiest to eat are animals fed their natural diet which in chickens includes insects and worms.
Why does their chicken have that yellow tinge that other brands don't? I don't like the texture either.
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