HIRING ILLEGALS: THE RISKS GROW

摘要

Talk to former Tyson Foods Inc. em-ployee Doris Jewell, and she'll insist that the hiring of illegal Mexican workers at the Shelbyville (Tenn.) plant where she worked on the production line was no secret to top Tyson executives at headquarters in Springdale, Ark. "They knew what they were doing down there," she scoffs. Now she and three other ex-Shelbyville workers are suing the company for allegedly depressing the wages of legal workers at 15 plants through an "illegal-immigrant hiring scheme" that violated federal racketeering laws, as their complaint states. The novel legal tactic put Tyson―and potentially other big employers―at the center of a new kind of war against illegal immigration being waged by the federal government and creative plaintiff attorneys. For the first time, companies could face gargantuan fines, damage awards, and even jail sentences. That could force hiring patterns to change quickly. Jewell's class action is riding the coattails of a massive federal indictment of Tyson in December alleging that the world's largest poultry producer conspired to smuggle workers into the U.S. The government says that thousands of Tyson's 120,000 workers, who start at about $9 an hour, may be illegal.