Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
In Tuesday's GOP presidential debate, Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) made “grossly inaccurate” statements about a federal raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant, according to a spokesperson for the plant’s company.
In the debate, Hunter said:
“[W]hen they made the sweep on the Swift plants — those were the meat-packaging plants in Iowa, took out some 850 people who were working there illegally several months ago — there were American citizens lined up the next day to get their jobs back at 18 bucks an hour.”
Sean McHugh, a spokesman for Swift & Co., called Hunter's statements “grossly inaccurate” in an e-mail. McHugh said that 90, not 850, Marshalltown employees were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Rather than the $18 per hour that Hunter claimed, the starting wage at the plant is $11 per hour, McHugh said, which was the same rate before the ICE raid. He said the average wage in the plant is $12.16 per hour.
Finally, McHugh disputed Hunter’s claim that “there were American citizens lined up the next day” to get those jobs. “The plant hires over 700 new employees every year. To claim that ‘now jobs are finally available for Americans' simply is not true,” McHugh said. “We work extremely hard to recruit to keep our plants fully staffed. High-profile media coverage, coupled with the fact that we pay over twice the minimum wage with medical benefits, drove interest in jobs at the plant.”
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