Archive for September, 2010

Question: Do you agree with desk top raids?
Should these people have been rounded up and deported?
Do you agree with just firing them?
Should they not have charges against them for fraud?
_________________________________________________________
Overhill Farms, a major food-processing plant, terminates more than 200 employees after an IRS audit finds that they had provided ‘invalid or fraudulent’ Social Security numbers.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
9:22 PM PDT, June 11, 2009

No immigration agents descended on Overhill Farms, a major food-processing plant in Vernon. No one was arrested or deported. There were no frantic scenes of desperate workers fleeing la migra through the gritty streets of the industrial suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

For more than 200 Overhill workers, however, the effect was devastating: All lost steady jobs last month and now find themselves in a precarious employment market, without severance pay or medical insurance. It wasn’t a hot tip or an undercover informant that helped seal their fates, but a computer check of Social Security numbers.

“A desktop raid” is how the workers’ representative, John M. Grant, vice president of Local 770 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, described the scenario.

Overhill, a $ 200-million-a-year company that provides frozen meals for clients such as American Airlines, Panda Express, Safeway and Jenny Craig, says it had no choice: An Internal Revenue Service audit found that 260 workers had provided “invalid or fraudulent” Social Security numbers. The government took no action against the workers. But Overhill did: All of the employees were fired May 31.

The dispute underscores some of the complex issues facing President Obama as he tries to make good on his pledge to overhaul the nation’s “broken” immigration system. Like agriculture, the food-processing and preparation sectors rely heavily on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented.

The White House has already scaled back the Bush administration’s controversial practice of work-site raids. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has vowed to shift the emphasis to employers who hire illegal workers. Audits of employers’ records are an essential tool in such cases.

More to the story please read:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-desktop-raid12-2009jun12,0,783064.story

grease – cannot you not read, I said to read the rest of the story, these people had thirty days to prove they were legitimate and legal, no one came forward hmmmm. They should have been held and checked for status. Also charged for fraud!

From article:
Overhill says it gave the workers 30 days to correct the problem with the IRS and provide the company with verification, but none did so.
international major medical insurance

Best answer:

Answer by GreasyTony
No, because mismatched SS numbers does not mean they are illegally here, and just being Latino certainly doesn’t mean that they are illegally here either….but it probably does to you! Plus, for some reason you missed two very good points in this article. If you had read it, you wouldn’t be asking this question.
==================================
Overhill, whose workforce is largely Latino, says it has no idea of the legal status of the fired employees. (So how can they deport them?) No one has formally accused them of being illegal immigrants. Still, the company argues that it risked potential criminal liability under tax and immigration laws if it continued to employ them after the IRS audit.

All of Overhill’s dismissed factory hands were hired before the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security’s so-called E-Verify system, which allows employers to confirm the legal working status of new hires electronically, verifying Social Security numbers and other data. The program was designed as a weapon against the vast trade in fraudulent and stolen Social Security numbers. Overhill is now using the system for new hires.