DENVER POST

January 5, 2007

Swift raids slice $30 million, packer says

The costs will come in finding and training workers to replace 1,300 rounded up at six plants in an immigration crackdown.

By Christine Tatum

Denver Post Staff Writer

Greeley meatpacker Swift & Co. said Thursday that federal immigration raids at six of its seven plants nationwide last month are expected to cost the company $30 million.

Swift, the nation's third-largest processor of fresh beef and pork, has hired hundreds of new workers to replace employees it lost, incurring about $10 million in expenses tied to hiring incentives and worker-retention efforts, it said. The company expects to lose $20 million more in lost operating efficiency as workers are trained.

Swift is operating on all shifts but likely won't "return to a state of normalcy" until the end of this year, said Don Wiseman, the company's general counsel.

"We might have the warm bodies back, but they do not represent the same efficiency and skill level we had on the morning of Dec. 12," he said.

That's the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the Swift plants and rounded up almost 1,300 of the company's 15,000 employees nationwide. Of 260 workers detained in Greeley, roughly 100 were returned to Mexico by the end of last month.

After learning last spring of the probe conducted by ICE and the U.S. Department of Justice, the company took steps to screen its workforce and weed out illegal employees.

Swift also mounted an unsuccessful legal battle in a Texas federal court to block the December raids, which company officials knew were coming and argued would be unnecessarily disruptive to Swift's operations.

Wiseman said the company repeatedly offered to work with federal officials to identify and round up specific employees wanted for questioning.

"But they said they weren't interested," Wiseman said. "And now, you look at these numbers and you can see just part of the impact the government's approach has had."

The raids came just as Swift was bouncing back from a slump in U.S. beef exports caused by concerns about mad cow disease. On Thursday, Swift reported that its net loss narrowed in the company's second fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 27. That loss was $12 million, compared with a net loss of $17.9 million during the same quarter of the previous year. Swift's sales rose to $2.47 billion from $2.31 billion.