Corporate Welfare: The Empire Of The Pigs

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For the past two years, Julia Howell has recorded in a diary life with the blended smells from rotting hogs and cesspools and the breezes from hog barns:

Monday, July 1, 1996: "80[degrees]. Calm. Tried to sit outside a while. Impossible without a mask. What a life!!"

Monday, July 8, 1996: "Had a storm at 70[degrees]. It rained toxic fumes 7:30 p.m. Horrible during rain!!!"

Wednesday, July 24, 1996: "Calm. 80[degrees]. 9:30 p.m. It would take two masks tonight."

The smell has forever altered the Howells' way of life. "We celebrated our 50th anniversary here this year," she says. "But, you know, when the hog fumes come rolling in, you can't plan on anything. I haven't had people in for dinner [for two years] because I'd probably have to meet them out on the driveway with a mask for them to get to the house.

"We thought we were at the point that we could retire. And, of course, the rhetoric from Seaboard is, 'Well, my goodness, your land, your home, it's worth more than you ever dreamed because of us coming in next to you...' Our kids couldn't sell this if they needed the money to bury us with. It's just devaluated to nothing as far as the market's concerned."

The story is much the same for Vancy Elliott and her husband Delmer, who live about three miles from Guymon and whose land abuts a Seaboard hog farm. "We have to put flytraps out in the summer," says Elliott. "But we even have flies occasionally in the winter now, and we've never had that before. Rats and mice are a real problem because they have so many pigs that are dying."

To help staff its hog-processing plant and farms, Seaboard has re-created the corporate model employed by the coal barons of the 1800s, whose workers lived in company-owned houses and shopped in company-owned stores.

In Guymon, Seaboard and local business leaders invested in an apartment complex and trailer parks to house the company's employees. Rent is automatically deducted from the paychecks of Seaboard workers. So, too, is the cost of meals that they eat at the plant. A two-bedroom apartment goes for $420 a month; for three bedrooms, $485. A Seaboard worker earns about $300 a week--before Social Security and income taxes are deducted.

"The people never see this money," said Carla Smalts, a rancher who campaigned against corporate hog farming while at the same time waging an ultimately losing battle against cancer. "It comes off the top of their paycheck right to Seaboard," she told TIME in December 1997. "By the time they pay Seaboard their rent and the meals are taken off out at the plant--and most of them eat at least one or two meals out there--they don't have a whole lot left. There's no way these people are going to buy houses." Carla Smalts died in August 1998 at age 52.

BRINGING HOME THE BACON

Let us recount, for a moment, some of Seaboard's corporate welfare in the 1990s: Minnesota provided more than $3 million in economic incentives; Kentucky, $23 million; Kansas, $10 million; and Oklahoma, $100 million. The Federal Government's OPIC provided $25 million in insurance for business ventures abroad. As for the financial burdens imposed on other taxpayers by virtue of Seaboard's presence, no one knows the cost. It is in the tens of millions of dollars. And all this for jobs that pay little more than poverty-level wages.