You’ll recall the immigration raid on a kosher meat packing plant in Iowa in May. Some 400 foreign workers were rounded up and hauled off to the county fair grounds for processing back home. Turns out there’s a lot more to the story.

young immigrants have begun to tell investigators about their jobs. Some said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, wielding razor-edged knives and saws to slice freshly killed beef. Some worked through the night, sometimes six nights a week.

One, a Guatemalan named Elmer L. who said he was 16 when he started working on the plant’s killing floors, said he worked 17-hour shifts, six days a week. In an affidavit, he said he was constantly tired and did not have time to do anything but work and sleep. “I was very sad,” he said, “and I felt like I was a slave.”

At first, labor officials said the raid had disrupted federal and state investigations already under way at Agriprocessors Inc., the nation’s largest kosher plant. The raid has drawn criticism for what some see as harsh tactics against the immigrants, with little action taken against their employers.

But in the aftermath of the arrests, labor investigators have reaped a bounty of new evidence from the testimony of illegal immigrants, teenagers and adults, who were caught in the raid. In formal declarations, immigrants have described pervasive labor violations at the plant, testimony that could result in criminal charges for Agriprocessors executives, labor law experts said.

Child Labor

Of course all the usual defenders of responsibility and rule of law will come rushing out to protect the owners and managers from defamation and their own self-willed ignorance. We will soon hear accusations of shifty 14 year old Guatemalans who lied to the good hearted operators. But maybe not. Maybe we’ll see a few faces in the slammer for violating not just labor laws but the laws of human decency.