The Forward's Understandable Defensiveness

Jewish Press
June 26, 2006

The Forward seems pretty concerned about how its reportage and editorializing about working conditions at AgriProcessors, the world’s largest kosher slaughtering house, is being received. In a rather unusual editorial last week(“A Kosher Storm”) the paper went out of its way to defend what reporter Nathaniel Popper and an earlier editorial had to say in the Forward’s May 26 issue. It was hardly a convincing effort, and serious questions persist about the validity of the Forward’s indictment of AgriProcessors.

For one thing, the latest editorial went to great lengths to make it seem that the paper’s account of working conditions at AgriProcessors was Topic A all over the country with people “wondering how a religious inspection system that they thought guaranteed a standard of ethical excellence could sanction what appears to be rank exploitation.” Significantly, we are not given any numbers. Did the Forward commission a secret poll? Ore are the Forward’s editors able to channel Jewish public opinion by osmosis?

The Forward insisted that that the issue is not whether AgriProcessors was engaged in illegality: “That’s the easiest question to ask, but it’s the wrong one...[O]ur report does not claim that they are out of compliance with the law. The trouble is that the law doesn’t work.” And, shades of the Forward’s labor movement roots, the editorial goes on to ask: “If a company operates just inside the limits of the acceptable, under a legal system that has defined acceptability steadily downward for a generation, should that satisfy a standard that is manifestly religious?” An interesting formulation, we think.

The editorial noted that a “few respondents have questioned our facts or attacked us for publishing them.” Again, no figure is given, but, more important, we are told that “Some rely on a self-described eyewitness account from the plant circulating on the Internet, written by a rabbi who happens to perform kosher inspections for AgriProcessors. Others have been impressed by an attack on the Forward’s integrity, written by a distinguished constitutional lawyer who has represented the company in the past.”

What the Forward editorial neglected to mention is that the “self-described” eyewitness rabbi fully disclosed his role with AgriProcessors in his account, as did the “distinguished constitutional lawyer” (Nathan Lewin), whose incisive piece appeared as the front-page essay in the June 9 issue of The Jewish Press. The Forward editorial also failed to mention that a Spanish-speaking university professor accompanied the rabbi on his tour of the plant and shared the rabbi’s conclusions.

This latter fact is of no small moment, since the plant workers were nearly all Spanish-speaking and the Forward’s readers were not told whether Forward reporter Popper is fluent in Spanish. As for the Forward’s sneering characterization of the rabbi as a “self-described eyewitness,” how is that any different from the status of its own reporter? Was he not also a self-described eyewitness? And if is significant that the rabbi works for AgriProcessors, well, Mr. Popper works for the Forward, and The Jewish Press has certainly not been alone in addressing the anti-Orthodox bent of that newspaper.

Indeed, in several respects, the Popper piece could be seen as a pretext for the Forward editorial – which amounted to a screed against normative Judaism – that accompanied it.

As a final buttress to its attack on AgriProcessors, the latest Forward editorial noted that “AgriProcessors accounted for more than half of all slaughterhouse complaints submitted to the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration this year in Iowa, a state with scores of meatpacking plants.” Of course these are “complaints,” not dispositions. The Forward should have disclosed the actual number of complaints against AgriProcessors. That would be a grand total of…six. That’s six complaints against the largest plant in the area – a plant that happens to be the thick of a battle with unions and animal rights activists.

There is ample reason for the Forward’s defensiveness. Not only did Nathan Lewin’s article controvert Mr. Popper’s allegations, but Mr. Popper’s very methodology leaves much to be desired. As we noted, there is no indication that Mr. Popper is conversant in Spanish. In addition he relied heavily on the account of one worker – out of 800 – “a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Juana,” who complained of several things including “a lot of injustice.” What, precisely, does that mean?

He also refers to “employees” – again, no numbers are given – who complained, among other things, of being berated for not working fast enough. (Why, the horror of it all!) A union organizer who unsuccessfully attempted to unionize the AgriProcessors plant – not exactly an unbiased source – is quoted as saying: “If I had to rate this one amongst all of them, of the different [plants] I’ve been to, it’s got to be the worst.”

Mr. Popper also quoted “Spanish-speaking community leaders,” unidentified and unnumbered, to explain that the grievances have not been made public before because they believed – and here again Mr. Popper offered no evidence to back up the claim – that the workers “have a well-developed fear” of losing their jobs.
And Mr. Popper actually quoted a PETA “investigator” – who insisted on anonymity! – on how the AgriProcessorsIowa plant compares with two other plants: “At the other two, they were compassionate if an individual was hurt. At Agri, they’d be more concerned about losing money than the individual.”

Finally, we have Mr. Popper’s telling description of the treatment of chickens: “The bulk of the work is done by rows of Hispanic men and women who grab the chickens by their feet and prepare them for death.” (Emphasis ours.)

Frankly, we’ve always been under the impression that a meat plant does exactly that – prepare animals for death. Where’s the injustice in that?

Is it any wonder the Forward feels it has a lot of explaining to do?