A major bakery on the Northwest Side once known for making Little Debbie snack cakes was sold earlier this month after
an immigration audit cost the company about a third of its workers.
About 800 employees of the main Cloverhill Bakery on the Northwest Side and the company’s bakeries in Cicero and Romeoville lost their jobs when the audit found many were hired after presenting fake or stolen IDs.
The owner of Little Debbie walked away, saying its orders no longer were getting filled on time by Cloverhill, and revenues fell for the bakery’s corporate owner, the Swiss food conglomerate Aryzta....
But the story of the 137,000-square-foot bakery in Galewood on the Northwest Side of Chicago appears to be more complicated than that. It precedes the Trump administration and involves
tensions between African American and Hispanic workers, according to current and former employees, a former company consultant and a worker activist group.
“They’re being pitted against each other, so they don’t get along,” says Dan Giloth, a community organizer on the West Side. “We believe this is a divide-and-conquer strategy.
“Unfortunately in Chicago,
there is a widespread segregationist employment model to contract out most of your production work through temporary agencies and look the other way when they target employees by race or immigration status,” says Giloth, a former union organizer who is project manager for the group Coalition Against Segregation of Employees. “The goal is to create a very vulnerable workforce — and keep the wages low.”...
In 2015, under the Obama administration, ICE inspected the documentation of Labor Network’s employees at Cloverhill.
In May 2017, the Trump administration sent letters to about 800 employees, saying they weren’t authorized to work in the United States, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
Those Hispanic employees didn’t return to work, leaving the bakery desperate to fill their jobs. So the company turned to another placement agency, Metro Staff Inc., and it provided Cloverhill with workers screened through the government’s “E-Verification” program.
Most of those new employees are African American...
According to a former consultant to the bakery, MSI
paid the black workers $14 an hour, versus the $10 an hour the Mexican workers were making through Labor Network.
The consultant, Felix Okwusa, says the bakery offered its remaining Hispanic workers a $1-an-hour premium to train the black replacement workers.
But Okwusa says Cloverhill soon ran into problems. In a memo to the company,
Okwusa, who is African American, 
wrote that the black workers “displayed a higher turnover rate of over 40 percent and a lower efficiency rate than their Hispanic co-workers.”
Okwusa included his memo in
a lawsuit he has filed against Aryzta in an effort to recover a bonus he says he was promised. Aryzta won’t comment.
“One of the facts of the case — and a reality in America — is that the immigrants do the work for less than an American will,” says Okwusa’s lawyer, George Oparanozie. “It shows the dynamics of immigration in this country. Many of these Hispanic workers have been here a long time, pay taxes in a lot of instances, and many of them could now be kicked out of the country.”
What happened at Cloverhill Bakery involves tensions between African American and Hispanic workers, according to workers, a consultant and activists.
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