(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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After pork plant bankruptcy and closure, Windom awaits answers from new ownership [1]
['Madison Mcvan', 'More From Author', '- July']
Date: 2023-07-21
WINDOM, Minnesota — HyLife Foods never installed a permanent sign in front of its pork packing plant in Windom, Minnesota. Instead, the Canada-based company strapped a banner across a concrete sign built by previous ownership.
Now, the banner is gone, and the concrete sign out front displays the logo of PM Beef — the name of the plant three owners and nine years ago.
HyLife filed for bankruptcy this spring and laid off its 1,000-person workforce in June.
Iowa Premium Pork — which operates plants in Luverne and Hopkins, Iowa — purchased the plant at a bankruptcy auction for $13 million in June.
As the new owners determine what to do with the plant, local officials are awaiting a decision that will have massive ramifications for Windom and the surrounding areas.
The city expects to have more information about the plant’s future in September or October, said Tiffany Lamb, director of the Windom Economic Development Authority. In the meantime, Iowa Premium Pork is inspecting and taking inventory of the plant and its equipment.
Even if the plant does reopen to its full slaughter and processing capacity, the temporary closure and population loss will affect local schools, property tax revenues, utilities and other economic activity in the area.
The sudden bankruptcy, closure and layoffs illustrate how the winds of the consolidated factory food economy can knock small cities off their feet.
Windom is a town with fewer than 5,000 residents located in southwest Minnesota. In the entryway of a Mexican restaurant downtown, flyers in English and Spanish advertise open jobs in meatpacking plants and produce harvesting.
The state DFL-controlled Legislature approved $14 million in assistance for the city to make up for the economic shock of the sudden closure.
Most of the funds will go towards finishing a housing project that HyLife had promised to lease for its workers. Another $2 million will go towards HyLife’s share of the city’s wastewater treatment plant. The Legislature set aside $1 million to recruit a buyer for the plant, but since the plant was purchased at the bankruptcy auction, the funds weren’t used. The city is advocating for that money to be used to recruit and train workers if the plant reopens, potentially in the form of a low-interest loan to Iowa Premium Pork, Lamb said.
Another $1 million was allocated to the local school district.
Nearly 100 Windom students had at least one parent working at the HyLife plant, Lamb said. School funding in Minnesota is calculated on a per-pupil basis.
“What’s difficult about this is there’s no accurate way to really track where folks ended up,” Lamb said.
That’s because while about half of the HyLife workers were residents of Windom or other parts of southwest Minnesota — one of the nation’s most important regions for pork production — the other half came to the U.S. on temporary visas tied to HyLife, leaving them in a bind when the plant closed. H-2B visas are temporary and non-transferable, meaning that the workers would be unable to find other work and had to return to their home country within 10 days of the plant closure.
Many former HyLife employees have found workarounds to avoid immediate return to their home countries.
The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry opened an investigation into wage theft at HyLife last month, offering a path for some former workers to continue living and working in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers work permits and protection from deportation to victims of, or witnesses to, violations of labor law.
At least 78 people applied for deferred action in the week after the applications were made available, Lamb said.
Lamb estimates that somewhere between 220 and 230 workers received non-H-2B job offers out of state.
Others returned to their home countries — Mexico and the Philippines.
Windom has dealt with plant closures and transitions before, but never one as huge and sudden as HyLife’s bankruptcy this year, said Steve Nasby, the city administrator. HyLife employed far more workers than the previous owners and laid off the entire workforce six weeks after filing for bankruptcy.
PM Beef, which closed in 2015, employed 500 to 700 people at its peak. But in the year prior to the closure, the workforce slowly declined through attrition, Nasby said. In the end, the company laid off 262 people.
Then a Glen Taylor-backed group of investors purchased the plant in 2016 and converted it to a pork plant under the name “Prime Pork.” HyLife, based in Canada and controlled by Charoen Pokphand Group, a Thai holding company, purchased a majority interest in the plant in 2020.
A representative of Iowa Premium Pork did not return a request for comment Thursday.
“We’re in limbo,” Cottonwood County Commissioner Kevin Stevens said. “The building sits empty and we don’t know what these people have in mind.”
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https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/07/21/after-pork-plant-bankruptcy-and-closure-windom-awaits-answers-from-new-ownership/
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