Jury awards $240 million to 32 mentally disabled Iowa turkey plant workers for years of abuse
Published May 01, 2013 – Associated Press – Ryan J. Foley
IOWA CITY, Iowa – For decades, the lives of 32 mentally disabled Iowa turkey processing plant workers were controlled by their Texas-based employer, which profited handsomely by hiring them out.
Regardless of sickness or injury, they were driven from the dilapidated, bug-infested bunkhouse where they were housed to their 41-cents-an-hour jobs removing the slaughtered birds’ innards. Day and night, at work and at home, their overseers subjected them to verbal and physical abuse that left them with “broken hearts, broken spirits, shattered dreams, and ultimately broken lives,” a government attorney said.
On Wednesday, they made history when a federal jury in Davenport awarded them $240 million — the largest verdict in the 48-year history of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sued on their behalf.
It’s unlikely the men’s former employer, the now-defunct Henry’s Turkey Service, of Goldthwaite, Texas, has anywhere near enough remaining assets to cover the $7.5 million in damages each man was awarded. But federal officials vowed to recover every last cent they could for the men, who had been “virtually enslaved” for many years, according to developmental psychologist Sue Gant, who interviewed them at length for the EEOC.
“That discrimination caused them such irreparable harm, and the jury got that. They understood,” said Gant, an expert on the care of people with intellectual disabilities. “The amount of the award just appears to be overwhelming. I think it goes to the degree of injustice here.”
An attorney for Henry’s didn’t respond to a message seeking comment. But the company’s president, Kenneth Henry, told the Quad-City Times after the trial that he planned to appeal, calling some of the evidence “terribly exaggerated.”
“Do you think I can write a check for that?” Henry, 72, told the newspaper.
The jury determined that Henry’s violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by creating a hostile environment and imposing discriminatory conditions of employment, and acted with “malice or reckless indifference” to their civil rights.
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who was an architect of that law, said the ruling sends a powerful message to employers throughout the U.S. that all workers deserve to be treated with respect.
During an interview following the verdict, Gant ticked off some of her findings from her review of the men’s treatment. Rain entered their bedrooms through failing windows and made their beds wet. Supervisors forced them to walk in circles carrying heavy weights as punishment and picked on a man who had a brace on his leg, often pushing him down. Another man had been kicked in the groin and was found with “testicles that were quite swollen.” Others were often locked in their bedrooms at night, she said.
“If these men had not been virtually enslaved, they could have enjoyed productive lives with the support of community,” she said.
State officials told the court that the abuse was uncovered in 2009, when they received a tip about neglectful conditions at the bunkhouse from a sister of one of the men. They inspected the building, which is several miles from the West Liberty Foods turkey processing plant where they worked, and found it was falling apart, infested with rodents and full of fire hazards.
They found many of the men in need of immediate medical care, including one man who couldn’t chew a waffle because of severe dental problems and another whose hands were infected from constant contact with turkey blood.
Social workers said the men described how the Henry’s supervisors who oversaw their care forced them to work long hours to keep the processing line moving, denied them bathroom breaks, locked them in their rooms, and in one case, handcuffed one of them to a bed.
Henry’s began employing men in the 1960s who had been released from Texas mental institutions. Hundreds were eventually sent to labor camps in Iowa and elsewhere, where they were supplied on contract as workers to employers including West Liberty Foods, which signed its deal with Henry’s in the 1970s and was not accused of wrongdoing in the case.
The EEOC says that by 2008, Henry’s was being paid more than $500,000 per year by West Liberty Foods, but was still paying the men the same $65 per month that it always had. The company docked the men’s wages and Social Security disability benefits, claiming it was to pay for the cost of their care and lodging, and it never applied for medical care or other services for which they were qualified. Last year, a judge ordered Henry’s to pay the men a total of $1.3 million in back pay.
During the trial, Henry’s officials argued that their arrangement had benefited the men and said the company had received praise early on for giving them opportunities. EEOC lawyers called that argument outrageous, saying the standards for caring for the disabled had changed dramatically since then.
After the hearing, the EEOC’s head attorney on the case, Robert Canino, said the verdict sends a message that their lives matter.
“If ever there was a case where the human story needed to be told, the full story, not just financial exploitation, but the devaluation of human life that can happen under the control of an employer, it was this case,” he said.
The jury awarded each man $5.5 million in damages for pain and suffering and $2 million to punish the company for knowingly violating the law.
The EEOC will examine “all sources of moneys and tangible assets” that could be seized to pay toward the judgment, including more than 1,000 acres of land in Texas worth up to $4 million, Canino said.
“We will work tirelessly to secure the most that we can for these men,” he said.
The state shut down the bunkhouse following the 2009 inspection, and new living arrangements were made for the men. Some live in nursing facilities in Texas, others moved in with family and some now live in homes under the care of Exceptional Persons, Inc., in Waterloo, Iowa, where spokeswoman Kate Slade said they now have choices about how to live and work.
“The men are enjoying their new lives and take full advantage of all this community has to offer,” she said.
State and federal prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against those responsible for the abuse. Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, said the higher legal standard for proving criminal charges made the prospect of winning convictions unlikely, but that the decision shouldn’t be seen as indifference.
“Our prosecutors were troubled then, and remain troubled to this day, by the inexcusable conditions and treatment surrounding the employment and housing of disabled men working for Henry’s Turkey Service,” he said.
No reporters had talked to Clayton Berg, one of the workers with intellectual disabilities in a $240 million abuse case, before Dan Barry wrote “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse” Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times/Redux
One day back in the spring of 2013, New York Times reporter Dan Barry was looking for a topic for “This Land,” his column about American life, when he came across a newswire story about a labor case involving a group of men with intellectual disabilities. The facts of the case: 32 men with disabilities, working for the same wage for 35 years, $240 million in damages. “What the heck are we talking about here?” Barry recalls thinking.
The men had been rescued from living in squalor and working in abusive and exploitative conditions at a turkey processing plant in tiny Atalissa, Iowa. They had spent decades working for just $65 a month, living in a house infested with bugs and infused with a rank smell. Roaches fell from the ceiling as they ate. They slept on dirty mattresses and used metal trashcans to catch water from melting snow on the roof.
Barry called the lawyer on the case to find out more—and also to ask about speaking with the men. The lawyer’s response was surprising: Not a single reporter had ever asked to speak with the men before.
When the turkey processing plant bunkhouse was closed down in 2009, some local media in Iowa reported the news. But by then the men had already been relocated to other places around the state and the country. Some coverage included interviews with one of the men’s sisters. The Des Moines Register published photos and videos of what it described as the “house of horrors” where the men had lived. Barry felt the story was too compelling and had too many unanswered questions, and he was intent on giving the men a voice.
He began by tracking down the men and methodically conducting interviews. First, he got a third-party introduction from a caretaker. When he initially met the men in person, he didn’t take any notes; they just talked. The second time he met them, he had a notebook. The third time there were cameras. Along the way, he verified information by circling back to caretakers and the attorney on the case. The result: “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse,” a multimedia report centered around Barry’s 7,000-plus word column, in which he painted a vivid portrait of the men themselves and the horrible conditions in which they had lived. An accompanying short documentary, “The Men of Atalissa,” a collaboration between the Times and PBS’s POV, was produced by Barry and his colleague, video journalist Kassie Bracken.
“I just wanted him to be a guy in a bus,” Barry says of his depiction of Clayton Berg, one of the men, on his way to work at his new job after leaving Atalissa. “The mundane nature of that is kind of extraordinary because of where he came from.”
Before Dan Barry asked, no journalist had sought to interview the men at the heart of a $240 million lawsuit
Barry didn’t want the men’s former circumstances or their disabilities to distract from the fact that they were, first and foremost, human beings—something that seems obvious but, too frequently, seems forgotten in depictions of people with disabilities. Stereotypes and even prejudices about disability persist, and those stereotypes can creep into media coverage in the form of clichés. People with disabilities are viewed as heroes for accomplishing ordinary tasks, as victims, or—in cases of violent crime involving the mentally ill—as villains.
“There are two extremes,” says Gary Arnold, president of Little People of America, which advocates for the approximately 35,000 Americans with dwarfism, a condition that results in short stature and can lead to a number of health complications. “One extreme is portraying people with disabilities as people who are helpless and deserving of pity. That reinforces the stigma of disability as something that is bad and that would need to be changed. On the other extreme, you have the overly heroic portrayal of disability, where the person is portrayed as a superhero for doing things that a non-disabled person does on an everyday basis.”
There are nearly 57 million Americans with disabilities (nearly 1 out of every 5 people), according to U.S. Census data, with conditions ranging from the physical—blindness, deafness, paralysis—to the mental and psychological, including depression and anxiety. Most newsrooms don’t have reporters specifically focused on covering people with disabilities and many activists and support organizations say Barry’s sensitive, non-sensationalistic story is the exception rather than the rule. Even research on stories depicting people with disabilities is hard to come by.
Arnold, of Little People of America, can cite plenty of examples of coverage that people with disabilities consider offensive. He says Little People of America stopped making itself available as a source to The Huffington Post, for example, because the publication consistently placed stories with their interviews in the website’s “Weird News” section. A search of the word “dwarf” on the site does turn up a number of headlines under that section: “Dwarf Stripper Kat Hoffman Finds Love With Army Sergeant,” “Jahmani Swanson Is ‘Michael Jordan of Dwarf Basketball’” and “Ritch Workman, Florida Lawmaker, Says Yes To ‘Dwarf-Tossing,’ No To Gay Marriage.” Huffington Post spokeswoman Lena Auerbuch says the publication has “spent years developing a respectful relationship with the little people community,” though she acknowledged that stories about people with dwarfism that involve pop culture and fringe entertainment “do sometimes appear in our Weird News vertical, a vibrant community that examines counterculture.” In September 2015, The Huffington Post added a disability news section to its website after pressure from advocates.
“What the disability community wants is attention to our issues,” Arnold says: access to health care, education, and government services, as well as the right not to face discrimination.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, was designed to address precisely these issues. The ADA protects against discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, public services, transportation, and telecommunications. It defines disability as anything that interferes with an individual’s reasonable access to and accommodations in public places and services, including the ability to be employed and educated. Many journalists are unaware of just how wide this definition is. That, argues Beth Haller, journalism professor at Towson University in Maryland and author of two books on people with disabilities and the media, has limited coverage. “People just presumed that all the [ADA] covered is people who are deaf, blind, or use wheelchairs,” she says. “If the media understood how broad the definition was, that would help.”
Crucially, this definition of disability covers a diverse list of physical conditions, ranging from AIDS and migraine headaches to diabetes and complications from pregnancy, and also includes people with a range of mental and psychological disorders, certain learning disabilities, and intellectual disabilities, like those of the Atalissa men in Barry’s story. For “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse,” The New York Times team was careful to portray the men as real people who could help tell their own stories. Photographer Nicole Bengiveno and videographer Kassie Bracken spent about a year reporting the piece—researching, interviewing, photographing, and traveling to the different states where the men had settled in the time since the house closed down in 2009.
Juli Windsor completed her first Boston Marathon in 2014 Andy Laub
One of the key elements of their reporting was patience. Initially, they were barred from taking photos or video. As the team earned trust, the restrictions were eased. “We had to put the story together in a very sensitive way,” says Bengiveno. “It was like detective work, meeting the men and learning their stories. Sometimes, there were scrapbooks, and we looked at their pictures. We saw them over and over again, because we had to get to know them.” Bengiveno spent time with the men without Barry, working to take photographs as unobtrusively as possible. She captured the men watering the garden, riding the bus, making dinner—mundane domestic tasks they were denied during their lives in Atalissa.
To tell the men’s stories, Barry relied on his own reporting as well as public records, court documents, and testimony by an expert who interviewed all the men for the trial. Sometimes, a caretaker helped him communicate with the men, since some of them had hearing and speech impediments. The greatest challenge was nailing down the timeline of events, since the men’s developmental and intellectual disabilities—which impacted their reasoning and learning—often affected their sense of time. Barry says there was “no trick or special approach” to his reporting; he just talked to the men and asked them to tell their stories.
That approach—treating people with disabilities as sources, not just subjects—is what advocates want more of. The National Center on Disability and Journalism (NCDJ) offers interviewing tips and a style guide for reporters covering disability. One of the most important things to remember when interviewing those with intellectual disabilities: Speak directly to the person you are interviewing, not their companion, and regard that person as the expert.
Also crucial is to not group all people with similar disabilities together, assuming how one person’s disability affects their life is universal for all people with the same handicap. This, according to journalist Mike Porath, extends to writing about the disability. “Ask the individual who is being interviewed how he or she would like to be referred to in the story,” says Porath, who founded The Mighty, a media company focused on sharing stories—many from a first-person perspective—of people with diseases and chronic illnesses. “One person may want to be called ‘autistic’ and another may want to be called ‘a person with autism.’ It should be up to the interviewee, not the interviewer.”
Porath conceived the idea for The Mighty after his young daughter was diagnosed with Dup15q syndrome, a rare chromosome disorder. He wanted a single community where people with disabilities could share their experiences and connect with others. “There is a lot of medical information on the Web, but not nearly enough stories of personal experiences that can often be far more helpful, insightful, or empowering,” says Porath, who worked for ABC, NBC, and The New York Times before founding The Mighty in 2014. “We need more stories from the perspective of individuals with disabilities.”
The Mighty has produced more than 6,000 stories since it launched, including ones that have been syndicated in outlets such as The Huffington Post and Yahoo.
Members of the disabled community are increasingly telling their own stories elsewhere, too. Martyn Sibley, a Brit with spinal muscular atrophy who uses a wheelchair, decided to do that by writing a blog about accessible tourism, technology, health, and personal relationships. He co-founded and writes for the online magazine Disability Horizons as well as The Huffington Post and The Independent. “For true inclusion,” Sibley says via e-mail, “we do need inspiration stories, but also everyday achievers who ‘happen’ to have a disability.”
Juli Windsor, a Boston-based physician’s assistant, considers herself an everyday achiever who happens to have a disability. In 2013, she e-mailed Boston Globe reporter David Abel to pitch a story about her effort to become the first dwarf to run the Boston Marathon. “My initial intent was that I wanted there to be more stories of people with disabilities being out there doing worthwhile things,” says Windsor. However, she stressed that she didn’t want to be depicted as a runner who was somehow overcoming her disability or defying expectations by logging those 26.2 miles.
“I do not view my life as a life of challenges and limitations,” Windsor says. “That’s not how I want to be portrayed.”
At the time, Abel was spending a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, but decided to work on a documentary about her for a class. He was waiting at the finish line on April 15, 2013 when two bombs went off. The race was halted soon after the explosions, and about 5,700 participants were never able to cross the finish line—including Windsor. She was less than a mile away from the end.
Abel was part of the Globe team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the bombing, but he came back to Windsor for a Runner’s World article in 2014. She ran the marathon for a second time, with Abel by her side. The pair crossed the finish line together, holding hands. The experience was grueling for Windsor, not just physically—at 3-foot-9, she takes roughly twice as many steps as the average runner, and, since dwarfs often suffer problems with their spines, she can experience significant back pain after long runs—but mentally, as well. Running past the spot where she was stopped the year before, Windsor had tears in her eyes, remembering the collective and personal trauma stemming from the bombings; her mother, who had been standing near the finish line, sustained face injuries and a shattered shoulder when she was trampled in the tumult.
It was this characterization of Windsor, as a Bostonian personally impacted by the bombing and persevering despite the heightened physical and mental obstacles, that Abel focused on in his article. For Abel, Windsor’s stature was only part of the reason he wanted to write about her. “If there’s a compelling story, my sense is we shouldn’t focus on the disability as much as the person and what their story is,” he says. “The disability is just a piece of that.”
“I do not view my life as a life of challenges and limitations. That’s not how I want to be portrayed.”
—Juli Windsor, Boston Marathon runner
That appears to be more challenging when addressing people with mental disabilities. “In recent years, the time you see mental illness covered the most is when there’s a violent act,” says Shannon Heffernan, a broadcast journalist with WBEZ radio in Chicago who has reported extensively on the subject. “I think mental illness and violence are linked in people’s minds. What that does is it further stigmatizes mental illness.”
This was certainly the case in August after journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward, of Roanoke, Virginia’s CBS affiliate WDBJ, were shot and killed during a live television broadcast. Soon after he fled the scene, the gunman uploaded a cell phone video of the incident, recorded from a first-person perspective, to his social media accounts, which were suspended soon after. Hours later, he shot and killed himself after a car chase with police officers.
Many stories about the gunman focused largely on his mental state. One CNN story alleged that his mental state was unknown, yet still referenced mental illness and firearms control in the same paragraph. The gunman had a history of conflicts with former colleagues, and media conjecture about mentally instability was never verified; the killer was never clinically diagnosed with a mental disorder. The portrayal of shooters as “crazy” perpetuates stereotypes of mental illness as being to blame for a whole array of societal problems, including gun violence, taking culpability away from other possible factors—including how easy it is to acquire a weapon in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act turned 25 years old in 2015, the year of the inaugural Disability Pride Parade in New York Seth Wenig/Associated Press
There is little training for journalists on how to avoid stigmas. Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Carrie Seidman decided to address the situation head-on. In “The S Word: The Stigma of Schizophrenia,” Seidman—who is the Florida paper’s dance critic, but occasionally does special projects—wrote two separate stories about two different men navigating their mental illnesses with help from their mothers. The first of those two narratives was Seidman’s own story, written in the first person, about her son, Keaton, and his “jagged journey to stability,” starting from his first psychotic break, in college, until his diagnosis today, as a man in his early 30s who is able to live a relatively independent and productive life.
Six short vignettes about people with schizophrenia and their family members, who were all granted anonymity because the stigma of a diagnosis is still so great, accompany the two stories. The package was illustrated with work by a local artist with schizophrenia, and ran as a special, ad-free section in the Sunday paper in November. Seidman’s account brought a poignant and intimate dimension to the topic, humanizing those with mental illness.
Many advocates consider rights for people with disabilities as the next frontier for civil rights. Stories on the subject sometimes bear a striking resemblance to coverage of women and minorities from only a few decades ago. “It really is not so different from ‘first woman’ stories,” says Kristin Gilger, director of the NCDJ and an associate dean at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “For several decades, there were always newspaper articles about the first woman to do this and to do that. Just like with women and minority groups, it takes time for journalism to mainstream it into their coverage.”
The NCDJ administers the Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability, and Gilger cites some recent winners as representative of the way coverage is changing. Ryan Gabrielson of California Watch won in 2013 for “Broken Shield,” his series of stories about the Office of Protective Services, a California police force designed to protect developmentally disabled patients, and its failure to investigate the horrific abuse of patients, even when they died under mysterious circumstances. Despite federal audits, investigations by disability-rights groups, lawsuits, and thousands of pages of case files and government data showing facility caregivers and other staff choking, hitting, and sexually assaulting patients, hundreds of abuse cases went unprosecuted. Gabrielson’s 18-month investigation led to greater protections for the patients.
ProPublica won in 2015 for a story by Heather Vogell about a boy with autism whose hands were broken when he was restrained by educators and about the broader use of restraint on hundreds of thousands of other schoolchildren every year. The article, “Violent and Legal: The Shocking Ways School Kids are Being Pinned Down, Isolated Against Their Will,” detailed the common practice of educators to isolate and fetter uncooperative—and often, disabled—children, sometimes with handcuffs, bungee cords, and even duct tape.
The New York Times’s Barry was honored with the 2014 award for “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse.” After the story was published in March of that year, Barry decided to spend the rest of the year reporting on the disabled community. It wasn’t difficult to find untold, or incompletely-told, stories. For one, he focused on the marriage of a couple who are both disabled and met in a sheltered workshop, where people with intellectual disabilities work in isolation at repetitive jobs for very low pay. Barry took this contentious issue and brought out the most human of elements: a happy couple in love, a bride and groom on their wedding day, and their joy at finding a life partner. He relates the smallest details, such as picking up balloons for the wedding party that don’t fit into the car and a nervous bride fretting over shoes that hurt.
Friends and family take pictures of Lori Sousa and Peter Maxmean, newlyweds who met at a sheltered workshop where they performed repetitive jobs Angel Franco/The New York Times/Redux
“The best thing news organizations can do to improve their coverage is to hire people with disabilities.”
—Mike Porath, founder of The Mighty
One simple way to improve coverage would be to train and hire more journalists with disabilities. “I think the issues stem from ignorance, not intent,” says The Mighty’s Porath. “The best thing news organizations can do to improve their coverage is to hire people with disabilities. There are a lot of great efforts to diversify newsrooms, but too often those initiatives are focused on gender and race alone. The best newsrooms will have people from all walks of life, including those with disabilities. All these life experiences and perspectives make newsrooms stronger.”
That’s certainly the case for Chicago’s ABC7, where, for more than two decades, disability issues have been covered as a beat rather than an occasional side story. The station hired Karen Meyer, a broadcast journalist who has been deaf since birth, in 1991; for 23 years, Meyer’s regular on-air reports addressed everything from issues about wheelchair accessible playgrounds to protests in D.C. demonstrating against the fact that there were no statues of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair.
Having reporters on a disability beat remains rare, but ABC7 has remained committed to Meyer’s legacy of pioneering disability coverage, even after she retired in 2014. The station appointed anchor Hosea Sanders and special projects producer Sylvia L. Jones to the disabilities beat after Meyer left, and the station broadcasts special reports on a disability issue each week.
“Sometimes reporters—as a reflection of society in general—will write about the poor, or people with a disability, or people with some kind of challenge, with a hint of condescension,” The New York Times’s Barry says. “You have to clear your head of prejudices.”
For decades, Hill County Farms, also known as Henry’s Turkey Service, housed a group of mentally disabled men in squalor in this former schoolhouse in Atalissa, Iowa. The EEOC won a judgment against the company for exploiting the men. John Schultz/Quad-City Times/ZUMAPRESS.com
Four years ago, 21 men with intellectual disabilities were emancipated from a bright blue, century-old schoolhouse in Atalissa, Iowa. They ranged in age from their 40s to their 60s, and for most of their adult lives they had worked for next to nothing and lived in dangerously unsanitary conditions.
Earlier this month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won a massive judgment against the turkey-processing company at which the men worked. The civil suit involved severe physical and emotional abuse of men with intellectual disabilities.
The EEOC now says the $240 million judgment will be reduced because it exceeds a legal cap on jury awards. But the case highlights the difficulty of preventing and identifying abuse of vulnerable workers, who are also the least likely to come forward about violations.
Susan Seehase, director of Exceptional Persons, a support center that took in most of the men in Iowa, visited their old dwelling. Windows were boarded up, allowing little ventilation or light. The cockroaches were overwhelming, she says. A leaky roof, mildew, accumulated grease and mice droppings contributed to an overwhelming stench.
A fire marshal immediately condemned the building, later testifying it was the worst he’d seen in nearly 3,000 inspections.
Decades Of Abuse, For $2 Per Day
The men had worked at a nearby processing plant, gutting turkeys under the watchful eye of a contractor called Hill County Farms. The contractor was paid to oversee the men’s work and living arrangements. The supervisors hit, kicked, handcuffed and verbally abused the men, who were each paid $2 per day. This went on for three decades, affecting 32 men.
Seehase says medical exams later revealed the men suffered from diabetes, hypertension, malnutrition, festering fungal infections and severe dental problems that had gone untreated.
It went on and on, she says, because the men knew nothing better and because no one reported the abuse.
“Their life experiences didn’t tell them that there was really another option for them,” Seehase says. “It’s incredibly difficult to try to understand. And I have no explanation. And I don’t know who can explain how this really happened.”
Kenneth Henry, the owner of Hill County Farms, could not be reached and his attorney didn’t respond to requests seeking comment. In testimony, Henry acknowledged paying the men $65 a month, but denied knowing about the neglect or abuse.
Robert Canino, the prosecuting attorney for the EEOC office that won the verdict, says, “We are always shocked to find out about these extreme cases because we don’t believe that they could have happened in our own backyard.”
This year, the EEOC is making a priority of prosecuting cases involving “vulnerable workers.” Examples include migrant farm workers who are raped by supervisors in the fields, or those who are the most likely to be exploited and least able to speak out in their own defense.
‘People Who We See But We Don’t Notice’
Canino says the turkey workers’ case reminds him of human-trafficking cases he’s prosecuted. The men were originally from Texas but transported out of state, where they lived isolated lives. He says vulnerable workers often remain silent because they don’t know their legal rights. They’re usually isolated by design from family, friends and community, and live in fear of abuse.
“We see the impact of the verdict as one that will hopefully open all our eyes to be more vigilant as a society, to be more watchful,” Canino says. “Maybe they’re people who we see but we don’t notice. We don’t notice them because we consciously or subconsciously assign them to some different station in life, and we assume that we can’t connect with them, we can’t relate to them, so we go about our business.”
This case, he says, demonstrates the cost of failing to notice. “It’s a wake-up call, and hopefully we don’t ever in the future have to ask the question: ‘How could this go on for so long and nobody notice?’ ”
Hill County Farms, also known as Henry’s Turkey Service, is now out of business. Canino says it’s unclear how much of the money will be recovered to compensate the men. But he says they say the real value of the victory isn’t the money.
“They told me that they were glad that people knew their story was the truth,” Canino says. “They fully understand the concept of people understanding them and believing them and then valuing them. They got that.”
White House Chronicle, Show #8013
Air Date: March 25, 2016
Run Time: 29:00
Guest Host: Jim Ludes, The Pell Center, Salve Regina University
Co-Host: G. Wayne Miller, The Providence Journal
Guest: Dan Barry, The New York Times
Topic: A discussion of Barry’s new book, “Boys in the Bunkhouse.”
The Men of Atalissa: Watch the Documentary & Go Behind the Story with Journalists from The New York Times
March 8, 2014 By Emma Dessau
In 2013, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won a $240-million judgment against Henry’s Turkey Service, which had exploited a group of men with intellectual disability who lived and worked together in a small town in Iowa. The Men of Atalissa explains what happened to these men in a documentary and in an article based on court and company documents, archived photographs and first-time interviews.
The Men of Atalissa marks the first in a series of collaborations with The New York Times. We talked with Times columnist Dan Barry and video journalist Kassie Bracken about the making of the multimedia report.
POV: The Henry’s Turkey Service program seemingly started out with good intentions. What was the point where things started to go wrong?
Dan Barry. Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Dan Barry: I think that the program may have been well intentioned, but flawed from the start. Even back in the 1970’s, there were programs for assisted living and movements towards the right to choose. [The men] moved to Atalissa in 1974 in the late summer, but by December of 1974, a social worker in Muscatine County is saying this is obscene, these men have no choice in where they live, who they live with, what kind of job they have.
Also, part of the program was discipline. If the men didn’t work hard enough, they would be punished. They wouldn’t be allowed to watch television, to go to the minimart and buy themselves a Mountain Dew. That’s not choice, that’s not how any adult wants to be treated.
The law they were operating under that allowed them to pay these men minimum wage is a complex and now very controversial law. So even then, however well intentioned, this is problematic.
POV: This was a huge case for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but would you say that it was a victory for them? Or a failure, in the sense that it took so long for the rescue and trial to happen?
Dan Barry: I don’t think the EEOC was aware of the case until the rescue in 2009, so I think the EEOC believes that it exacted justice. It told the men’s story through the trial. The attorney, Robert Canino, convinced a jury — as they often say, a jury of non-disabled people, in Iowa — to say this is a communal outrage and we’re going to hit you hard with a hammer of $240 million. The EEOC thinks this struck a blow against the exploitation of people who are vulnerable in our society.
Now, separate from that, is whether government was late to the dance, and I’d say there’s no question that time and time again, as The Des Moines Register pointed out as early as 1979, this is a problem, and government never properly responded.
POV:Around the time of the jury verdict, it seems that (Henry’s Turkey Service company president) Kenneth Henry was hesitant to speak about the case.
Dan Barry: You know, I called him up and I said, “Hey, I think I’m going to be in Goldthwaite, Texas. Do you mind if I stop by?” And he was very gracious. He met me on the road in a pick-up, led me to where I needed to be, and then spent two or three hours recounting his experiences and expressing pride in what Henry’s Turkey Service had done.
He does feel that way. Yes, it went bad towards the end, he feels bad about some of it, but overall, no one else cared about these “boys.” That’s what he would say: “These were the forgotten boys and we took them in.” And he wanted to tell his story.
Kassie Bracken: I also spoke with him on the phone and said, similarly, “I’m going to be close by in Austin, would you mind if I came by? Let me just meet you and introduce myself.” I told him, “I think it’s important that I hear your side of the story on camera. We’ve shot some other interviews and I’d love to include yours, and if at any point you want me to turn off the camera, I will.” I could tell he was very hesitant and there were a few times he did ask me to turn off the camera, but it was honestly when he was starting to get emotional about it.
Dan Barry: I think his emotion is captured in moments where his voice wavers or his eyes redden, you do get the sense that he’s emotionally invested in this case and these boys — “boys” I use advisably — and what they were trying to do.
The schoolhouse. Photo: The New York Times
POV: The title of the story is “The Men of Atalissa,” but there’s emphasis on using the word “boys” (in the Atalissa community) to describe these men.
Dan Barry: I could have easily chosen the “Boys of Atalissa,” but to me, “Men of Atalissa” was much more ennobling and a way of saying, you know what, these guys are men, in the full understanding of that word. Working hard, of age, getting it done and enduring. It’s like the Faulkner line, “They endured.” I wanted to say “The Men of Atalissa” as sort of a denunciation of so many years of being called boys.
POV: Was it difficult to negotiate that you’d actually be able to speak with the men?
Dan Barry: Yes. First, I called up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawyer who represented the men and he told me no one had ever spoken to them. You can understand that they want to be protective, so I asked if I could at least meet them and get a sense of them. We made an agreement that I could speak with them and meet them, but without cameras or videotaping.
Kassie Bracken. Photo: The New York Times
Kassie Bracken: I’ve worked with Dan many times on his stories, and I told the [the lawyer] a little bit about my personal interest in this one, that I see this as a way to restore some of the dignity from the experience – that’s where I’m coming from. There was a period where I said I’d just like to go down, I don’t have to even have a camera, let’s just see if this is a comfortable situation for me to be part of this. I think that sort of approach made the lawyer rethink things. That happens a lot – no cameras, no videotaping — and then it’s about explaining where you’re coming from and what you hope to gain from bringing a camera into the story.
Dan Barry: The whole point of the story is really about empowerment and having choice in life, and we didn’t want a situation where we were talking around then men about their choices in life, we wanted to give them a choice. If the men didn’t want to do it, the whole deal was off.
We knew that we’d need access to the men themselves. Rather than talking around the subjects, we needed to speak to the men. That’s what convinced Kassie and me to go forward, because we had access to these men and we got to know them, we got to understand what they’d gone through.
POV: Were the families of the men involved in negotiating interviews, and were they present when you were filming and reporting?
Dan Barry: Most of these [men] no longer have families. Many of them really were dropped off at state schools in Texas when they were young boys and in many cases, if not most cases, that pretty much ended their relationship with their families. Some men continued to have relationships with their mother or a brother, but most of them didn’t. These men are now in their 60s, many of their parents are dead, so there was really no one else to check in with. The people who help them in their every day life really are, for lack of a better word, their guardians and their protectors. I did speak with some of the family members who were still around and I can’t say that they’d really been in touch with the men.
Photo: The New York Times
POV: How did you collaborate, in terms of having a reporter, a videographer and a photographer (Nicole Bengiveno of The Times) all working at the same time?
Dan Barry: What Kassie and I have done, along with Nicole, is figure out how to give one another time to do we need to do. I’ve been yelled at many times not to get in the way of a shot. We mostly do only the one interview. I may be the one asking the questions, and Kassie is shooting, but if I don’t phrase something quite the right way or if I miss something, Kassie will chime in.
Kassie Bracken: In this case, Dan had already met the men and we just wanted to make sure they were comfortable, and I was another new person, so that was another reason it made sense to do it together. Once they got to know me, I could start asking them questions. But we just wanted to be cognizant of that as well.
POV: Was it hard to get the women of the Atalissa Betterment Committee and city councilman Dennis Hepker to speak with you and be so forthcoming?
Kassie Bracken: I was a bit apprehensive, because obviously this is a small community and a fair amount of the people there felt that they’d been maligned by the immediate coverage after the rescue, so you don’t know what you’re walking into. It didn’t necessarily seem like it would be the most hospitable situation, but I was very surprised. People were pretty open to us. Nicole Bengiveno, who was with us, would just go up to someone on a lawn and start talking and they’d introduce us – and one by one you’d meet another person and you know, everyone there knows everyone. I met one woman from the ABC who said, well, we’re having our last meeting, and I asked if I could show up. Nicole and I went over, and I spoke to the ladies and asked if it would be OK if we spoke about what happened and how they felt about it now.
That was essential to so much of the story, that five years later, even from behind the camera, I could see that it’s still so present. It was really interesting to see that mix of maybe denial, maybe defensiveness, but also, some regret. Honestly, with everyone we spoke to there was a real affection. And that wasn’t made up. The details they shared — it’s obvious there was a real relationship there.
Dan Barry: They were part of the community, they were accepted and integral to the church services at the Lutheran church. And so, I think that they’d wanted to tell their story and we were lucky enough that they still wanted to tell it. That’s what you see in the documentary.
POV: Where are the men now?
Dan Barry: The first men who retired went down to Texas, and those men have wound up in not-a-very-nice nursing home. It’s a different kind of institution… Other men are in group homes, where it’s six or seven people, 24-hour staff, and there’s a veneer of institutionalization there as well.
Then, there are a couple of men who live independently. They live in their own apartments, do their own laundry and cooking, and that speaks to what was denied to them for 35 years. They could have lived independently for 35 years with a little help here and there. And there are the men in Waterloo (Iowa), sharing houses with two or three other men, using public transit, going to work only if they want to work. So, the guys who went south to Texas did not fare as well as the guys who went north to Waterloo, and that’s kind of tragic. I know that it bothers the lawyer who represented them for the EEOC.
Kassie Bracken: Susan Seehase (Exceptional Persons, Inc.), who is working with the men in Waterloo, said it’s almost like they’re aging in reverse. They’ve recaptured some youth. One of the men was dying his hair cherry red when I was there, and it’s very visual even just the color in their rooms. You can see it. As a videographer, it was great to see them in their quality of life.
POV: Is there any update in the status of the settlement?
Dan Barry: No money has been collected through the court verdict or any of the fines, but that is still making its way through the courts. The Department of Justice, on behalf of the EEOC, is doing its best to go after the assets of Henry’s Turkey Service to see what they can get to give the men, but it’s not a short process. They may not wind up with anything but it’s still an active pursuit.
POV: This is something that could be happening in other places, and we just don’t know about it. Since the trial, have any other cases been looked into or discovered of similar situation or magnitude?
Dan Barry: Disability rights advocates tell me yes. We’ve been so focused on this case that we really haven’t broadened our scope but I’m told the Henry’s case has prompted the Department of Justice to crack down on abuses of Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which basically allows employers to pay a sub-minimum wage to people with disabilities. Because of this case, the DOJ is going after these things and they have presented two cases, in Rhode Island and in Oregon, where they’re raising questions about sheltered workshops and whether people are being paid properly or being exploited.
POV: Did you take anything away about how we, as a society, we can pay more attention to things like this?
Kassie Bracken: That, to me, is the big question: How do we make sure we’re seeing all that’s in front of us? While working on this, I got off the subway and was walking down the street and there was a guy who was probably talking to himself and dressed a little funny… and this is New York, you know, you just look away. And all of a sudden felt just stupid and awful at the same time. That’s what it’s about. It might not be the analogous situation, but that’s what it’s about. For me, it started right there in that minute. You know, I thought, I can’t believe this is exactly what I’m working on, and I’m doing the exact same thing.
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