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Town's salvation has a price

Residents of the dying town of Hooker were thrilled to get the largest beef plant built in two decades. But as they thought it over, the enthusiasm faded.Residents of tiny Hooker were happy to get the largest beef plant built in two decades. But they aren't happy to see their way of life escape.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 22, 2007

HOOKER, Okla. - People started giving up on this place years ago.

The drug store and five-and-dime closed. The Ford and Chevrolet dealerships left, too, along with the tractor-parts retailers.

Vacant brick storefronts with sheets of yellowed newspaper taped in the windows are reminders of what once was in this speck of a cattle town in the Oklahoma Panhandle, a place where there are more cows and hogs than people.

A couple months ago, the lumber store shut down. It was a last gasp.

"It's a d - - - shame to see a town like this," Earl Meng, a member of the City Council who has lived here for 60 years, says as his pickup rolls over Hooker's cracked streets one recent morning.

Salvation, some locals hope, lies in a slaughterhouse.

Specifically, a Smithfield Beef processing plant to be built a few miles east of town, a $200-million project that will create as many as 3,000 jobs and put Hooker back on the map.

This would be the largest beef plant built in the United States in two decades, even as U.S. beef consumption has remained steady.

It's planned for an area that ranks among the nation's biggest producers of beef, grain and farm supplies. An estimated 600,000 head of cattle roam on farms within 25 miles of the proposed plant.

When the plans for the plant were announced in October, locals were ecstatic. But love turned quickly to loathing for a large group of residents who saw the plant as an attack on what was left of their struggling town.

They fear that the bulk of the jobs will be too low-paying and attract immigrants who will overwhelm city services.

"I'm not opposed to change, I'm just opposed to takeover," says Don Ukens, a Hooker native who shuttered his Main Street TV and appliance shop in the 1990s.

Beef plant workers earn around $10 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobs are dirty, strenuous and sometimes dangerous and attract a high number of immigrant laborers at plants across the United States.

"It's a hard and relatively low-paying job, but it's the only opportunity that exists for many of these workers," says Cornell University professor Lance Compa, an expert in labor law and international labor rights. "These companies take advantage of these groups, they get super-exploited."

Industry experts have concerns, too. Days after the plant's announcement, JP Morgan Chase analyst Pablo E. Zuanic wrote that a processing plant that size - that would process 5,000 head of cattle daily - would add too much capacity to the industry and worsen the plight of beef packers, who are dealing with a glut of meat and poultry in the market that has held prices down.

Zuanic also questioned whether Smithfield was even going to build in Hooker. He theorized the real goal might be to buy out longtime rival Swift and the threat of a new plant would help achieve the takeover.

As residents trade facts and rumors about the plant in Sunday church, farmer Jackie Stevens says she prays to God every night not to let the plant come.

"It's going to destroy the life we know," Stevens says.

[Last modified February 22, 2007, 01:47:39]