BusinessTN

November was a month of contradictions for The Vincit Group. The privately held industrial sanitation company was preparing to move into Brabson Place, a new, $15 million headquarters it co-owns along with Wolford Development and which anchors a key corner in downtown Chattanooga. The stately building symbolizes success for a business that began in 1968 as Zee Company, maker of industrial cleaning agents. Now Zee is one of The Vincit Group's five "vertically integrated" subsidiaries primarily serving meatpacking plants; its flagship, QSI, is thought to earn $10 to $20 million annually, staffing and managing cleaning crews for industry leaders like Cargill, Smithfield and Tyson.

At the same time, two low-level QSI managers were scheduled for sentencing, guilty of hiring and providing stolen identities for illegal immigrants at an Illinois meatpacking plant. The managers were among 62 QSI employees—over half of QSI's workforce there—arrested in a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While the Vincit Group declined comment, the arrests highlight the problems inherent for a business created from and caught up in the ills of the industry it serves.

Since the 1980s, a few corporations have controlled meatpacking, and they have maintained their narrow profit margins by hiring non-union, immigrant labor and pushing fewer workers to work faster. It's gruesome, hazardous work, with 36% of meatpacking employees injured on the job every year.

That figure does not include meatpacking's most imperiled workers: the contract employees who rush to clean blood-slick surfaces and equipment, often ignoring safety protocol, and at high risk for crushing, amputation and chemical exposure. Plants that once cleaned in-house have cut costs by outsourcing to contractors like QSI, whose crews must scour massive slaughterhouses to USDA specifications in a few hours. According to meatpacking industry expert Julie Eisenberg, contract cleaning is a "hidden industry"—new enough that OSHA still classifies its workers as janitors. And those workers are usually immigrants, often undocumented, and desperate enough to accept the hard work and poor wages commensurate with winning the low bid.

Lance Compa, lecturer in labor law at Cornell University, says if contractors' top brass don't know about undocumented workers, it's because they "don't want to know," insulating themselves from lower-level management. But in 2003, when QSI employees at a North Carolina pork processing plant threatened a walkout, top management was on the scene. The National Labor Relations Board later found QSI guilty of assaulting the workers and threatening them with deportation.

Back in Chattanooga, The Vincit Group keeps a low profile, despite its enhanced presence. In 1968, when the business was founded, who could have imagined cleaning could become such dirty business?