Last fall a state investigation found a shuttered hog plant in southwestern Minnesota shorted workers — many of them immigrants — more than $40,000.
But last month, an attorney representing the remaining assets of the bankrupt HyLife plant in Windom charged the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry with fabricating the lost wages claim.
The $41,752 claim is "not based on any actual unpaid employee," wrote Lucian Murley, an attorney for the liquidating trustee. Murley argued the state didn't interview workers to arrive at the outstanding wage claim and, instead, based the number on "incomplete documentation."
On Wednesday, the state defended its investigation and said that if HyLife submitted false bookkeeping records, that was illegal.
"This investigation can be done through the books and records of a business, as was done here, and need not be through a personal interview of every employee that is suspected to be underpaid," wrote Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Jeremy Eiden.
Last spring, HyLife announced the closure of the Windom plant, citing losses of up to $6 million a month as the price of shipping pork to international markets, many in Asia, grew increasingly expensive. In the subsequent weeks, tens of thousands of hogs awaiting slaughter were sold to a South Dakota company, and an Iowa company purchased the plant for $13 million.
The plant has not yet reopened.
A Delaware court is overseeing the distribution of assets to businesses and entities owed money for services, work and sales to the plant, which slaughtered up to 5,000 hogs a day. Minnesota attorneys have laid out a case by which 310 HyLife workers were owed as much as $1,900 or as little as $6 in unpaid wages.
In January, the Star Tribune spoke with former HyLife workers at an English education class who claimed their former employer had not paid them fully in the weeks running up to the plant's closure.
