When Ed Hayes started the Kansas chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps last year, he promised that the group would protest employers who hire undocumented workers by picketing at their job sites. The last weekend of April, they made good on the promise by showing up at the construction site for JE Dunn’s Santa Marta Senior Living Center, an upscale, brick-and-stucco retirement community in Olathe.
The next week, Hayes and fellow Minuteman Roger Thompson got an invitation to JE Dunn’s downtown Kansas City office, where they met with a company attorney and vice president Dan West. Hayes says he praised the company, because he’d been hearing that JE Dunn didn’t hire undocumented workers. But the Minutemen also told Dunn that they were convinced its subcontractors were employing illegals and wanted the parent company to do a better job policing its hired help.
When the Pitch called JE Dunn to check Hayes’ story, a spokeswoman first responded that “nobody’s familiar with this guy [Hayes].” After subsequent calls, however, the company acknowledged the meeting with the controversial Minuteman group, which has been blasted by Hispanic organizations as militant and racist.
West tells us that the meeting was “short” and “not antagonistic.” After Hayes’ contingent was spotted with a banner at Santa Marta, West says, he and a company attorney sat down with the two Minutemen and explained that Dunn prohibits the hiring of undocumented workers in its agreements with subcontractors. “It wasn’t -- how can I say it-- it wasn’t really a controversial meeting,” West says. “It wasn’t like we came to a whole lot of conclusions; it was just, ‘Here are our procedures and processes.’”
Though the two parties didn’t form an official partnership, West says he’s not turning a deaf ear to the group's demands. “As specific things come up on projects,” he says, “we will continue to talk with them about it.”
Hayes says the meeting earned JE Dunn the favor of a “courtesy call” to let the company know in advance if Minutemen planned to picket one of its work sites. Two months after the meeting, though, JE Dunn has lost that status.
Hayes says his men are gearing up for a new round of pickets at Kansas City area job sites this month. Meanwhile he’s still hearing from pissed-off workers at Santa Marta, leading him to believe that JE Dunn “hasn’t done anything at that site to keep the illegals out.” – Carolyn Szczepanski
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See why people were upset about the Frances Semler choice by the Mayor (and your publications former employees)? She is also a member of Eagle Forum, which also dabbles in Hate.
The Pitch has done a very poor job covering Funkhouser. It looks like your paper has become a public relations arm for a very troubled Mayor's Office.
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