Like “a Dickensian time warp...” That’s
how Wall Street Journal reporter George Anders described
conditions in the nation’s poultry processing plants (12/1/94) — low
wages, horrible working conditions, harsh work rules, dead-end, nonunion,
mind-numbing, monotonous and dangerous. Anders ought to know: he
actually
worked undercover at two of these plants and interviewed 50 workers
at other plants. His account is chilling.
“ The work often was so fast-paced that it took on a zany chaos,
with arms and boxes and poultry flying in every direction. At break
times I would find fat globules and blood speckling my glasses, bits
of chicken caught in my collar, water and slime soaking my feet and
ankles and nicks covering my wrists...”
Americans’ insatiable appetite for chicken (averaging 72 pounds
per person last year) is murder on chickens, but it has also created
a living hell for the 221,000 poultry processing workers as well. Plants
are clustered in a “broiler belt” across the Rural South,
in small, company towns that provide a steady stream of cheap, unorganized
labor — primarily poor, uneducated African-American women and
undocumented Hispanic immigrants. Union organizing attempts have met
with harassment, intimidation, firing or reassignment to the worst
jobs.
Normally, we think of tough, risky jobs as offering higher pay, but
not in the poultry industry. Wages start at about $5/hour and top out
around $6-$7. Only the “live hangers” — those
who hang the struggling birds by their feet before they are stunned,
slaughtered, machine-plucked and rehung for processing — get
a few dimes more.
After the birds are rehung, headless and upside down, the workers “on
the chain” process them frantically, in assembly-line fashion,
at the rate of 91 chickens per minute, the maximum allowable speed.
Among the grisly jobs on the line are the “buttonhole-cutter,”
who slits the bird open; and the “gut-puller,” who yanks
out the innards. Others chop off the limbs, pull off the skin and separate
the organs.
Automation has “deskilled” the process so much that
each worker may make the same cut thousands of times a day, resulting
in cumulative trauma injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Only
the
meat-packing and auto assembly industries have worse records.
Anders describes the many dangers facing poultry workers: floors are
slick with wash water and chicken bits; workers constantly cut themselves
and others with sharp knives and scissors; and the cold temperatures
in the plant numb their fingers, which increases the risk of injury.
Hygiene is deplorable — the line moves so fast that chicken parts
often end up on the floor, and workers are so tired that they just
pick
them up, put them back on the line and keep moving. Anders reported
that there was no soup in the bathroom where he worked.
The poultry barons seem to have a particular hang-up about bathrooms.
Workers can be fired for leaving the line without permission. According
to Anders, people said they sometimes peed on themselves because they
could not get a supervisor’s attention and were too scared to
leave the line without being excused. One worker described the indignity
of such rules, commenting: “I’m a grown woman. I don’t
like being told when I need to go to the bathroom.” And breaks
can be few and far between: Anders said he got just one five minute
break in five hours at one plant.
Where are the regulators? That’s a good question. Clinton’s
former Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy, recently resigned when he
was caught accepting “favors” (payoffs) from Tyson Foods,
the nation’s largest poultry producer. In exchange for dragging
his feet on reform of the inspection system, Espy was wined and dined
by the Tysons, receiving such bribes as football playoff tickets and
scholarship money for his girlfriend.
OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is
not staffed adequately to inspect plants the way they should be, so
the agency relies on worker complaints. But workers are often afraid
or do not know their rights. The result: injury, illness and death.
Last year, for example, a worker’s legs were amputated by an exposed
drive shaft in a Mississippi plant. Anders interviewed a priest who
was told by “Jorge” that “he has seen coworkers run
over by forklifts, lose fingers and go numb in their arms and hands.”
In a horrible plant fire in North Carolina in 1991, 25 poultry processing
workers were killed and 55 were injured when their escape was blocked
by padlocked fire doors (management was trying to prevent employees
from stealing chicken parts). Not one government agency had inspected
the plant in its 11 years of operation, even though the company had
two plant fires at other locations the year before.
The misery of the poultry workers is surpassed only by the misery of
the billions of birds slaughtered each year. When you eat chicken and
other factory-farmed animals, in the words of Alice Walker, “It’s
like you’re eating misery... a bitter life.” Food
should be about celebration, life, health and sustenance; not salmonella,
artery-clogging
cholesterol, violence and death.
Joan Zacharias is an animal activist and campaigner
for social justice. She lives in Brooklyn. This article first appeared
in The VivaVine.
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