140 chickens get processed every minute in most poultry plants in the US.
That’s the maximum speed the US government allows most poultry plants
to run their assembly lines.
It’s a speed that helps chicken companies stay profitable.
But if you ask poultry workers, they’ll say it’s a speed that causes them pain.
Meat processing is a dangerous job in America.
Workers are 3 times more likely to get seriously injured
than the average American worker.
More likely to get seriously injured than people who work in oil and gas drilling
industrial building construction, or people who operate sawmills.
And that was before the COVID pandemic tore through meat plants.
Meat processing has a long history of safety issues.
Using a sharp tool quickly and close to other people is dangerous.
But some of the harm is avoidable, because today, workers are without some basic protections
necessary to keep them safe.
So why has the US failed to protect the people who process our meat?
Meat processing refers to the stages of turning a live animal into a food product in a factory.
For poultry, a factory layout might look something like this.
Workers hang live chickens by their feet on a conveyor belt
where machines stun them, cut their throats, defeather them
remove their heads and feet, and take out their guts.
Then their carcasses are sanitized with an acid solution before they get stored in a cooler.
This slaughtering section is almost entirely automated
and it's the fastest part of the line.
But what happens next still requires human precision.
Unless they are sold as whole chickens
workers cut up the carcasses into parts, by hand.
This process is called deboning.
That’s the job this worker has.
She works at a poultry plant in northwest Arkansas.
And requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her company.
She's worked in poultry processing for over 20 years.
And it’s how she met her husband, who died last year from COVID
after the virus spread through poultry plants in the area.
Deboning work is extremely repetitive.
She's making those motions thousands of times a day.
A 2014 CDC report found that, 34% of workers suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome
and 76% of workers had nerve disorders when working at standard speeds.
These conditions make the finger joints enlarged and stiff, and give workers wrist pain
like these photos of poultry workers’ hands show.
Pace, repetition, and musculoskeletal disorders also increase the odds of more severe injuries
which is why the poultry industry has more reports of finger amputations
than any other industry.
And why the meat processing industry as a whole averages 2 amputations a week.
Americans eat a lot more meat per capita today than we did in the 60s.
But we actually eat less beef and just a little more pork.
It’s because we eat a lot more chicken.
One reason is because chicken is comparatively cheap.
It’s less than half the cost of pork or beef.
If a meat processing company wants to keep prices low and its profits high
they can adjust their output.
In other words, they can try to produce more chicken with the same cost of labor.
That can be achieved through faster slaughter line speeds.
The US Department of Agriculture regulates meat processing line speeds.
But it’s primarily concerned with food safety.
Another agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, regulates worker safety
but doesn’t have the power to set line speed limits.
Line speeds affect both food and worker safety
but regulating them through the USDA means worker safety risks may be overlooked.
KELLOWAY: It's based on food safety standards.
It does not consider the effect on workers at all.
In 2001, an OSHA “ergonomics rule went into effect” “aimed at reducing injuries…
caused by a worker performing a repetitive task,”
which could have empowered the agency to regulate line speeds.
But within a year, Congress “axed” the rule after
“business groups argued the standards were too costly.”
Today, the National Chicken Council, the lobby that represents the poultry industry
routinely asks the US government to increase the maximum line speed.
Starting in 2018, the USDA granted waivers to at least 54 plants to increase their line speeds
from 140 birds per minute to 175.
These 15 plants received those line speed increases in 2020
even though they had been previously cited for worker safety violations
and for severe injuries
according to a report by the National Employment Law Project.
Evidence that worker safety may not have been a consideration
when allowing faster speeds.
KELLOWAY: Humans are not machines and there's just a limit to
human capacity for some of these repetitive motions.
It’s not just line speeds that fall into this gap in regulatory oversight.
It’s also why the amount of chemicals used to prevent food-borne illness
like peracetic acid, ammonia, and chlorine
aren’t regulated for worker safety.
Chemical accidents like ammonia and chlorine gas leaks injure hundreds of workers a year.
And they frequently make workers sick.
Absent stricter government regulation to protect them
workers may feel they only have one other option: unionization.
But that’s become out of reach for most workers.
LICOLLI: I believe it's a mess.
Magaly Licolli organizes non-unionized poultry workers in northwest Arkansas
through an organization called Venceremos.
She’s digging through her storage container to find protest signs.
LICOLLI: This was when we were telling them
to shut down the factories because of the outbreaks.
This part of the country is crucial for poultry production.
These three counties in Arkansas process more poultry than almost anywhere in the US.
And multiple poultry companies have plants here.
Including Tyson, one of the largest poultry producing companies in the world
which has its corporate headquarters here in Springdale, Arkansas.
That’s where Magaly is headed, to deliver a petition in protest of working conditions
at a poultry plant also located in Springdale.
LICOLLI: Workers have been complaining a lot.
The working conditions have gotten worse, even worse than the pandemic.
LICOLLI: There is less workers and workers have to work faster.
LICOLLI: And the salary was the same.
The petition asks for a $4/dollar an hour wage increase, no restrictions on bathroom
and water breaks, more frequent short breaks, and paid sick leave.
When we reached out to Tyson for this story, they wrote that they have “no reason to
deny breaks” to workers
and claimed the petition was “misrepresented” to the workers who signed it.
Venceremos organizes poultry workers from other companies in the area
who have had similar complaints
like this strike at a George’s poultry plant in Springdale, Arkansas.
The work that Magaly’s organization does is important in a state like Arkansas
where the vast majority of poultry workers don’t have access to a union.
Unions have historically made dangerous jobs, like slaughterhouses, a little safer.
But in the 1980s, union power declined, in part due to a rise in anti-union politics.
Those trends hit the meat industry, too.
KELLOWAY: Unions once played a really important watchdog role in both maintaining a wage floor
across the industry and maintaining safety standards.
Pork and beef processing companies shuttered unionized plants located in urban areas
and reopened non-union plants in rural areas.
To meet this skyrocketing demand for chicken starting in the 80’s
the poultry industry set up large plants in rural areas, too.
Arkansas and other top poultry-producing states have anti-union laws
and have some of the lowest union membership in the country.
Meat processing workers are about twice as likely to be a person of color
to not be a citizen, and to be foreign-born,
when compared to the total workforce.
LICOLLI: The majority of the workers working in the northwest Arkansas are from
Central America, a lot of people from Mexico
but also one of the biggest populations is also people
from the Marshall Islands.
When unions began to decline between 1980 and ‘90s
injuries in the meatpacking sector rose by 40%.
Since then, government data shows that injuries have declined
a statistic the National Chicken Council shows on their site
and roughly the same one they gave us when we reached out to them for comment.
But there’s a debate about how reliable that data is.
KELLOWAY: There's a lot of evidence that shows reporting is down considerably.
There are a lot of worker-led and advocate-led surveys
that show persistent high levels of injury.
One of these surveys was given to Alabama poultry workers.
72% of them said they suffered from
“significant work-related injury or illness.”
That’s compared to 4.5% in the government’s data on the whole country from that same year.
Because I've seen workers suffering, you know, all these years.
They’ve had accidents, injuries that left them disabled for life.
If they have babies, sometimes it's hard for them to hold them because of the issues that
they have in their hands.
The poultry industry could make these workers’ lives a little easier—and, importantly,
safer by making modifications to this line.
Like reducing the speed, giving workers more breaks, or minimizing repetition
by switching up job roles.
Paid sick leave is another improvement and Tyson recently announced they would start
offering this benefit to workers in 2022
but only the vaccinated ones.
For now, Magaly continues her fight on behalf of workers.
We went outside the Tyson headquarters.
The director of public relations was there to receive the petitions.
I think that people really need to take into consideration that
without these workers we don't have food on our table.
And that's just facts.
It's just not only about the humanity but the moral duties that we have to these workers.
Hi, thanks for watching this second episode of our Future Perfect series on the meat industry.
Something that didn’t make it into this story is the impact that this book had.
This is The Jungly by Upton Sinclair.
It's a novel that was published in 1906 about the misfortunes of a Lithuanian family who
immigrates to the US to work in Chicago’s meatpacking industry.
It was a best-seller of its day and it was hugely influential.
Theodore Roosevelt who was president at the time even credited the book for
inspiring him to pass the first food safety regulation in the US.
But Sinclair apparently had hoped that the focus would have been more on the workers
and the animals suffering in this system.
I talked to Claire Kelloway about this.
KELLOWAY: Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, will often say
“I was aiming for readers’ hearts and hit them in the stomach."