Vol. 81/No. 37      October 9, 2017

 

Chicken plant bosses seek to jump line speeds 25%

 
In a drive to boost their profits, chicken processing bosses are pressing the federal government to relax U.S. Department of Agriculture rules and allow their companies to jack up factory line speeds by 25 percent — to plow through 175 chickens a minute, up from 140. That’s three living, clucking chickens transformed into packaged products every second.

In August National Chicken Council President Michael Brown arrogantly claimed, “This change will not affect food safety — if anything, it will enhance it.” But it’s poultry workers already facing dangerous line speeds and working conditions who would bear the brunt of this latest attack.

Some 300,000 workers are employed in the poultry industry nationwide, many in plants in the South. The five major companies — Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Perdue Farms and Koch Foods — have led the speedup drive. Already some one-third of poultry workers get afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome and three-fourths suffer nerve damage to their wrists and hands.

Bosses are now working on new plants designed to take advantage of the higher line speeds. Tyson and Sanderson both say their new plants will process more than a million birds a week.

The speedup drive was facilitated when the USDA cut back inspections of poultry plants in 2014, relying instead on companies inspecting themselves.

Pork plant bosses are getting on the bandwagon. The USDA is considering new rules that would allow them to process 1,300 hogs per hour, 200 more than currently permitted.

Meat workers’ injury and illness rates are nearly two-thirds higher than for other workers, higher than both mining and construction.

The packinghouse bosses hire a large number of immigrant workers, many without papers, aiming to keep the workforce divided and protests against lousy pay and conditions muted.

And the working conditions are lousy, with the bosses tailoring everything to maximize production and profits. In Arkansas, the second-largest broiler production state, 91 percent of chicken workers are denied sick leave, 80 percent can’t afford health care, and nearly two-thirds report having been shorted on their wages by their employers, the Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center reports.

The bosses see workers as just another piece of machinery, to be tossed aside and replaced when broken or no longer able to keep up. But, as Swiss writer Max Frisch said about guest workers there, “We asked for workers, but we got people.”

Earlier this year some 800 poultry workers in Marshville, North Carolina, waged a successful fight to force Unicorn Inc. to pay them $1.2 million, half for back wages and an equal amount in damages.

 
 
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