MODERN-DAY SERFS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 124

lot of fat falls on the machines and the floor. There's fat everywhere. Everything's greasy. So when there's
a disk cutter with a rotating blade, your fingers are in danger.” 41
One in five workers in the meatpacking and processing sectors is in the United States illegally. 42 Na-
tionwide, poultry workers are 50 percent Latino, and more than 50 percent are women. The companies pay
low wages, and an average worker qualifies for Head Start, food stamps, the National School Lunch Pro-
gram, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
A 2000 survey of poultry companies by the Department of Labor (DOL) found that over 60 percent
of plants violated basic wage and hour laws. A majority of poultry plants illegally force employees to
work off the clock by not compensating workers for job-related tasks before and after their shifts, and for
brief breaks during the workday. The DOL survey also confirmed that over half of poultry plants, mainly
nonunion plants, illegally force workers to pay for their own safety equipment by deducting the costs of
required gear from workers' paychecks. Tyson and Perdue have been sued and have had to pay millions
of dollars for cheating workers out of wages and failing to compensate workers for time spent taking off
protective gear. 43
In 1991 twenty-five workers died from smoke inhalation in a fire at a poultry plant in North Carolina.
Rescue workers found that the owner had ordered the fire exits to be locked to prevent stealing. Twenty
years later, working in a poultry plant is still one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Because the in-
tegrators mix antibiotics in the feed of chickens to prevent infection from overcrowding, the birds harbor
antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is passed on to poultry workers. In a study of poultry workers, research-
ers found they were thirty-two times more likely to be resistant to the antibiotic gentamicin than people
not working with poultry. Poultry workers are also exposed to dust and droppings from poultry, causing
respiratory illnesses like pneumonia and asthma. 44
Speaking of her years interacting with poultry workers, Morison reflected on her community's experi-
ence with Perdue: “Publicly they speak of doing the 'right thing,' and privately within the company realm
they do the complete opposite. The worst [incident] in my mind was of a pregnant processing-plant worker
who was forced to urinate on herself because to allow her to use the bathroom would mean that her spot
on the line would have been empty and it would have slowed processing speed down.” She went on to say,
“In this same Perdue processing plant, workers were continually harassed by a supervisor who constantly
threw pieces of chicken, hitting workers if it was deemed they weren't moving fast enough.”
It is not only the workers in the poultry industry who suffer—the conditions in which the birds live and
die can only be described as cruel, from their birth to slaughter. Broiler operations use birds that have been
bred to have large breasts, and they grow so fast that their size does not keep pace with their hearts or
lungs, causing heart attacks and other health effects.
Thousands of birds are crowded together for their brief lives in extremely crowded conditions in the
filthy warehouses where they live in their own waste. At the end of their short lives, the birds are roughly
loaded in tractor trailers, denied food and water, and sent to processing facilities where they are hung by
their feet and slaughtered by the truckload. 45
Laying conditions for egg-producing hens are no better than for meat chickens—just different. Eggs are
produced in large-scale operations with hundreds of thousands of layer hens held in each facility. A hand-
ful of firms own multiple farms or contract with a number of large layer operations, most of which house
their birds in small cages that are stacked from floor to ceiling. Sixty-nine million eggs were produced in
the five states where production is concentrated: Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, California, and Pennsylvania.
In October and November 2010 the Humane Society placed an undercover activist as a worker at an
egg farm owned by Cal-Maine, producer of 8 billion eggs a year. The living conditions were extremely
dirty and overcrowded, with each bird having a space the size of an 8"x 11" sheet of paper. When the hens'