Nation's Slaughterhouses Exploit Migrant Workers

by Dave Bennion

Published December 02, 2008 @ 08:00AM PT

Stephanie at change.org's Animal Rights blog directs us to an article by Desiree Evans about the hidden process that brought all those Thanksgiving turkeys to the table last week.

Throughout the South, in rural areas along the hog belt and poultry belt, thousands of workers labor in poultry and meatpacking plants, sorting, cleaning, pulling, deboning, gutting, cutting, slicing and packaging turkeys, chickens, and hogs every day. Whether for Virginia-based Smithfield Foods or Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, these workers perform some of the most dangerous factory jobs in the nation and are subjected to repeated injury and inhumane treatment. Yet their plight is often overlooked. These workers have very few rights in an industry that has been allowed to exploit its workforce due to a lax regulation and enforcement.

Moreover, many of the workers doing the dangerous work of meatpacking are immigrants, often undocumented, and thus more exploitable. Companies have increasingly come to rely on an immigrant workforce that may not complain about harsh conditions for fear of being fired or deported.

The current unregulated mess is bad for the workers:

Injury has become endemic to the industry. With rapid line speeds, poultry workers handle as many as 30 turkeys a minute. Furthermore, in these poultry plants, workers are surrounded by dangerous machines and toxic chemicals, and they're often required to make thousands of cuts with sharp knives each day, according to the Observer. Making more than 20,000 cutting motions a shift, workers can end up with lacerations, debilitating nerve and muscle problems, or missing fingers.

As the Observer reports:

The government does as little as possible to protect poultry workers from mangled hands, severed digits or crippling musculoskeletal disorders. It leaves it to poultry plants to police themselves, and gets involved only when companies report problems. Workers who have no way to speak out pay the price in pain and in injuries that leave them disfigured and unable to do simple tasks.

Bad for the animals (as Stephanie points out in her post):

If workers must work so quickly and in such dangerous situations that they frequently suffer terrible injuries themselves, is it any surprise that we have so many reports of chickens, turkeys, and pigs ending up in the scalding tanks while still conscious? Is it so shocking that cattle are frequently not rendered unconscious by the bolt gun and then suffer through having their throats slit and their limbs chopped off all while they're still alive and conscious?

Bad for the environment:

[F]actory hog farms in eastern North Carolina produce 19 million tons of waste each year -- far more than the coastal ecosystem can absorb, according to SELC. Untreated hog excrement is poured into "lagoons" that can and do overflow, polluting nearby waterways and land. According to the watchdog nonprofit Food & Water Watch, millions of gallons of waste from Smithfield's lagoons have contaminated North Carolina's rivers and creeks, threatening the health and livelihoods of people living nearby.

Not good!