Chickens on a truck near a Tyson Foods plant in Springdale, Arkansas, June 18, 2012. (Photo: Steve Hebert / The New York Times)
Thousands of workers stand for up to 12 hours straight in freezing-cold, foul-smelling factories — aching, hurting, gasping for air, struggling to go on until their next bathroom break — while they relentlessly pull, cut and jab at dozens of chickens churning down the line every minute at dangerous speeds, repeating the same, intensive body-motions more than 20,000 times a day.
One by one, most are left injured, debilitated and sick.
This is the damning reality uncovered in a recent report on the US poultry industry — called Lives on the Line: The Human Cost of Cheap Chicken — by the international human rights organization Oxfam. The details of how 280,000 workers are ruthlessly exploited and abused in one of the world’s largest meatpacking industries speak volumes about just how cheap and expendable workers’ lives are in Obama’s America.
From the bosses’ perspective, however, conditions in the poultry industry are exactly as they’d like. US poultry is one of the great success stories of the much-touted “recovery” from the Great Recession of 2007-08.
According to the National Chicken Council, the country’s largest employers’ organization in the broiler chicken industry, US poultry corporations sold nearly 9 billion chickens in 2015, mostly to domestic consumers, at a wholesale value of $60 billion.
Four powerful companies — Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s, Perdue and Sanderson Farms — control 60 percent of US poultry and are making some of the highest profits among American corporations. In 2014, those four poultry companies brought in more than $2 billion in profits, while the executives of these companies made an average annual salary of $8 million, more than double their 2011 rewards.
On top of this, the poultry industry giants have received $196 million in tax credits and other government incentives since 1995. Tyson Foods’ stock price rose by…