Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  As we’ve seen, dirty workers sometimes hail from poor, isolated backwaters in America—the “rural ghettos” where many of the nation’s prisons are located, for example. In the case of poultry slaughterhouses, many are from other countries, “shadow people” hired to work in an industry that plays an increasingly central role in America’s food system and diet. Between 1960 and 2019, the per capita consumption of chicken in the United States more than tripled, surpassing both beef and pork to become America’s most popular meat. By the latter year, more than twenty thousand fast-food chicken franchises had opened for business in the United States, part of a thirty-four-billion-dollar industry. The “shadow people” stood at one end—the invisible end—of a chain that led from America’s factory farms through its industrial slaughterhouses to the frozen nuggets sold in supermarkets and the order windows at Chick-fil-A and KFC. As Everett Hughes might have noted, these workers solved a problem for society, performing a distasteful job that someone had to do to keep the customers at these franchises satisfied but that few Americans had the stomach or wherewithal for.

  “PLANTATION CAPITALISM”

  I heard this sentiment again and again at the workshop in Bryan, Texas, where I met Flor Martinez. A Guatemalan worker named Juan told me that at the poultry plant in North Carolina where he had worked for many years, white people would sometimes come in, work until the lunch break, walk out, and never be seen again. “They say, ‘I’m not crazy enough to stand here all day,’” he said with a chuckle. Like the other workers on hand, Juan had come to the workshop at the invitation of the Centro de Derechos Laborales (Center for Labor Rights), a pro-worker nonprofit organization based in Bryan that sought to help immigrants defend their rights. About halfway through the proceedings, after a lunch of refried beans and fresh tamales was served, a group of workers came forward to perform a skit. Dressed in hairnets, smocks, and orange latex gloves, the workers stood side by side behind a waist-high table that they pretended was the production line in a poultry plant. As they simulated various tasks, moving their hands quickly while repeating the same motions over and over again, a male supervisor stood watch, periodically shouting, “¡Vamos!” “¡Rápido!” At one point, one of the female workers asked to go to the bathroom. “Necesito ir al baño,” she said.

  “¡Aguantarse!” the supervisor shouted, meaning “Hold it in.”

  “No puedo esperar,” the woman responded. “I can’t wait.”

  “¡Aguantarse!” he roared.

  Afterward, I spoke with one of the workers who had taken part in the performance, a woman I’ll call Regina (she did not want her real name used). Originally from Mexico, she was in her mid-fifties, with brightly polished fingernails and an impish smile that vanished when she started talking about her experience at the poultry plant in Bryan, where she worked for two years. By the time she left, she had developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both arms. She’d also sustained a hip injury when a worker carrying heavy boxes accidentally rammed into her. Performing the skit had been painful, she said. But the source of the pain was less physical than emotional, reminding her of the times she’d stood on the line needing to go to the bathroom and been ordered to wait. This happened so frequently that she developed a bladder problem, she said. Eventually, she started wearing a sanitary napkin to work in case she had to wet herself on the line.

  “My logic would tell me that I had the right to go to the bathroom, but I did not want to lose my job,” she said with downcast eyes. When I asked her how taking such precautions made her feel, she fell silent. “Sad, mad, impotent,” she said. Then she cried. A divorced mother with several children to support, she obeyed the supervisors who humiliated her only because she needed money and feared losing her job, she told me. “Necessity makes us work at that place,” she said after wiping her eyes.

  A few weeks later, I came back to Bryan to interview several other current and former line workers at the poultry plant. All of them were Mexican immigrants. All were women with children and families to support. When I asked why they worked at the plant, all relayed a variation of what Regina had said: because they needed the money and because it paid better than flipping burgers or cleaning toilets at a motel, the only other work they could find in Brazos County, where good jobs were hard to come by, especially for Latinos, among whom the poverty rate was 37.4 percent. As they recounted their experiences, all but one of the women wept openly.

  As the tears suggested, the workers at the plant didn’t just feel mistreated. They felt degraded and demeaned, a sensation familiar to the subjects of Scratching Out a Living, an ethnographic study of the poultry industry written by the anthropologist Angela Stuesse. Until 1945, poultry production, unlike pork and beef, was a small-scale industry based mainly in southern states like Mississippi, where Stuesse did her fieldwork and where, prior to World War II, the workforce consisted mainly of white women. By the 1970s, the white women had been replaced by African Americans, whose entry into previously segregated plants prompted many whites to leave. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the industry’s Black workers found themselves working alongside Latino immigrants in what had suddenly become a highly profitable business (in 2020, poultry and eggs were Mississippi’s top agricultural products, generating $2.8 billion in revenue). Reflecting on how few of the profits trickled down to the workers, Stuesse characterized the poultry industry as a system of “plantation capitalism,” featuring a labor force dominated by people of color who toiled under dehumanizing conditions for companies whose owners and senior managers were overwhelmingly white. As on plantations, the workers were subjected to brutal treatment by supervisors who exercised total control over them. As on plantations, the grueling work left both physical and emotional scars. Working in a poultry slaughterhouse “causes more than bodily pain,” Stuesse concluded. “Chronic abuse at the hands of superiors also injures the spirit, threatening workers’ sense of dignity, self-worth, and justice.”

  Historians of slavery might take issue with the term “plantation capitalism.” Yet as I listened to the workers at the poultry plant in Bryan describe the indignities they endured, the phrase kept coming to mind. “All they lack is a whip for them to hit you,” said Regina, snapping her fingers to imitate the supervisors who ordered her around. Others spoke of being treated like “machines” that became disposable the minute their bodies started breaking down. This was the view of Libia Rojo, a friend of Flor Martinez’s whom I met on my second trip to Bryan. She’d worked at the plant for eighteen years, an experience that had left her with a damaged shoulder, an injured wrist, and a lame right arm that hung limply at her side. The injuries had recently forced her to stop working, she told me. Now she feared that no one would ever hire her again.

  I heard a similar story from Juanita, an undocumented immigrant who lived in a trailer park in Bryan with her husband and their three young children. Inside the trailer, the shades were drawn and the air was stifling, moistened by the steam billowing out of two large pots simmering on the stove of a tiny kitchen. When not sprinkling salt or slicing plantains into the pots, Juanita attended to her children, among them a fretful toddler whose cries for something to eat were temporarily silenced with a bottle of Nesquik. The two other children sat slumped on a threadbare couch in the corner of the room, watching television. The cramped quarters and multiple mouths to feed explained why, when Juanita first started working at the poultry plant, she disregarded the warnings of older workers who told her, “You’re young—you should not work here.” The job paid $12.20 an hour, which seemed like a fortune to her, and included health benefits (though workers had to pay one-fourth of the cost out of pocket). “At the orientation, I thought, wow,” she said.

  Not long after she was hired, Juanita slipped in the bathroom at the plant because the floor was slick with grime. She broke her fall with her left hand, which soon started hurting. She went to see the plant doctor, who wrapped her wrist in a bandage and told her she needed to limit her activities. The
job she was subsequently assigned—packing chicken breasts onto trays at breakneck speed—was incompatible with this directive, which won her little sympathy from her supervisor, who she began to suspect was plotting to get rid of her. On one occasion, she arrived at her shift two minutes late after going to the nurse to get bandages for her hands, which were particularly sore that day. “You’re always late; you do not pack enough!” the supervisor scolded her. “I cannot permit this.” When she started crying and asked to go home because the pain was agonizing, he threatened to fire her. “I don’t care how you feel: you stay or I fire you,” he snapped.

  Later, while she was working in another department, the chemicals used to disinfect raw chicken accidentally splashed into Juanita’s eyes. The tearing and irritation got so bad that the nurse at the plant sent her to see a specialist in Austin, who told her she needed surgery. For this and subsequent appointments related to her eyes, Juanita told me she had to pay out of pocket. When she came back to work, her eyes continued to bother her, but the nurse at the plant determined that the condition was unrelated to the job. At one point during our conversation, Juanita pulled out a folder filled with medical records. She showed me a physician’s report given to her by the company in which the nurse wrote, “No work related injury, is allergy.” Juanita glared at the document. “I have never had allergies,” she said. She fished out another medical document, from the third party that administered her health plan at the plant. It was an “Adverse Benefit Determination” that concluded the injuries to her left hand, left wrist, and shoulder were also not work related.

  “They wanted me to leave the job; that is what they mainly do when you get injured,” said Juanita, who told me the only thing her health insurance seemed to cover were cheap ointments and bandages dispensed at the plant clinic. Eventually, Juanita did leave the job. When we met, she was unemployed and unsure if she would ever be able to work again, both because she was undocumented and because of her physical impairments. Although her eyes had stopped tearing, her vision was not as sharp as it used to be, especially when exposed to bright sunlight, which was why the shades in the trailer were drawn. Sanderson Farms, she said, treated her “like a disposable piece of trash.”

  MISSIONS IN TRANSPARENCY

  The day after visiting the trailer park where Juanita lived, I drove to the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan to see if I could talk to some managers and supervisors about how workers on the disassembly lines were treated. When Upton Sinclair composed The Jungle, outsiders curious about such matters could visit a slaughterhouse simply by walking through the streets of cities like Chicago and looking around. “They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stockyards,” one of these outsiders, Rudyard Kipling, wrote in his 1899 Letters of Travel, which included a vivid description of pigs and cows slaughtered in livestock pens that stretched on for blocks. “You shall find them about six miles from the city,” wrote Kipling, “and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight.”

  More than a century later, America’s slaughterhouses had gone the way of prisons, relocating to the “unobtrusive margins” of society, both to take advantage of business-friendly environments and to be removed from sight. The Sanderson Farms plant was located in an industrial park, off a freeway, at the end of a winding road bounded by a metal gate. PRIVATE PROPERTY PAST THIS POINT, a sign above the gate announced on the rainy, overcast day I visited. After following the road up a gently sloping hill, I reached a parking lot marked off by another security gate. In the near distance, two rain-doused flags—one with fifty stars, the other with just one (the flag of the Lone Star State)—sagged on a pole by the entrance to a massive brick building. As I walked over to the security gate, a semitruck stacked with wooden crates encased in mesh wiring rolled by. The crates, which had arrived that morning full of live, squawking birds, were the only indication that what took place behind the walls of the building was the mass slaughter of animals. They were now empty and spattered in drizzle.

  Sanderson Farms, which owned and operated the plant, is one of the world’s largest poultry producers and the only Fortune 1000 corporation in Mississippi, where the company was founded in 1947. A family business that started out supplying chicks and feed to neighbors in the town of Laurel, the company went public in 1987. In the 1990s, it expanded its operations into other states (Georgia, Louisiana, Texas), places with weak unions and, no less important, permissive environmental laws. The plant in Bryan opened for business in 1997. Fifteen years later, Environment Texas, a nonprofit group, published a report citing it as the state’s leading polluter of water, releasing 1.2 million pounds of toxic discharges into the state’s creeks and rivers. This was not unusual. According to a report published in 2018 by the Environmental Integrity Project, the typical slaughterhouse discharged 331 pounds of nitrogen a day, roughly the amount contained in the untreated sewage of a town of fourteen thousand people. Some poultry plants routinely violated local pollution limits, the report found, violations that often went unpunished. Many other plants were located in states with lax regulations “that allow them to discharge far more pollution.” If “good people” living in affluent communities weren’t bothered by this, it’s perhaps because most of them were shielded from the consequences. As the Environmental Integrity Project noted, slaughterhouses were disproportionately located in isolated areas “with a high percentage of Latino and African American residents” and a large number of residents “living beneath the poverty line,” communities that “can least afford to lose their drinking water supplies and natural resources.”

  The dirty by-products (blood, fecal waste) of the meatpacking industry leached into the streams and rivers of the same communities where the people who did the dirty work inside the slaughterhouses lived. Places like Bryan, where, according to the Texas Education Agency, 74 percent of the children in the local school district were economically disadvantaged in 2015.

  Like many poultry companies, Sanderson Farms favored a business strategy known as vertical integration, whereby it owned everything from the feed mills and hatcheries to the trucks that delivered the chickens to slaughter. Pioneered by Tyson, this strategy enabled the big companies that dominated the meat and poultry market to reap massive profits. As the reporter Christopher Leonard shows in his book The Meat Racket, it was far less beneficial to rural communities and to the contract farmers who raised chickens and hogs. The farmers were paid based on secret formulas, written by the companies, that often left them on the verge of bankruptcy. Those who complained about the terms were often put out of business (the companies, which owned the chicks, would simply stop supplying them). As Leonard notes, rural Americans had coined a term to describe what happened to their counties as companies like Tyson expanded their influence: “They have been chickenized.”

  Also like its competitors, Sanderson Farms took pains to cultivate a positive image. In 2018, as part of this effort, the company launched a “truth-telling” ad campaign to promote its new “Mission in Transparency.” “We believe if we are transparent and tell our customers and consumers more about why we do what we do, they will not only have a better understanding of poultry production, but they will also be able to feel better about what they are feeding their families,” announced Hilary Burroughs, director of marketing at Sanderson Farms.

  The emphasis on transparency had not filtered down to the guards at the security gate of the plant in Bryan, who told me I could not enter the premises after I asked to go inside. One of the officers handed me a slip of paper with the plant’s phone number on it, explaining that all visitors needed to get permission before entering. I went back to my car and called the number, reaching an office worker who gave me another number—for Mike Cockrell, the CFO of Sanderson Farms, who was based in Mississippi. I dialed it and spoke to Cockrell’s secretary, a friendly woman with a thick southern accent who took down my name and explained that Mr. Cockrell was in a meeting. She said she would try to get his attention and that I should call back. />
  An hour later, I called back, explaining that I was outside the plant and waiting for permission to enter. Mr. Cockrell was still in a meeting, she told me. After another hour passed, I tried again. Mr. Cockrell was still busy, she said, and would be tied up all afternoon with phone calls and emails, making it impossible for me to get into the plant that day.

  In the weeks that followed, I called Sanderson Farms several more times, repeating my request to visit the plant in Bryan. I also asked for an interview with Cockrell. Neither the interview nor my request for a visit was granted. This was hard to square with the company’s Mission in Transparency. It was not hard to square with the secrecy for which the meat and poultry industry was known. In a number of states, it was actually a crime to record a video or take a photograph inside a meat or poultry slaughterhouse, thanks to so-called ag-gag laws passed with the help of the industry’s lobbyists. (Some of these laws were subsequently struck down by judges who determined that they were unconstitutional.)