The
chicken hangers
Date: Sunday, February 01 @
19:11:10 PST
Topic: IDENTIFY (News and Analysis)
President Bush has proposed an overhaul of the
nation’s immigration laws that could provide broad new
rights to millions of undocumented workers. But how are
they faring now? A look at how immigrant workers from
Mexico are changing the face of the poultry industry in
the South.
Written and photographed by
Russell Cobb / Laurel, Mississippi
Published Monday, February 2, 2004
A tractor trailer packed with broiler hens on the way
to a chicken processing plant, which is a common sight
on a Mississippi highway.
Chicken processing is a dirty business, but no job in a
poultry plant is more dreaded than “live hang.” Here,
workers known as “chicken hangers” grab birds by their
feet and sling them on to fast-moving metal hooks. This
is the first — and dirtiest — stage of poultry
processing. The birds, weighing approximately five
pounds each, fight back by pecking, biting, and
scratching the hangers, who wear plastic cones around
their forearms to shield off chicken attacks. Then, as
workers finally hoist the birds onto the hooks, the
chickens urinate and defecate out of desperation, often
hitting the workers below.
The next stage — the “kill room” — may be bloodier, but
most of the work there is done by laser-sharpened
buzz-saws; only rarely does a chicken slip past the saw
with its throat intact. Although no one has figured out
how to sanitize the nasty job of hanging chickens,
poultry managers pride themselves on the efficiency of
their plants. One plant manager in Laurel, Mississippi,
described his plant to me as “an automobile factory in
reverse: They put cars together, we take chickens
apart.”
Like many immigrant workers in the poultry industry,
Esteban — a Veracruz, Mexico, native in his early
twenties — agreed to work in “live hang” only because it
paid slightly better than other positions at the Peco
Foods plant in Bay Springs, Mississippi. Nestled in the
rolling hills of southern Mississippi’s “Pine Belt,” Bay
Springs feels like a twenty-first century company town:
Peco employs approximately 800 workers, while the total
population of Bay Springs is around 2,000. At $8 an
hour, chicken hangers at the Bay Springs plant make $1
to $1.50 more than other workers who debone, package,
eviscerate, or kill chickens in other parts of the
plant. In an industry with some of the highest turnover
rates and lowest wages in the nation, chicken hanging
has the highest turnover of any position. According to
one manager I spoke to, workers in “live hang” rarely
last a week before they ask to be transferred to another
position. Others simply disappear, never to return to
the chicken plant.
“You think you’d last a week here?” the manager asked me
as he opened a door to the plant’s live hang room. For
about five seconds, I watched men in a dark, sweltering
room, (the darkness supposedly calms the chickens)
struggle with a blur of feathers, dirt and blood. A
conveyor belt dumped chickens on the ground and about
five men wrestled to get them on the hooks before the
next load arrived.
“I probably wouldn’t last an hour,” I responded.
Despite the bleak conditions, Esteban flourished in his
new job. With closely cropped hair, a slight build, and
a collection of NBA T-shirts, Esteban had the air of a
bright-eyed teenager. As an undocumented worker who
spoke no English, he made the most of his limited
opportunities in Mississippi; he got along well with his
line supervisor and claims to have been able to hang
over forty five-pound chickens per minute, an incredible
feat considering the hazards of the job.
Then, after a year on the job, Julio Gordo, a manager at
Peco Foods, called Esteban into his office. (To protect
his identity, Julio Gordo is a pseudonym.) According to
Esteban, Gordo told him that the Social Security
Administration had notified Peco Foods that Esteban’s
Social Security Number had repeated as a number for
another worker.
At first, Esteban feared he would be fired by the plant
and deported for document fraud — a fate not uncommon
among undocumented workers. “Gordo told me he could have
the cops here in five minutes if I didn’t cooperate with
him,” Esteban confided to me later.
Big Poultry's big opponent: NIULA Local 693
representative Charles Carney.
The no-match crisis: threats in the guise of favors
When I first met Esteban during the hottest days of last
summer, he was reluctant to talk about hanging chickens,
Peco Foods, Social Security Numbers, or anything else
other than the new car he had bought with Peco wages.
Like many immigrant workers in chicken plants, Esteban
initially shrugged off my questions about hardships in
the plant by saying, “I came here to work and I don’t
want any problems.”
At the time, I was working as a translator for the local
union, Laborer’s International Union of North America
(LIUNA) Local 693 while gathering research for an
academic paper focusing on the changing face of the
South vis à vis the poultry industry. The management of
Peco Foods decided to let me in the plant on one
condition: that I work exclusively as a translator — and
not as a recruiter — for the union.
I quickly learned that workers at Peco Foods had two
mutually exclusive opinions about the plant: inside the
plant, they had no complaints about the work or their
bosses; outside the plant, the workers despaired about
what they saw as deplorable conditions and incessant
harassment by managers. Many wondered why they had
risked their lives to come to Mississippi only to slave
away in a chicken plant. They longed for jobs picking
fruit, cutting timber or doing construction — anything
besides hanging poultry.
Outside the plant, they accused managers of not paying
overtime, charging workers money to keep their jobs, and
denying workers bathroom breaks; inside the plant,
however, they couldn’t be happier about Peco Foods. In
the end, a job at the chicken plant represented a ticket
to a new life for immigrant workers and few were willing
to quit over perceived injustices. Esteban was no
exception.
After Gordo allegedly threatened to deport Esteban, he
reassured him that he could stay on at the plant if he
could get a new ID and Social Security Number. Esteban
knew this would be difficult; fake documents cost
hundreds of dollars and were sold by only a handful of
people in southern Mississippi on the black market.
Furthermore, Esteban knew he would run the risk of being
fired or deported if he bought a new Social Security
Number, since he would be admitting his old one was
false. Even with a new I.D., his seniority — including
the two raises he had received for a year’s work — would
be revoked. Esteban would be starting over from scratch.
Then, according to Esteban, Gordo told him he was
willing to do him a “favor”: Esteban could buy a new
Social Security Card from Gordo for $700. This was a
favor Gordo had done for many other Mexicans in the same
situation, he claimed. Still, the news came at a bad
time: Esteban was trying to pay off traffic tickets and
send money back to his family in Veracruz. He simply
didn’t have the cash to pay off his supervisor. When
Gordo also demanded that Esteban arrange a date for him
with Esteban’s female cousin after work as a return
“favor,” Esteban decided he had had enough. (In a
conversation with a union representative, Gordo
vehemently denied that he ever offered to “sell”
documents to employees).
Esteban asked the plant’s union representative, Charles
Carney, for advice. Although it was rare for an
immigrant worker to talk to a union rep in the plant,
Esteban felt he had no other choice than to turn to the
union, since Gordo had threatened to terminate him if he
didn’t accept the deal.
Carney listened in shock to Esteban’s story as I
translated. “Tell him we need to talk to him at home,”
Carney told me. “We can’t talk in here.”
Home, as we found out, was a run-down trailer park on
the outskirts of Laurel, Mississippi, where many chicken
workers lived. Tucked away behind the town’s Wal-Mart on
an unpaved road, the unnamed trailer park looked more
like a refugee camp than a subdivision; rotting garbage
and abandoned pick-up trucks were the only landmarks.
The day we visited, workers came out of their trailers
to tell similar stories about Gordo first charging them
to obtain jobs and then, after informing them of a
Social Security “no-match” letter, demanding additional
payment for providing new documents.
After a day of interviews, it became clear that the
Social Security Administration (SSA) had sent a letter
to Peco Foods with a list of workers’ names whose Social
Security Numbers’ did not match its records. Peco Foods
then told these workers individually that they must
“correct” the error or be fired within two weeks.
Although Peco officials are no longer officially
commenting on the “no-match” situation, Steve Conley,
the company’s human resources manager told the
Associated Press in August, “We didn't realize there was
a problem with these folks or we wouldn't have hired
them in the first place. At that point, we just told
them, get it straight with Social Security or we'll
terminate you.” (Peco Foods did not respond to phone and
e-mail inquiries for this story.)
Carney, a former poultry plant worker himself, was
incredulous when he heard that company officials claimed
they were ignorant of the immigrants’ status. In fact,
he was convinced that the company knew it stood to gain
from employing workers who could be easily sacked
because of questions about their papers and took
advantage of their precarious legal status.
Carney’s union, LIUNA Local 693, had recently succeeded
in ousting one manager accused of charging immigrants to
obtain jobs and his replacement — Gordo — was turning
out to be even more problematic. Carney began to wonder
if Gordo’s purported strategy of selling counterfeit
documents to immigrants who had shown up as “no-matches”
in the SSA’s database extended to higher level managers
in the company, and perhaps outside the plant.
After Esteban was fired weeks later, Carney called Peco
Foods’ plant manager and threatened to file a grievance
for a breach of the union contract unless the worker was
reinstated and Gordo was fired. Carney claimed the
worker was fired without just cause since, as far as he
could tell, the “no-match” letter did not imply the
worker was illegal, but rather that there had been some
sort of error in his paperwork. The plant manager was
surprised to hear a union representative — especially an
African American —taking an interest in the plight of an
immigrant worker.
“I thought you wanted [the immigrants] out of the plant,
because they were stealing your jobs” the manager said
to Carney over the phone.
“If I’ve learned one thing over the past ten years,”
Carney responded, “it’s, if you can’t beat ‘em, join
‘em.”
“He didn’t take that too well,” Carney told me later. “I
think I heard him throwing a chair around his office.”
Trailer parks such as this one outside Laurel,
Mississippi, are often owned by poultry companies and
rent their trailers per immigrant worker, packing as
many as six workers into one single-wide trailer.
Learning to “speak Mexican” in the rural South
Carney, a stout Baptist deacon and veteran of the
Vietnam War and many years in Mississippi chicken
plants, is an unlikely convert to the immigrants’ cause.
When he came back from the war, Carney found a job in
the deep freeze section of a Sanderson Farms plant in
Collins, Mississippi. He quickly gained a reputation as
the only African American worker willing to stand up to
a notoriously racist plant manager and helped to
unionize three poultry plants in southern Mississippi.
After nearly a decade of fighting to keep immigrants out
of the local poultry plants, only to see their numbers
increase steadily, Carney underwent a Pauline conversion
in his attitude toward immigrant rights a few years ago.
Although he doesn’t “speak Mexican,” as he puts it, he
believes immigrant workers and African Americans share
many of the same problems in Mississippi poultry plants:
both are stuck in low-wage jobs with few chances to get
ahead in a highly segregated society. They work in an
industry that Occupational Safety and
Health Administration has designated as one of the
most hazardous and which ranks near the bottom in Labor
Department statistics for median wages. And as bad as
conditions can be for African American workers on the
processing line, Carney believes the immigrants’
situation is worse; in fact, he often compares it to
slavery.
But while Carney equates “Big Poultry” with the
plantation system, industry experts cite the huge
economic impact of chicken on the state economy and its
ever-expanding global market as Mississippi’s ticket out
of its seemingly perpetual status as the nation’s
poorest state. According to Mississippi State
University poultry science reports, poultry
contributes $2 billion to the state economy and nearly
70,000 jobs, making it the most important “agricultural”
industry in the state. Since 1987, the number of
Mississippi chickens sold has more than doubled to over
700 million per year and poultry companies are
increasingly looking abroad for new consumers. In 1990,
the U.S. exported 500,000 metric tons of chicken
overseas, while in the year 2000 that figure increased
five-fold to 2,500,000, as China and Russia became the
two largest consumers of U.S. chicken.
Peco
Food’s Web site proudly boasts company exports of
“jumbo wings” and “jumbo legs” to Indonesia, China,
Spain, and Romania, among other countries.
Like the plantation system, however, Big Poultry is
largely a Southern phenomenon: the top six
broiler-producing states are located in the South, with
Georgia and Arkansas constantly battling for number one.
And even though it is currently ranked as the
fifth-largest broiler producer, Mississippi boasts the
single largest processing plant in the U.S. — an
ultra-modern Choctaw Maid plant built in 2000 in
Carthage, capable of processing over 2 million chickens
per week. It is this massive boom in poultry that is
largely responsible for changing the rural South from a
biracial, agricultural culture to a globalized
entrepôt.
Despite the boom in poultry production, the industry has
a notorious reputation with labor unions, environmental
and immigrants’ rights groups. Tyson, the world’s
largest chicken processor, was labeled by
Multinational Monitor
magazine as one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations”
in 1999 for its use of child labor. Then, Tyson became
the subject of a thirty-six-count Justice Department
indictment for human trafficking in 2001. Ever since
three top-level Tyson managers were acquitted by a
federal grand jury for smuggling immigrants to the South
from Central America last year, the industry has faced
increasing scrutiny on its recruiting and hiring
tactics. The media spotlight on Tyson’s alleged
trafficking in immigrant labor, combined with the
economic downturn and security concerns in recent years,
has made many locals — whites and African Americans
alike — wary of embracing undocumented workers.
In another Peco Foods plant in Canton, Mississippi, a
similar “no-match” crisis set off a crusade led by the
town’s sheriff against Canton’s entire population of
undocumented workers. After approximately 200 workers
were fired by Peco because of the “no-match” letter,
Sheriff Toby Trowbridge told the Clarion-Ledger — the daily
paper in Jackson — that he would “round up” all
“illegals” and “deport them.” Although many workers were
finally reinstated after the plant’s union filed a
grievance and national media started to take notice of
the sheriff’s campaign to deport an entire trailer park
populated by immigrants, the damage had already been
done.
As Anita Grabowski of the Equal Justice Center, an
Austin, Texas-based legal aid group that focuses on
immigration, told me: “Most of the workers live paycheck
to paycheck. ... They had to find other work.” Grabowski
worked on a campaign to get the workers reinstated and
found the union in Canton — a local of the United Food
and Commercial Workers — less enthusiastic than Carney’s
local when it came to the plight of immigrant workers.
Grabowski says that in the Canton case, union
representatives were more interested in recruiting
dues-paying members. At a July meeting for union
members, Carney tried to convert other African American
workers to his newfound cause. “They treat these
Hispanics like they treated black folk back in slavery
days,” he said. “Y’all got to stick together with the
Latinos.”
As more and more Americans prefer white meat to red,
the South’s poultry industry expands.
The “Latinization” of the South
In a state still wrestling with ghosts of the Civil
Rights struggle, Carney’s message gets a mixed reception
in the black community. In towns throughout the South
where poultry is king, working-class African Americans
view the influx of Latino workers with suspicion.
Although the South is famous for its insularity and
chauvinism, the refrain “they’re stealing our jobs,” is
actually heard more in the black community than the
white community, since few whites work processing-line
jobs such as “live hang” and evisceration.
As Mike Cockrell, the chief financial officer of
Mississippi’s largest poultry company, Sanderson Farms,
told me during a tour of the company’s Laurel plant:
“Jobs in chicken processing have been traditionally
filled by black women. Many of these women are single
mothers without much education. You can imagine it’s got
to be a hard life trying to raise children and work
fulltime at a chicken plant.”
Cockrell went on to argue that Hispanic immigrants —
many of them indigenous people from southern Mexico and
Central America — have a completely different conception
of what constitutes a decent standard of living than
Americans, but that Sanderson was committed to improving
conditions in the plants. “Normal incentives to keep
employees — health care, retirement, pensions — don’t
work with immigrants,” he said. “They come here to work
and send money back home.” Nevertheless, Cockrell
maintained that Sanderson Farms was a “family-friendly”
company; he cited Sanderson’s child-care facility in
Collins, Mississippi, as an industry first. “We have
people who work almost their whole lives here, and love
it,” he said. “The guy in the kill room, he loves
killing chickens. It’s hard to get him out of there.”
“He can say what he wants,” Carney later told me. “But
the fact is, they care more about those chickens than
they care about their people.” This is truism repeated
by processing line workers everywhere. In an industry
with annual turnover rates approaching 100 percent, the
only constant in a chicken plant seems to be the endless
line of upside-down birds whirling past the plant floor.
Because of increasing competition for these low-wage
jobs, racial tension among Hispanic immigrants and
African Americans runs high and occasionally boils over
into a shouting match in the break room or parking lot.
Carney fields calls daily from African American job
seekers who claim to have been turned away from plants
even as more immigrants are brought on. Poultry
managers, for their part, maintain they simply can’t
hire enough native workers to supply the booming demand
for chicken, which Americans increasingly view as a
healthier and safer alternative to red meat.
Even if immigrants are not, in fact, taking poultry jobs
away from locals (Grabowski claims they are not), the
negative reaction is as understandable as it is
misconceived. Against the odds — Mississippi is
notoriously anti-union — Carney helped organize three
Mississippi poultry plants in the early 1990s: two
Sanderson Farms plants and one run by Peco Foods in Bay
Springs. About five years ago, after tough union
certification drives and harassment by plant managers,
things started to look up for the union and its members.
The poultry industry was booming and the union had
fought for and received wage hikes and other benefits.
Then, the immigrants began arriving. Native
Mississippians working on the line were at first
perplexed, then angry, as line-speeds increased and new
jobs were filled by workers from Mexican town they had
never heard of, like Oaxaca and Chiapas. The immigrants
worked harder, faster, and never complained. Labor
contractors brought in groups of immigrants and paid
them separately from other workers, often deducting a
cut for their “services.” Seemingly overnight,
immigrants became the majority on the line at Peco Foods
and a significant part of the Sanderson Farms plant.
Under the union contract, new workers aren’t allowed to
join until after a ninety-day probationary period. When
Carney tried to recruit immigrant workers for his union,
he found that the labor contractor fired workers after
exactly ninety days, only to rehire them the same day
under a new name and Social Security number. He
discovered that workers who complained about not
receiving overtime were fired on the spot. Even after
massive firings, the poultry plants were able to bring
in new immigrant workers without missing production
quotas.
The situation is not unique to southern Mississippi.
Throughout the South, immigrants have started taking
jobs in poultry and meatpacking plants in towns that,
until recently, remained largely untouched by the great
waves of immigration to the United States throughout the
twentieth century. The impact of Latino immigration on
the economy and culture of the South has been
overwhelming, yet rarely examined. When the
Census Bureau
reported that the Latino population of the southern
states had tripled from 1990 to 2000, many people who
follow immigration patterns thought that the Census had
actually underreported the number of Latinos in the
South. In Laurel, for example, the mayor and police
officials consistently estimated the Hispanic population
to be around 10 percent, while the census reported only
2 percent. Laurel residents say ten years ago, there was
not one Mexican restaurant in town, whereas now there
are at least four, plus three Mexican grocery stores.
This unprecedented immigration to the South represents a
curious twist in the logic of global capitalism. “What’s
unique about poultry,” Grabowski says, “is that unlike
other sectors — like manufacturing — where companies
have moved abroad in search of cheaper labor, poultry
companies have, in effect, brought the cheap labor here.
Poultry has combined the worst labor practices in
agriculture with the worst practices in meatpacking.”
Immigrants to small southern towns also struggle with
life outside the plant. Although Mississippi has one of
the lowest costs of living in the country, immigrants
often pay over $1,000 a month for a rundown two-bedroom
house or trailer. Rental markets in small towns in
Mississippi are often controlled by a handful of
landlords who gouge immigrants by charging rent per
person, not per property. Under this scheme, half a
dozen workers can be housed in small trailers, some
without heat or running water. According to Laurel’s
mayor, some poultry workers have even lived in tents by
the town’s only shopping mall.
Responding to the no-match crisis
As Carney contemplated his options for responding to the
situation at Peco Foods, he quickly learned more about
the SSA’s “no-match letter”— the reason Peco had fired
Esteban. Shortly after Esteban was fired, other workers
started approaching Carney telling him that they, too,
had been notified that they had shown up as a “no-match”
in the SSA database and would be fired within two weeks
if they did nothing to correct the problem.
Carney called other LIUNA locals and an immigrants’
rights group in Jackson. The “no-match” letter was not
even on their radar; no one knew how to respond to the
threat of mass firings other than to wish the immigrants
luck in the next chicken plant. He arranged an ad-hoc
meeting at the Catholic church in Laurel with some
bilingual immigrants’ rights advocates and asked workers
to come. With less than twenty-four hours advance
notice, approximately eighty workers showed up for the
meeting.
After consulting with a team of lawyers and researchers
from the Equal Justice Center and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC),
Carney and his colleagues were finally able to get some
background on the “no-match” letter. Both organizations
are legal aid non-profits that represent immigrant
workers with immigration and labor issues. After every
tax season, Carney learned, the SSA sends letters to
employees whose Social Security Numbers do not match the
name reported to the SSA through the Internal Revenue
Service.
According to the SSA, the original purpose of these
letters was to reduce the astounding $374 billion in the
SSA’s “Earnings Suspense File” (ESF), an account that
holds money paid into Social Security that cannot be
linked to individual workers. However benevolent SSA’s
intentions, the result of the government’s “no-match”
campaign has been a disaster for immigrant workers, a
group disproportionately affected by these letters. The
National Immigration Law Center (NILC) estimates that
tens of thousands of workers have been fired solely on
the basis of the “no-match” letter.
What makes these mass firings particularly troublesome,
according to Bill Beardall, director of the Equal
Justice Center, is that the SSA has no law enforcement
powers and does not “share” information with government
agencies like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(the agency formerly known as the Immigration and
Naturalization Service).
Although employers are supposed to submit a copy of the
letter to the employee and allow him or her to handle
the issue without interference by the company, the
company often fires the employee on the basis of the
letter alone. In the Peco Foods case, for example, the
company created its own letter, which it required
employees to submit and sign, in effect forcing them to
admit that they are working illegally. Once they admit
to having submitted counterfeit documents to the
company, they must be fired under the terms of the 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act, which prohibits
employers from “knowingly” hiring undocumented workers.
None of this, of course, is explained to the immigrant,
and companies such as Peco appear determined to keep
immigrant workers in the dark about the “no-match”
process; Peco sent out approximately sixty no-match
letters last summer to immigrant workers and did not
provide a Spanish translation until workers began to
demand one. None of the workers were allowed to see the
SSA’s original letter, which clearly states in
boldface type (in English and Spanish) that the letter
does not constitute grounds for any adverse action
against the employee.
Furthermore, the letter states that if the employer
does, in fact, take action against the employee, the
company “may” (a key word whose ambivalence remains
unresolved even by legal experts at NILC and the Equal
Justice Center) be violating the employee’s rights under
the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The workers were simply told
— and sometimes urged on the spot — to sign the
company’s letter and return it to Gordo as soon as
possible.
The workers at the meeting in Laurel, however, appeared
determined to fight for their jobs. With some emergency
training and support from Beardall, the group of
immigrants’ rights advocates gathered at Laurel’s
Catholic church — including a freelance English
teacher/translator and a Catholic seminarian — were able
to explain to the workers that it would be illegal for
the company to fire them without a just cause and that
the “no-match letter” did not, in itself, constitute a
just cause for termination.
Nevertheless, many of the immigrant workers doubted
that, the company would respect their legal rights as
workers. After hours of discussion in Spanish and
English, it became clear that the workers held a
fundamental mistrust not only of their employer — Peco
Foods — but also of the governmental institutions that
regulate companies’ labor and safety practices. The
immigrants simply could not believe that their rights
would be respected by either the company or the
government.
Foul-smelling victories
In a sense, immigrants are rightly skeptical of such
institutions: undocumented workers are often arrested
for minor crimes such as public intoxication or
excessive traffic tickets and then deported. If an
undocumented immigrant chooses to testify in court
against an abusive employer, he or she will almost
certainly be asked about his or her employment
eligibility and the source of his or her documents,
which are often counterfeit. This means potentially
exposing the coyote who brought him or her into
the country, as well as family and friends. Also, a
recent decision by the Supreme Court in Hoffman Plastic
v. NLRB makes it even harder for undocumented workers to
win remuneration after being fired. Even when
undocumented immigrants are “unjustly terminated,” the
court ruled, they do not have a right to sue their
employer for back pay. Grabowski cites the Hoffman
decision as a major factor in the Canton workers’
inability to win back pay after being unjustly fired. In
sum, the cards are stacked against the worker and only
those with nothing to lose — such as Esteban — are
willing to come forward and tell their stories.
Ultimately, the group of workers assembled at the church
in Laurel decided to hand in letters to the company
stating that they were aware of the no-match problem and
would look into it on their own; they would not admit to
having submitted a false Social Security Number, as the
company had asked them to. Workers reported that when
Gordo learned of the meeting, he became furious and told
them they “would pay a price” and that “the union
couldn’t help them.”
Many of the workers — and Carney — feared that Peco
Foods would fire them, regardless. Surprisingly, days,
then weeks went by, and Gordo took no action. The
chicken hangers kept hanging chickens and the debone
line kept removing bones from meat. For the immigrants
and their unlikely advocate, it was a small, quiet
victory over a powerful industry, an industry whose
influence has done more to change the face of
Mississippi than anything since the civil rights
struggle.
Weeks after the “no-match” crisis had passed, I found
myself back in the Peco Foods break room gazing through
a window onto the plant floor. A conveyor belt with
metal hooks wound around an immense room from “live
hang” to “cut up,” where a group of mostly Latina
workers furiously separated chicken breasts from bones.
The floor was like an ice-rink of chicken slime and
water. The air was putrid as the smell from “further
processing” — where the birds’ bones, guts, and waste
are boiled into animal feed — hung in the humid
Mississippi air.
A group of chicken hangers came through the door for a
fifteen-minute rest. Most of their break is spent
doffing and donning their uniforms, which are caked in
chicken excrement and chicken guts and the time left is
usually spent smoking cigarettes and eating snacks from
the vending machines. Two weeks after receiving their
“no-match” letter, they weren’t basking in their victory
over Peco Foods, but contemplating other jobs in
Mississippi, anywhere but in a chicken plant.
"So you don’t want to stay here in Bay Springs now that
you can keep your job?"
"I hear the timber industry is hiring," one said. "Beats
hanging chickens."
STORY INDEX
CONTRIBUTOR >
The writer
Russell Cobb, INTHEFRAY.COM Contributor
MARKETPLACE >
(order from independent bookstores at BookSense.com and
a portion of each sale goes to INTHEFRAY.COM)
Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and
Small-Town America
Edited by Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and
David
Griffith. University Press of Kansas. 1995.
An anthology of articles by anthropologists and
sociologists tracing the transformation of
small-town America through low-wage meatpacking
jobs.
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The Jungle
By Upton Sinclair. 1906.
The classic Upton Sinclair novel that forced the
government to drastically reform working conditions
in meatpacking plants in the early twentieth
century.
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ORGANIZATIONS >
Equal Justice Center
An Austin, Texas legal-aid non-profit which has been
monitoring abuses in
the poultry industry throughout the South.
URL:
http://www.equaljusticecenter.org/PoultryWorker.htm
Occupational Health and Safety Administration
(OSHA)
The governmental agency charged with maintaining
safe working conditions in U.S. workplaces.
URL:
http://www.osha.gov/
National Immigration Law Center
A "national support center whose mission is to
protect and promote the
rights and opportunities of low income immigrants
and their family members."
URL:
http://www.nilc.org
National Immigration Law Center
A "national support center whose mission is to
protect and promote the
rights and opportunities of low income immigrants
and their family members."
URL:
http://www.nilc.org
Laborers International Union of North America
One of the unions — along with the United Food and
Commercial Workers'
Union — attempting to organize undocumented workers
in poultry plants.
URL:
http://www.liuna.org/
TOPICS>
President Bush’s proposed immigration reforms
URL:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040107-1.html
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