The Poultry Industry’s Negative Side
The newfound celebrity status of Arkansas and the chicken’s dramatic ascendancy have focused attention on what some consider the dark side of poultry production:
* Union organizers are trying to sign up the generally ill-educated workers in poultry factories, where the pay starts at $5.50 an hour and the work--though increasingly automated--can be hard and mind-numbing.
* Tyson Foods and other poultry processors are second only to the meat-packing industry in incidents of repetitive stress injury among their workers. Turnover is routinely 60%, but others stand in line as jobs are vacated.
Bigger operators such as Tyson Foods get higher marks for working conditions, ergonomic research, medical benefits and the like. But critics say the poultry business has too many firms similar to notorious Imperial Foods of Hamlet, N.C., whose owner recently went to prison for locking the fire exits at his chicken plant to prevent pilferage, leading to the deaths of 25 workers in a 1991 fire.
* Though it’s unclear whether poultry are killed any more brutally than other creatures, animal-rights activists do not like the way live chickens are hung upside down from overhead conveyors and electronically stunned before being passed over a spinning rotary blade that slits their throats. “Some people say it’s gross, but they’ve got to be dispatched somehow, and this is the best way we know,” says Ted Burnett, manager of Tyson’s plant in Springdale.
* Consumer activists object to the chemicals used in chicken feed. The recent use of irradiation to kill bacteria in chickens is now under attack.
* Northwest Arkansas’ impressive volume of chicken feces--roughly equivalent to the human waste produced by a city the size of Los Angeles--has become a burden to streams and ground water when it is spread on pastures as fertilizer.
The Republicans made it their strategy during the presidential campaign to paint Bill Clinton as the coddler of a polluting industry. But that attack lost momentum when it turned out that President Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency had been handing out awards to northwest Arkansas farmers and regulators for their fine work protecting rivers.
On another front, some farmers who “grow” the chicks delivered to them by companies such as Tyson have begun to organize in at least nine states, complaining of one-sided contracts and chicken-feed pay. A key issue: whether poultry companies will guarantee to supply the farmers with chicks for as long as it takes to pay off the mortgages on their $75,000 chicken houses.
Floyd Hoke, president of the northwest Arkansas chapter of the fledgling Contract Poultry Growers Assn., says the poultry companies are free to cut off supplies of chickens to the farmers, leaving them with little recourse and no revenue to pay off the loans.
Any broad-scale success by the growers could change the economics of the business, says Allan Rahn, a poultry economist at Michigan State University. It’s a system that frees Tyson and other companies from acquiring the land and facilities that make up 60% of the industry’s fixed assets, Rahn says, while retaining virtually full control.
He believes that the farmers at least deserve long-term contracts, but notes that they’re not forced to sign anything they don’t like. “You can say it’s exploitive,” Rahn says, “or you can turn that around and ask: Would the broiler industry be where it is today without it?”
