Bonus: 100 points- no make-ups.
Please read the following
article and respond in a quick write of 150 words to the following. Weave in
specific evidence.
Now that you understand
Factory-Produced Chicken and the conditions under which the people work, how
might you change this situation?
Have you eaten at Taco Bell,
Popeyes or Kentucky Fried Chicken?
EXPLOITATION
AND ABUSE AT THE CHICKEN PLANT
Case
Farms built its business by recruiting immigrant workers from Guatemala, who
endure conditions few Americans would put up with.
By Michael Grabell
Poultry
processing begins in the chicken houses of contracted farmers. At night, when
the chickens are sleeping, crews of chicken catchers round them up, grabbing
four in each hand and caging them as the birds peck and scratch and defecate.
Workers told me that they are paid around $2.25 for every thousand chickens.
Two crews of nine catchers can bring in about seventy-five thousand chickens a
night.
At the
plant, the birds are dumped into a chute that leads to the “live hang” area, a
room bathed in black light, which keeps the birds calm. Every two seconds,
employees grab a chicken and hang it upside down by its feet. “This piece here
is called a breast rub,” Chester Hawk, the plant’s burly maintenance manager,
told me, pointing to a plastic pad. “It’s rubbing their breast, and it’s giving
them a calming sensation. You can see the bird coming toward the stunner. He’s
very calm.” The birds are stunned by an electric pulse before entering the
“kill room,” where a razor slits their throats as they pass. The room looks
like the set of a horror movie: blood splatters everywhere and pools on the
floor. One worker, known as the “backup killer,” stands in the middle, poking
chickens with his knife and slicing their necks if they’re still alive.
The headless
chickens are sent to the “defeathering room,” a sweltering space with a
barnlike smell. Here the dead birds are scalded with hot water before
mechanical fingers pluck their feathers. In 2014, an animal-welfare group said
that Case Farms had the “worst chicken plants for animal cruelty” after it
found that two of the company’s plants had more federal humane-handling
violations than any other chicken plant in the country. Inspectors reported
that dozens of birds were scalded alive or frozen to their cages.
Next, the chickens
enter the “evisceration department,” where they begin to look less like animals
and more like meat. One overhead line has nothing but chicken feet. The floors
are slick with water and blood, and a fast-moving wastewater canal, which
workers call “the river,” runs through the plant. Mechanical claws extract the
birds’ insides, and a line of hooks carry away the “gut pack”—the livers,
gizzards, and hearts, with the intestines dangling like limp spaghetti.
On the
refrigerated side of the plant, there’s a long table called the “deboning
line.” After being chilled, then sawed in half by a mechanical blade, the
chickens, minus legs and thighs, end up here. At this point, the workers take
over. Two workers grab the chickens and place them on steel cones, as if they
were winter hats with earflaps. The chickens then move to stations where dozens
of cutters, wearing aprons and hairnets and armed with knives, stand shoulder
to shoulder, each performing a rapid series of cuts—slicing wings, removing
breasts, and pulling out the pink meat for chicken tenders.
Case Farms
managers said that the lines in Canton run about thirty-five birds a minute,
but workers at other Case Farms plants told me that their lines run as fast as
forty-five birds a minute. In 2015, meat, poultry, and fish cutters, repeating
similar motions more than fifteen thousand times a day, experienced
carpal-tunnel syndrome at nearly twenty times the rate of workers in other
industries. The combination of speed, sharp blades, and close quarters is
dangerous: since 2010, more than seven hundred and fifty processing workers
have suffered amputations. Case Farms says it allows bathroom breaks at
reasonable intervals, but workers in North Carolina told me that they must wait
so long that some of them wear diapers. One woman told me that the company
disciplined her for leaving the line to use the bathroom, even though she was
seven months pregnant.
Scrambling
to find workers in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, Case Farms
sent recruiters across the country to hire Latino workers. Many of the new
arrivals found the conditions intolerable. In one instance, the recruiters
hired dozens of migrant farmworkers from border towns in Texas, offering them
bus tickets to Ohio and housing once there. When workers arrived, they
encountered a situation that a federal judge later called “wretched and
loathsome.” They were packed in small houses with about twenty other people.
Although it was the middle of winter, the houses had no heat, furniture, or
blankets. One worker said that his house had no water, so he flushed the toilet
with melted snow. They slept on the floor, where cockroaches crawled over them.
At dawn, they rode to the plant in a dilapidated van whose seating consisted of
wooden planks resting on cinder blocks. Exhaust fumes seeped in through holes
in the floor. The Texas farmworkers quit, but by then Case Farms had found a
new solution to its labor problems.
Recently, Case Farms has found a more captive
workforce. One blazing morning last summer in Morganton, an old yellow school
bus arrived at Case Farms and passed through the plant’s gates, pulling up to
the employee entrance. Dozens of inmates from the local prison filed off, ready
to work at the plant. Even their days may be numbered, however. During the tour
in Canton, Popowycz and other Case Farms managers showed me something they were
excited about, something that would help solve their labor problems and also
reduce injuries: in a corner of the plant was a shiny new machine called an
“automatic deboner.” It would soon replace seventy per cent of the workers on
the line. ♦
