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We eat a lot of it—89 pounds per person each year. Chicken is America’s most popular meat. From nuggets to sandwiches to wings, poultry is a $50-billion industry.
But how does all that chicken reach your plate? It’s not easy to turn a live bird into a bucket of buffalo wings. In fact, it takes a lot of work: hanging, cutting, trimming.
We’ll show you what the poultry industry doesn’t want you to see, and tell you exactly what you can do to help workers in their struggle.
The poultry industry is booming. Consumer demand is growing and profits are climbing. Executive compensation is soaring.
Even the lives of chickens have begun to improve as consumers have voiced concern for their treatment. But one key part of this rocketing industry has been left behind: the people who work processing poultry. Every day, hundreds of thousands of workers become disposable parts of a large, fast, relentless machine.
These women and men stand on the line hour after hour, faced with an endless stream of chicken carcasses. They hang, cut, debone, twist: repeating the same motions tens of thousands of times each shift, with few moments to rest, stretch, or take a bathroom break.
This video is a quick overview of the interactive story that follows: what the poultry industry doesn’t want you to see and what poultry workers need you to know.
These are demanding jobs—and the industry doesn’t make it any easier for the workers. In fact, Big Poultry treats workers as replaceable cogs in their machine; turnover in poultry plants can reach as high as 100 percent every year. To find workers willing to do these jobs, the poultry industry exploits vulnerable people who have few other options: minorities, immigrants, and refugees—even prisoners. Because of their precarious situations, most workers are afraid to speak out or do anything that might jeopardize their jobs.
Many of us choose to eat chicken because we believe it is a healthy and more environmentally friendly source of protein than other meats. And many have spoken out to ensure that the conditions under which chickens are raised are improving. We deserve to know where our food comes from.
You need to know what really goes on behind the walls of those poultry plants. So, we collected stories, photos, and video from workers who invited you into their lives to show you what’s wrong and how you can help.
The industry squeezes profits and productivity out of these workers. For every dollar spent on McDonald’s McNuggets, only about two cents goes to processing workers. Those workers hang, cut, trim, bread, freeze, and package those chickens—and they get 2 percent of the sale price.
Workers throughout the poultry industry face these problems, but four companies control roughly 60 percent of the American market: Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms. These companies are so big that if they make changes, other companies may follow.
Consumers have already pushed Big Poultry to change: Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s, and Perdue have all recently pledged to phase out the use of antibiotics from their chicken supply chains. People spoke and they listened. They’ll listen again.
The booming poultry industry puts increasing pressure on workers
These plants operate around the clock to process 8.5 billion chickens a year.
Americans now eat three times more chicken than we did 50 years ago. And that means more workers are needed to hang, cut, pull, and trim millions of birds each day.
The poultry industry has come a long way. Today it’s a modern model of efficiency and consolidation. Big Poultry has grown from thousands of small farms into an industrial power-house dominated by a handful of companies that control almost everything—from the chickens and feed to the product distribution network. The top four companies control roughly 60 percent of the market.
Inside the processing plants, new technologies make it possible to churn through millions of chickens each day. Machines now handle the birds at several stages, but most of the work is still done by hand: from hanging live chickens to cutting wings to trimming skin. Each worker handles thousands of birds every day. The work is rapid, repetitive, and low paying. The injury rate is high, and the atmosphere is oppressive.
Today, Americans prefer chicken cut into parts or processed into forms such as tenders, nuggets, or frozen entrées. As our tastes have changed, the processing work has shifted from the home to processing plants.
As the industry has grown and changed, so have consumers’ tastes. Not only do we eat a lot more chicken, but 30 years ago, most of us bought our chickens whole. Today, we buy 90 percent as cut-up parts.
Each extra processing step means human hands are at work on the line: cutting, pulling, deboning, skinning, and then coating, frying, freezing, and packaging. It’s not a simple task to take a live chicken, and turn it into Perdue Fun Shapes Chicken Breast Nuggets or Pilgrim’s Honey-Dipt Chicken Strips. As demand for these products grows, the pressure on workers grows too.
In the drive to keep up productivity, the industry leans on the workers to go ever faster.
The maximum speed at which poultry companies can run their processing lines has doubled in the last 35 years, and the poultry industry has been pushing to make the maximum speed even higher. Faster line speed means higher production, and higher profits. But the pace places a greater strain on workers.
On the line itself, depending on the job, many workers say they have to process around 35 to 45 birds per minute. This means performing the same task on about one chicken every two seconds: more than 2,000 chickens per hour, more than 14,000 chickens per day. A conservative estimate is that the average worker repeats forceful motions—cutting, pulling, slicing—over 20,000 times per day.
As chicken has become big business, all aspects of the industry have been consolidated and enlarged. Thousands of small farms have been absorbed into huge operations.
