Glazing hams and carving turkeys hide a sinister truth: Our food supply is increasingly dangerous. A look at the meatpacking industry's dark secrets.
The most wonderful time of the year is upon us, but as we gather around laden tables, a menace lurks behind every mouthwatering morsel.
E. coli, listeria, salmonella – these deadly contaminants are becoming all too common in our food supply. The human cost of every bite is higher than ever, and it’s not just our health that hangs in the balance.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, award-winning journalist Alice Driver, author of Life and Death of the American Worker, serves up a searing new indictment of the meatpacking industry. Her years-long investigation exposes a system rife with abuse, where the well-being of workers and consumers alike is sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
As industry safety regulations will surely grow weaker in the coming administration, the health risks are poised to escalate.
Driver’s unflinching discussion of the grim realities behind our dinner plates is not for the faint of heart, but it’s essential listening for anyone who cares about the food we eat and the people who bring it to us.
The true cost of cheap meat is human suffering from both its processing and consumption. So before you fill your plate this holiday, what you learn here may change how you eat.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Exposes about worker conditions and safety have long been a catalyst for social progress. From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation to Karen Silkwood’s whistle-blowing. Their works have changed the world. Sometimes conditions improved. Other times progress has been frustratingly slow. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the meatpacking industry in Chicago in 1906, we lived in a largely unregulated world.
What’s truly astounding is that today, in many places, conditions are even worse. This, despite the maze of regulations that now exist but are often unenforced or circumvented. In our current political climate, worker protection and food safety have become another battlefield in America’s red-blue divide. Federal legislation often falls victim to extreme lobbying and partisan gridlock while state-level approaches vary widely. Even our eating habits have become politicized with stark differences in meat consumption patterns between rural and urban America.
All of this plays out against the backdrop of a global food supply chain that’s more complex and vulnerable than ever before. The Covid pandemic laid bare, just how precarious our food system can be. My guest today, Alice Driver, has written a book that stands at the tradition of muckraking journalism while speaking directly to these contemporary issues. Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, exposes the harsh realities faced by workers in Tyson Food Plants, particularly in Arkansas.
Alice Driver is a James Beard Award-winning writer with roots in the Ozark Mountains. She has spent years investigating the meat packing industry, conducting extensive interviews with workers and their families, and uncovering stories of exploitation, resilience, and the human cost of our food system. It is my pleasure to welcome Alice Driver here to the program to talk about Life and Death of The American Worker. Alice, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Alice Driver: Thank you, Jeff. That was a marvelous introduction to the book.
Jeff: Well, thank you. First of all, tell us a little bit about why the book. Why did you think that this needed to be reported with respect to the meatpacking industry today, and Tyson Foods in particular?
Alice: Well, I would say that the book is not really about Tyson Foods. It’s more about the meatpacking industry, which is a very consolidated industry. There’s only a handful of companies that are like Tyson. Tyson Foods is the largest in the United States and the second largest globally. And it’s also a company that is Arkansas-founded and based. And so I wanted to tell a story that was about my home state, but that was also global.
It’s about rural America, but it’s really about our food system which is a global issue. And when I began this work in 2020, I had the funding to write one article. So I did not think that this was going to be a book. But in the pandemic, we all really began to rethink labor and what is the meaning of work. And I think that’s why my article gained traction and eventually the work became a book.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about the meatpacking industry today. You mentioned a moment ago the consolidation, fewer and fewer players in it, the way in which that has impacted the behavior within that industry.
Alice: Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris has recently said that as part of her economic plan, she is going to take on the consolidated nature of the meatpacking industry. And why is consolidation an issue? Because on one side, you have companies that have colluded to raise the price of chicken and meat and other products. And the other side of the coin is that companies can work together to suppress wages or control labor conditions for workers. And so it’s something that needs to be addressed.
Jeff: And one of the things that you talk about in the book is the amount of immigrant labor, immigrant workers in the business.
Alice: In general, in the meatpacking industry across the United States, the largest percentage of labor is immigrant labor, primarily from Mexico and Central America.
Jeff: Has that increased of late or has that been pretty consistent over time?
Alice: It’s been steadily increasing since the ’70s, ’60s, and ’70s, because what happened in the ’60s and ’70s, there was a large percentage of the workforce in the meatpacking industry that was black, and that was organizing, unionizing, really organizing around labor rights. And so to nip that in the bud, you could say meatpacking companies started looking for workers who would be less able to organize. And in this case, when you have, for example, the workers I followed, they’re from Myanmar, they’re from the Marshall Islands, from Mexico, Honduras. And a lot of them are either illiterate, they’re undocumented or they’re in a vulnerable position, which makes it more difficult for them to know and access and demand their rights.
Jeff: And what impact did the COVID-19 pandemic have on the industry?
Alice: Well, so the industry, what really was at a crossroads, because the way that meatpacking works is in order to keep production up at any plant, you need to have workers elbow to elbow on the line cutting, for example, chicken wings or cutting chicken feet. And if you do not have bodies on the line, your production will go down. And so in the pandemic, COVID was spreading. And obviously, COVID spreads when people are very close together when there’s no social distancing and workers needed to quarantine. But companies face this problem of if they let workers social distance if they let workers quarantine, then they won’t be able to keep up production.
And what companies did was present the problem as if you a worker at a meatpacking plant do not come to work, you will be contributing to starvation in the United States. That was how they framed the problem. And that was not the truth. That was not a reality. Starvation was not a problem.
Jeff: One of the things that we have seen with this is the power of the lobbying industry with respect to the meatpacking industry. Talk about that.
Alice: Well, in my book, I describe a period during COVID when meatpacking plants were the highest site of infection of COVID aside from prisons. And so a lot of workers and other people who were concerned wanted to implement social distancing or in some cases, to shut down plants to allow workers to go home. And what meatpacking companies did, Tyson included, several large meat-packing companies sent representatives to meet with the Trump administration. And their lobbying efforts resulted in Trump declaring meatpacking plants critical infrastructure. And beyond that, the important point is that he declared them critical infrastructure, but he did not require them to implement any COVID protections for workers.
Jeff: And why was that?
Alice: Well, we can speculate about what the Trump administration was thinking, but meatpacking lobbies are extremely powerful. They contribute a lot of money. In my book, I really focus on this. It’s a bipartisan issue. They contribute money equally to Democrats and Republicans. They supported Clinton, they supported Bush, and they’ve really, in many ways, gotten a pass in terms of strong oversight of safety and health at meatpacking plants.
Jeff: And doesn’t Don Tyson, the CEO of Tyson still work in a replica of the Oval Office?
Alice: Well, yes, it’s a replica of the Oval Office, and it’s Don Tyson’s son that’s now running the company. His name is John. And so that Oval Office has all the doorknobs are replicas of eggs and inside is decorated with all kinds of chicken and egg motif art. Yes.
Jeff: Tell me about your conversation with some of the workers there at the Tyson Plant. What did they have to say? Some of them spoke and obviously anonymously and taking risks doing it. What were some of the things they had to say?
Alice: Well, every single worker that I interviewed who is still working at Tyson is anonymous. The only people in my book who use the real names are either dead or no longer work at Tyson. So I think that tells you a lot about the level of fear that workers experience. It was very hard to gain the trust of workers because, in this state, Tyson really has a influence over the economy, politics, you name it. And one example of this, just yesterday a former director of public relations at Tyson Foods who communicated with me during the time I was writing my book. He is now a journalist who covers Tyson Foods for Axios in Arkansas.
And he wanted to interview me about my book, even though he was working at Tyson and actively saying that workers were lying while I was writing my book. So this state is a very complicated place to tell the truth about Tyson, and I had to spend a lot of time with workers. I spent four years following a group of workers really looking at their daily life and how their life was impacted by work in this case at chicken processing plants.
Jeff: And talk about the ways in which their lives were impacted, workplace injuries, chemical accidents, so many of the things that you talk about.
Alice: When I started interviewing workers, I was asking questions about COVID work conditions. But what came out of those interviews was that many workers who became infected with COVID and then died of COVID had first been in a chemical accident in Springdale which is the headquarters of the company in 2011. And so chemical accidents are very common at meatpacking plants across the country that there’s been some really good research about this in the past couple of years. And because there’s chemicals everywhere for refrigeration and also for sanitation, and if mixed incorrectly, they can produce weapons-grade chemicals.
And so some of the workers were in a chemical accident. And the other part of this is that while I was talking to workers and asking about the chemical accident, they said, “Oh, the Tyson nurse said I was fine,” after they came back from the hospital or, “The Tyson doctors said I was fine.” And I was wondering, “What are they talking about? Does Tyson have nurses and doctors?” Well, Tyson has an onsite system of medical clinics. And so workers face the challenge of one being injured and two, having to go through a system in which they might be told that they are fine or they are not injured. And so if they want to go outside of that system, they have to pay for their own medical care.
Jeff: And how reflective is Tyson and what you found there? How reflective is that of the industry at large?
Alice: So I interviewed several people who used to work at OSHA which is the organization that oversees health and safety. And they said the onsite clinic model is reflective of the industry in general. And so, even though I’m writing about Tyson, because it’s the largest of the meatpacking companies, it’s really in a system where there’s only a few major players, what I’m saying is this is what the system looks like and we need to consider that it is not serving consumers, it is not serving workers, and it is not serving animals.
Jeff: Talk about the animal aspect of it.
Alice: My book is really focused on labor conditions and workers. But in the process, you also get a picture of, for example, what things look like at a meatpacking facility. I had workers texting me and complaining about worm infestations, weevil infestations, and flour, the flour used to coat chicken nuggets, pools of water, and blood. And there’s just very different jobs that people have. One of the people who I interviewed, the job that she had was cleaning chicken poop off of chicken feet. And another worker, his job was picking up condemned chicken.
And I was wondering what is condemned chicken. And it’s all the chicken that falls onto the floor and it’s used to make dog food. So you get a picture of a workplace in which– for example, there was just a big listeria outbreak at Boar’s Head. And if you read a description of the plants at Boar’s Head, I read it and I thought, “Wow, people are going to be really surprised when they read my book and they read something very similar.”
Jeff: Taking a kind of 30,000-foot view of it, the meatpacking industry has been problematic for so long. I mentioned going as far back as Sinclair in The Jungle so many years ago. What is it about this industry that is so prone to this kind of activity?
Alice: Well, I’m thinking of a book by writer Eyal Press called Dirty Work and meatpacking work is dirty work. It’s something we don’t want to see it, we don’t want to hear about it. Essentially there’s a sense in which we don’t want to know how are animals raised. How are they treated? What do they eat? How are they killed? And how are the workers who are doing this brutal work because it is the most dangerous job in the United States? And if we are forced to look at that, we really have to admit that we as a country, as citizens, need to make changes for animals, for our own health, and for the workers.
Jeff: And what are the inherent dangers? You mentioned some of the conditions, but what are some of the dangers to the workers in these places?
Alice: Well, you have basic things like repetitive motion. Most workers at some point have carpal tunnel syndrome and need surgery. Many workers need surgery in both hands and surgery has to be approved by the onsite medical system. So one of the workers in my book, she needed carpal tunnel surgery in both hands. She had a doctor confirm that she needed surgery, but by the end of the book, she had never been approved to have surgery. And she was taking pain medication, she was trying to get disability, she couldn’t work anymore. She felt useless, she was depressed. And carpal tunnel syndrome is something that’s preventable in the sense that if you rotate workers between different stations, you can prevent that kind of an injury, but rotating workers can decrease production. So there’s a lot of things that are solvable, but if you’re just only maximizing profits, then you’re not going to address safety issues.
And then there’s larger issues like the machinery and sanitation. The sanitation work, which is done at night, and that’s where it’s hired through a third party. So there’s often children on those shifts, and they’re really big machines with blades. And so in my book, there’s an example of a worker in Alabama at Tyson plant who was inside a machine cleaning it when the machine came on and decapitated him. And the issue was that the machine was supposed to have a safety so that it would not turn on when a worker was inside it, but the safety had not been maintained. And so there’s just a lot of issues that are detailed about maintaining equipment, maintaining safety equipment, and that kind of stuff, which is really preventable.
Jeff: And what are the pay scales like in these places?
Alice: When I started interviewing workers, for example, Angelina, who’s one of the main workers in my book, she started working at Tyson with her husband Placio. They’re both from El Salvador. And they started working in the ’90s– no, it might’ve been the ’90s or early 2000s. They were making $12 an hour. And in 10 years time, you get a raise of $1. And so workers who started off– many of the workers I interviewed had been there 10 years or 20 years. The first year of the pandemic, Tyson did not raise wages, but after that they did. So now there’s workers who might make $15 an hour starting, and then there’s different grades that make more.
Jeff: And have there been efforts to unionize these workers?
Alice: It really depends on the state. Arkansas is a right-to-work state which is a nice name for legislation that is really anti-union. And so here workers, and this is where I fall in my book, have really tried to organize via an organization called [unintelligible 00:18:49] which was founded by 16 immigrant women who were poultry workers and is led by Director Magali Lacoli, who’s from Mexico. And so she’s done really difficult work in terms of providing workers a space where they can learn about their rights and helping them organize. Most recently they protested child labor.
Jeff: Given how ugly all of this is, is there a place in the marketplace for a company to come along and tell the public that it prepares their food differently, that doesn’t engage in the kind of practices we’ve been talking about?
Alice: I think there’s two issues. One is a structural issue which we need to address. Meatpacking is heavily subsidized. And so we need to think as a nation, what are we subsidizing and where are we putting our money? I absolutely think there’s a way to produce meat and chicken that is ethical where workers are safe. But we have to invest in that and we have to care about it. So it has to be work on a structural level, which would be the government and work as consumers. What do we care about? I do not believe the story that cheap meat and the only thing we can afford is what we have.
Jeff: What kind of oversight has there been in terms of OSHA and the government in general?
Alice: Well, the issue that I talk about in my book is that OSHA is underfunded and understaffed. And a recent study showed that if OSHA staff were to visit every facility in the United States, it would take 160 years. And so that’s something that’s also we could solve that by fully staffing OSHA.
Jeff: And is there any chance of that happening?
Alice: Well, I am hopeful, given that Kamala Harris has discussed taking on the consolidated power of the meatpacking industry, I do think that opens up a space to discuss these issues. Because I think it is time to make changes.
Jeff: Talk about the impact that this project has had on you and how you look at food perhaps differently.
Alice: Well, it has had an impact on me personally. I grew up in the Ozark Mountains and my parents were a part of the back-to-the-land movement, and that movement really believed in– my parents grew their own food, and when I was young, they raised their own chickens and butchered their own chickens. And so I did grow up with a specific vision of respect for food and the food system. But I do have to say that when I started writing this book, I stopped eating meat.
Jeff: And we’ve talked about Tyson and the chicken aspects of this, but this is across the board in most all aspects of the meat packing industry.
Alice: Yes, I reported a story on the hog industry in North Carolina, and I actually had to get in a tiny airplane because in so many states in Arkansas and in North Carolina, I can’t set foot on the property of a meatpacking company. I’m never going to see what’s going on. So I saw from an airplane, they call them lagoons, but they’re basically lakes full of hog waste. I saw chicken factories from above and just pyramids of chicken poop. And all of that waste is recycled and used as fertilizer, which the New York Times has done some great reporting on the issues with that because there’s Forever Chemicals have been found in the waste.
Jeff: Are there any companies that have engaged in any kind of transparency at all?
Alice: I mean on the level of large meatpacking companies like Tyson, I would say no. Part of the solution could be buying locally, buying from farmers, supporting people you know, and that’s an individual effort. And part of the issue is that we need a structural effort. We need the government to address these issues.
Jeff: Is it shocking to you in any way that these are issues that have been going on for so long?
Alice: It is shocking to me because I was an English major, and I read The Jungle and I remember it. And when I started this project, which I was only going to write one article, I thought, “Surely things have changed a lot.” And I was surprised that a lot of things made me think of The Jungle.
Jeff: Alice Driver. Her book is Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. Alice, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on The WhoWhatWhy Podcast today.
Alice: Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
