The Southern Model Revisited: The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, Immigration, and Health and Safety in Poultry Processing

Abstract

This research combines a sociology of agrifood conceptual framework with a commodity systems analysis methodology to investigate the nexus of race, ethnicity, immigration, and health and safety in the US poultry processing industry. The poultry industry was the first agricultural sector to industrialize. Through vertical and horizontal integration, the industry is dominated by a few powerful firms. The industry has been criticized for multiple ethical failures regarding contract growers, processing plant workers, and communities. Meat and poultry processing is one of the most dangerous manufacturing jobs in the United States. Poultry processing is especially reliant on a non-union, minority, and immigrant labor force. This “Southern Model” is the preferred model of agrifood globalization. The COVID pandemic brought renewed attention to precarious work in poultry processing and exposed the lack of resilience in the agrifood system in general, and the poultry industry in particular.

1. Introduction

“This is the Old South. They freed the slaves and put them to work in the chicken plants”

[1] (p. A1).

Poultry was the first agricultural sector to industrialize [2,3,4]. The poultry model is predicted as the future of agrifood globalization [5,6,7]. The poultry industry is criticized for serious ethical failures regarding production, processing, and community impacts [8,9,10,11,12]. Poultry processing is characterized by an ethnic and racial succession in the composition of the workforce, from poor Whites and Blacks to Latinos, and now to a mix of immigrant, refugee, and Black workers. By 2019, most workers were people of color, women, and immigrants [9]. In early 2020, the foreign-born share of meatpacking workers was 45.4%, 28% higher than the average share of all industries combined [13].

A key feature of the poultry industry is its reliance on informal, rather than formal, labor forces. The industry is historically based on exploitative labor relations and hazardous work conditions in the processing plants [10,11,14,15,16,17]. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to precarious work in poultry processing and shined a light on the brittleness of intertwined connections between processing labor and broiler production that resulted in decreased resilience in the industry [18,19]. We contribute to and expand on this discourse through an investigation of how the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, and health and safety in poultry processing was grounded in the peculiar political economy of the development of the poultry industry in the US South, what we refer to as “Southern Model” [6].

The poultry industry developed in the US South in the 1950s under a unique set of circumstances characterized by a history of plantation agriculture and vertical and horizontal integration [10,11,12,15]. The poultry industry “possessed a distinctive southern accent from its inception” [5] (p. 184). The common feature of “poultry-producing regions in the South was poverty, enduring poverty” [20] (p. 36). “What drew the poultry industry south was primarily a resident African American population and poorly educated ‘hillbillies’ from the Appalachians and Ozarks” [16] (p. 130). The Black Belt region of the South was “constructed through the violence of plantation slavery”, which “continues to shape the regional infrastructures of racial capitalism evident in the dominance of the poultry industry” [15] (p. 32). This “Southern Model”—grounded in a history of slavery and sharecropping in the US South—is diffusing around the world as the preferred form of agrifood globalization [5,6,7,21].

By the 1970s, Blacks had replaced Whites as the predominant labor force in the processing plants [22,23]. In the 1990s the labor force switched quickly to Latinos. Push factors in Mexico related to neoliberal globalization and pull factors in the United States related to the reorganization of meat and poultry processing industries combined to transform the labor regime in poultry, as well as beef and pork processing [17,24]. By 2018 37.5 percent of the meat and poultry workers were foreign-born, compared to 17.1 percent of the U.S. workforce [25].

As undocumented Latino labor became problematic legally, the poultry industry first recruited other immigrants, refugees, and then Black workers again to meet their labor needs [9]. For example, the Marshallese Islanders are a new immigrant group pulled to the United States as poultry processing workers [14]. Finally, meat and poultry processing is very dangerous work with serious health and safety risks, and it is even more dangerous for immigrants [12,18,26,27].

In this paper, we combine a sociology of agrifood conceptual framework with a commodity systems analysis methodology to investigate the case of labor succession in the poultry industry to illustrate the ethical implications of the complex intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, and health and safety in the global agrifood system and what it means for the resilience of the food supply. The sociology of agrifood conceptual framework analyzes the changing structure of the agrifood system from production through consumption, with special attention to power differentials and social stratification among actors that participate in the various commodity systems that make up the agrifood system [28,29]. Commodity systems analysis is a qualitative, comparative historical research methodology employed to investigate the power relations of an agricultural commodity supply chain within its socio-historical context, which includes state policies, corporate structure, labor relations, scientific environment, and other related factors [30,31].

The paper is organized into three major sections. The first part provides an overview of the development of the poultry industry, with a focus on the racial and ethnic succession of poultry processing plant workers. The second part focuses on the health and safety implications for poultry processing plant workers, with special attention to the situation facing immigrant groups in general, and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. The third part contexts the events of the case within a sociology of agrifood conceptual framework with a focus on the issue of resilience and labor in the poultry industry and the agrifood system.

2. The Poultry Story

“In the decades following the abolition of slavery, White landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production” [12] (p. 1).

This poultry industry emerged in the DelMarVa (DelMarVa is the region of the United States where the states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia have common borders) region in the Northeast US as a by-product of the egg industry, centered on growing the male chicks (called cockerels) into broiler chickens for meat consumption in urban markets. It was structured around independent breeders, hatcheries, farmers/growers, feed dealers, slaughterhouses, truckers, and retail markets. In 1935, the DelMarVa area accounted for two-thirds of US broiler production [32]. Technological developments in housing, genetics, feed, and disease control supported the growth of large-scale confinement operations [33]. When the US government commandeered DelMarVa’s production during World War II, operations in the US South expanded to meet domestic demand [34].

The southern post-depression and post-WWII political economy provided the social and institutional context for a contract-based model of broiler production that became the industry standard [10,16,35]. Underemployed farm labor, favorable climate, lower wages and less unionization, low feed costs, and cotton crop failures contributed to the South’s advantage. As the dominance of the cotton industry waned, planters and their political allies—the Plantation Bloc—shifted their focus to poultry production. Racially discriminatory policies such as the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, biased government programs such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Acts) and the agricultural credit system, and the consolidation of White-only farmer cooperatives created structural barriers for Black (and poor White) sharecroppers to benefit from the changes, forcing their redundant labor from the fields to the contract farms and processing plants [15]. In North Georgia poultry pioneer Jesse Jewell and leaders of the Georgia Cotton Producers Association (later renamed Gold Kist) created the first integrated systems [9,10].

The South had surplus labor for the processing plants and an abundance of marginal farmers who viewed contract broiler production as an attractive way to supplement their incomes. There was a well-established culture of merchants and feed dealers extending credit to small farmers, who saw broiler contracts as sharecropping and part of the agricultural history of the region [36]. As labor was displaced from the cotton industry, droves of first White and then Black women from the tenant and sharecropping system migrated to the processing plants. During Jim Crow, poultry processing was one of the few places that hired Blacks. In the 1960s, Black women increasingly replaced White women in the labor force [9,23].

In the 1950s, innovative feed companies across the South vertically integrated into hatcheries, feed mills, and processing plants, combined with contract broiler production. By 1960, the structure of the industry had shifted from the independent system to one controlled by vertically integrated firms at the center of agro-industrial districts in the South [5,37,38]. The smaller, independent firms exited the industry as large, vertically integrated corporations such as Pillsbury, Continental Grain, and Ralston Purina dominated the market [33]. When these major firms divested their poultry holdings in the early 1970s, regional integrators such as Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue bought those complexes and solidified their regional positions in the US South [39]. Vertical integration moved broiler production from a farm sideline to a highly developed agribusiness [40].

During the 1960s, the integrators modernized the processing plant through automation and increased line speed. Southern social structures grounded in racism, sexism, and anti-unionism kept the workers “relatively docile” and “loyal to the plants” [16] (p. 130). By the 1970s, the South accounted for 90 percent of national broiler production, and the vertically integrated model had diffused throughout the United States and then globally [21,41,42]. Technological innovations in production and processing enhanced productivity, generated rapid growth, and increased market share against beef and pork [43]. High turnover rates required flexible labor pools, increasingly supplied through immigrants. During the 1980s, integrators faced a depressed domestic market and developed strategies to generate profits through increasing market share (horizontal integration), increased productivity (mechanization and line speed), lower labor costs (immigrants), value-added innovations (e.g., nuggets) and disposal of overproduction (exports). Horizontal integration generated a rash of mergers and acquisitions leading to industry consolidation. After buying its competitors, Tyson Foods, Inc. became the largest poultry company in the world [44]. By 1990, about half of all poultry processing was concentrated in four low-wage, antiunion southern states—the Chicken Belt (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina) [45].

Researchers have long noted the increasingly oligopolistic market structure of the broiler industry over time [2,3,7,46,47]. In 1960, the top four firms controlled about 12 percent of production, up to 23 percent in 1980, 44 percent in 2000, and 58 percent in 2020 [48,49,50]. As horizontal integration progressed, regional monopsonies emerged dominated by single firms such as Tyson Foods, Inc., Pilgrim’s Pride, Inc., Sanderson Farms, Inc., and Perdue Farms, Inc. [51].

Industry consolidation and labor succession in the poultry industry was part of a larger socio-economic restructuring in the 1980s as part of globalization. In particular, the beef and pork packing industries were transformed from a labor regime based mostly on White males in unions in historical meat packing cities to non-White males and females (first Latinos, and then Asians and other immigrant groups) in non-union jobs in rural areas [52]. Corporations such as Armour and Swift sold off their high-labor cost union-based meat packing divisions to new companies who re-opened the same plant but with non-union wages and immigrant labor. Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) emerged as an industry leader with its innovative boxed beef and boxed pork processing system. In 2002, Tyson bought IBP and moved strongly into the full protein system. It also brought the poultry model—the Southern Model—into the beef and pork industries [6,7].

2.1. Labor Succession: From Blacks to Latinos

When the Cotton Belt failed and the Chicken Belt emerged, the sharecroppers and farm workers, both White and Black, went to work in the chicken plants [1,12,15]. By the 1970s, Blacks made up the bulk of the labor force in poultry processing, but with substantial plant and geographic variability [22,23,24]. In his regional analysis, Griffith [53] found that Whites (47.7%) were the majority labor force in the North Georgia region, with Blacks dominating in the Texas/Arkansas (43.58%), North Carolina (60.21%), and DelMarVa (72.95%) regions. Latino labor was most common in the Texas/Arkansas region (22.5%).

Prior to 1990, there were few Spanish surnames in the labor force; after 1990, almost all the new hires were Latino. By 2005, Latinos made up about three-fourths of the 250,000 laborers in 174 major chicken processing plants, with most of the remainder from Southeast Asia and Micronesia [24,54]. In 1996, about 70 percent of the workers at a Georgia plant were Blacks, but when ICE raided that plant in 2007, 75 percent were Latino and 14 percent were Black [55]. Latinos steadily replaced Blacks in these kinds of manufacturing jobs throughout the US South, a phenomenon referred to as the “Nuevo South” (see below).

Schwartzman [24] argues that the two accepted reasons for this labor succession from Blacks to Latinos are incorrect. Those two reasons are as follows: (1) Latinos took the jobs that nobody wanted, and (2) as the industry expanded in the South, Latinos filled the labor shortage as locals took more desirable jobs. The first reason notes that poultry processing is very dangerous and undesirable work, with generally low wages. Because local workers do not want these jobs and turnover rates are high, immigrants are needed to fill the labor vacancies.

Although these jobs are often undesirable, the labor shortage issue was overstated [24]. The poultry industry expanded during this period to meet growing demand domestically and globally. In 1994, poultry processing was the second-fastest-growing factory job in the United States. In terms of employment and revenues, it was bigger than peanuts in Georgia, tobacco in North Carolina, cotton in Mississippi, and all crops combined in Arkansas and Alabama. During this expansion, the integrators hired Latinos instead of locals—mostly Black women—to meet their labor needs. The real reason for the labor shift was the rise of Black labor organizing success during this period [9,24].

The poultry processing workplace is a strictly disciplined work environment driven by the processing line, with numerous occupational hazards and little opportunity for unionization [20]. Union organizers noted that the increase in line speed and resulting hazardous working conditions in the plants made them ripe for union organization [9,24]. In the early 1980s, less than 10 percent of poultry plants were unionized. Strikes and walkouts in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized poor working conditions, increased line speeds, lack of bathroom breaks, chemical spills, low earnings, lack of benefits, and long work hours. Civil rights and community organizations supported the union movement in the South. After several successes in the mid-1980s, management countered by firing union organizers/members, discouraging new unions, and encouraging the decertification of existing unions. It also followed the meatpacking model of either selling or closing union plants, which were then re-opened as non-union plants [24].

As unions became more militant, management countered with more aggressive responses. The practice of replacement hiring of Latinos during and after strikes, combined with hiring Latinos preferentially to meet the increased labor demand, effectively pushed local workers out of the job market. While other industries were closing and/or outsourcing as part of globalization, poultry was a regionally specific industry often characterized by one dominant firm—the regional monopsony. To counter the early success of unionization, the integrators recruited immigrants who would work harder, complain less, and were less likely to unionize. As a result, unemployment and poverty for Blacks in general, and for single mothers in particular, increased in these poultry towns [9,24].

2.2. Labor Succession: Pull and Push in the Nuevo South

During the late 1980s and 1990s, the meat and poultry processing labor supply shifted rapidly toward Latino immigrants, mostly from Mexico [54,56,57]. Prior to the 1990s, Latino immigrants were predominantly undocumented, male Mexican agricultural migrant workers who followed the harvests on the industrial vegetable and fruit farms. This pattern shifted in the 1990s as new laws gave these undocumented immigrants amnesty and a path to permanent resident status and citizenship [24]. These Latino males found year-round employment in poultry towns, sent for their families, and settled in those towns permanently [20,58]. Industry executives praised the work ethic of these immigrants.

In the 1990s, the poultry industry experienced two crises: labor and profits [24]. Hiring immigrant Latinos, especially the undocumented, solved both crises. Replacing native workers with undocumented immigrants eliminated labor activism and reduced labor costs. Integrators launched advertisement campaigns with bilingual posters and radio ads in Mexico and Guatemala for jobs in the United States and used contractors to bring them across the border and work in the US plants [59]. Once these recruited immigrants arrived, chain migration through familial networks secured a constant supply of workers.

This recruitment strategy worked for staffing the plants but elicited attention on the poultry integrators from the US Department of Justice for labor violations. For example, Tyson was charged with illegal recruitment of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants over a 7-year period from 1994 to 2001. It paid smugglers $100 to $200 per person to deliver undocumented immigrants to processing plants in five states and provided those workers with false documents, housing, and access to social services [59]. No Tyson executives were convicted, three managers were acquitted, two managers received one-year probation, and the Tyson worker who smuggled the workers, Amador Anchondo-Rascon, received two and a half years in prison. The Department of Labor also indicted Tyson Foods for engaging in discriminatory hiring practices from 1996 to 2004 when it denied entry-level jobs to qualified women and Blacks [24]. In 2007, Tyson was the focus of a class action lawsuit charging it with purposefully depressing plant wages by hiring undocumented immigrants in eight plants in six states. Tyson appealed the verdicts all the way to the US Supreme Court but lost, and finally agreed to pay $5.8 million to current and former employees to settle the suit [60].

Schwartzman [24] concludes that while chain migration fueled the continuous expansion of Latinos in the US South, it also steadily displaced the mostly Black labor force in the manufacturing and processing industries. The racial and ethnic succession in poultry processing was due to principally labor-management conflicts, not undesirable jobs and labor shortages. Racial and ethnic displacement suppressed unionization, worsened workplace health and safety, and depressed wages. The industry’s reliance on racialized antilabor tactics was a way to disorganize Black-led worker movements and keep wages low and profits high [9].

These pull factors in the United States were complemented by push factors in Mexico [9,24,45,53,61]. Neoliberal restructuring as part of IMF structural adjustment programs, the peso crisis, GATT membership, and NAFTA all opened Mexico to foreign direct investment (FDI) and cut the protectionist safety net the government provided for the farmers and the poultry industry (IMF (International Monetary Fund; GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade); NAFA (North American Free Trade Agreement)). FDI accelerated the modernization of the Mexican poultry industry as the major US firms Tyson Foods, Inc. and Pilgrim’s Pride, Inc. acquired existing vertically integrated companies and expanded to become dominant in the Mexican market [21]. The larger Mexican firms adopted the new technologies and gained production efficiencies, pushing smaller companies out of business. NAFTA eliminated the tariffs on corn, forcing many campesinos off the land. IMF and NAFTA restructuring cut the social safety net for rural people and pushed them into migration streams, first from the countryside and then from the country [24].

This pattern of Latino labor succession in the manufacturing, service, and construction industries in the southern United States, referred to as the “Nuevo South,” increased tensions between locals and the new immigrants [41,57,62,63,64,65]. Poultry processing plant towns tended to exhibit a split labor market made up of a core of local workers who had the better-paying and less dangerous jobs surrounded by a fluid expansion and contraction of immigrants who staffed the lower-paying and more dangerous jobs [16]. Real wages tended to remain stagnant as line speeds increased, repetitive motion injuries increased, and the industry continued to block unionization [26,56]. The continuous flow of immigrants served as a constant threat to native workers. The integrators preferred immigrant workers, often illegal, who were willing to work in dangerous and difficult situations and whom they could exploit because of their undocumented and/or precarious status [11,20,26,53,54,56,58].

2.3. Labor Succession: From Latinos to Legal Immigrants, Refugees, and Blacks

In response to the increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids against undocumented Latinos, in 2000, another labor succession began involving a mix of immigrants and refugees, such as the Marshallese Islanders, Somalians, Burmese, Laotians, Chinese, Haitians, Karen, and Sudanese. ICE raids began in 1997 but were infrequent. By 2005, 2006, and 2007 there were 1300, 4400, and about 5000 worksite arrests of undocumented workers, respectively [24]. The meat and poultry processing industries were a primary target.

Naturalized immigrants and refugees initially filled the meat and poultry jobs of the departing undocumented immigrants [66]. For example, the case of Raul—a Mexican-American worker—starts in the second succession and describes the third. Raul, who had been living and working in Nebraska since 1994, “watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants moved into town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away by immigration raids” [67] (p. A1). In Cactus, Texas, a December 2006 ICE raid of a Swift & Co. beef processing plant led to the arrest of 297 Mexican and Central American workers on immigration violations and triggered a population exodus of an estimated 600 who feared additional raids. Swift filled its labor gap with refugees from Burma and Somalia [68].

Worksite raids increased under the Trump administration, frequently targeting the food processing industries [69]. While the raids and arrests increased, the number of employers and managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants decreased. In 2019, there were 2048 worksite arrests, including at seven Mississippi chicken and food processing plants owned by four companies. The Mississippi raids were the largest in more than a decade with the arrest of 680 people [70]. Increased worksite raids and new anti-immigrant laws across the South accelerated the departure of Latinos as the predominant poultry processing workforce [9].

The Marshallese Islanders are part of this third succession in poultry. In 2018, they were the largest non-Spanish or non-English speaking poultry processing group [25]. Their special legal status made them attractive to an industry looking to fill jobs once held by undocumented Latinos. Under the Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreements with the United States in 1986 and 2004, the Marshallese have the right to work, live permanently in, and travel freely to the United States without visas [71]. The COFA agreements granted Marshallese citizens this unique social entitlement, while the United States in return had exclusive use of Marshallese territory for its military operations, including 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. The Marshallese population in the United States increased more than three times after the COFA agreements [72]. A lack of education and health infrastructure in the Marshall Islands, coupled with poor health and educational outcomes, high poverty and unemployment rates, displacement related to nuclear testing, and rising sea levels due to climate change combined to push migration to the United States [71].

The job opportunities in poultry processing plants in Arkansas were a strong pull factor for Marshallese migrants. The poultry industry is the largest agribusiness in Arkansas, which always has difficulties filling its need for low-wage workers [14,73]. Aggressive recruitment strategies by poultry companies in the Marshall Islands and Hawaii, as well as the referral and support from their extended families who had worked in the poultry plants, pulled many Marshallese Islanders to migrate and work in Arkansas. In 2013, about 75 percent of the Marshallese community in Arkansas worked for poultry companies [74]. As the new preferred labor force, they replaced Latinos. By 2015, the Marshallese made up about 40 percent of workers at one processing plant in Northwest Arkansas [75]. Marshallese workers in the poultry processing plants had similar experiences to Latino and other immigrant workers [14].

By 2018, poultry workers were 37.2 percent Black, 29.5 percent White, 26.5 percent Latino, 4.8 percent Asian American/Pacific Islander, and 2.1 percent Other, with 40 percent women [25]. For many of the poultry processing plants across the South, the departure of undocumented workers was filled by the return of a majority Black workforce [9]. From 2006 to 2016, Blacks were the only labor group to substantially increase labor force participation [66]. In her study of one Georgia plant that had gone through this transition, Freshour [9] found that between 80 and 90 percent of the line workers were native-born Black women, usually single mothers with little education. They returned to a worksite with “severely weakened union representation or none at all” and “continued fear of displacement either through plant maneuvering to return to undocumented workers or by the looming fear of offshoring” [9] (p. 34).

Building upon the works of DuBois [76] and Woods [77], Williams and Freshour [12] employed the concept of “carceral geographies” to illustrate how the Plantation Bloc extended the carceral relations of prisons into the poultry industry, thereby perpetuating racialized control of the workforce resulting in premature disability and early death. Because poultry processing plants are one of the few places that will employ felons, as Black and Brown people leave prison, they find jobs in poultry processing, in a different kind of incarceration. It is never anyone’s first choice to find work in the poultry plants, but rather the decisions are linked to broader carceral geographies of underemployment, the threat of incarceration and/or deportation, and punitive disciplining of social welfare that have long criminalized Black and undocumented workers [15]. “Her comparison to slavery was common, especially among Black workers who criticized the unjust pay for their labor as they sacrifice their bodies, health and sometimes their lives” [12] (p. 13).

3. Health, Safety, and Social Injustice

“The carceral dynamics of control and confinement are aided by the racial violence of dangerous working conditions for the mostly Black and Latinx women who continue to work inside these plants” [22] (pp. 13–14).

The Department of Labor classifies poultry as a hazardous industry, with high occupational injury rates and low wages [78]. Despite technology advancements, poultry plant work still depends on the human labor of killing, cutting, deboning, and packaging along a continually moving disassembly line operation. It involves long work hours of standing, repetitive movements, rapid line speeds, heavy reliance on hand tools, and exposure to toxic chemicals in bone-chilling temperatures. Workers are often pushed to work beyond their physical and mental limits to meet the required high production quotas, which limits workers’ access to bathroom breaks and plant health facilities (e.g., nurse stations). They often are thrown into the job without proper safety instructions, job training, and safety equipment [26,27]. Coupled with limited English proficiency, many immigrant workers are not fully aware of the risks and lack understanding of the safety precautions in the work environment [14,79].

These hazardous work conditions place workers at a high risk of serious injury and illness, including musculoskeletal disorders, repetitive trauma disorders, chronic low back pain, chronic respiratory problems, and dermatologic conditions [26,80,81]. For example, 57 percent of meat and poultry workers reported at least one musculoskeletal symptom [82,83], and more than 750 amputations were reported among meat and poultry workers from 2010 to 2017 [84]. The analysis of OSHA injury data from meat and poultry plants in 28 states between January 2015 and August 2018 revealed that a worker lost a body part or was sent to the hospital for in-patient treatment about every other day [84].

Black women in the South suffer disproportionately from these workplace injuries [23,85]. Immigrant workers are also more likely to suffer from workplace injuries and occupational health issues due to language barriers and a lack of understanding of the policies related to health and safety [26]. About two-thirds of Marshallese workers experienced work-related illnesses and injuries, and about 55 percent of workers did not understand safety policies well [14].

However, the high rates of reported workplace injuries and illnesses do not capture the true picture of the hazard. There are gaps between the companies’ recording and reporting occupational injuries and illnesses to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and what workers experience in the workplace; the company reports are often lower than the actual rates [26,27,80]. Often workers, particularly immigrant workers, do not report or underreport their injuries or illnesses to the company because of employers’ discouragement and/or fear of retaliation such as job loss [86]. Two-thirds of poultry and meatpacking workers indicated they were scared to report their injuries and were reluctant to file an OSHA complaint because of a lack of protection from retaliation [87]. About two-thirds of Marshallese poultry plant workers who experienced work-related illnesses and injuries in the poultry plants did not report it to their employers due to fear of being fired, suspended, and getting demerit points [14]. The Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center reported that more than one-fifth of workers were fired after reporting their injuries [88]. This hostile work environment is referred to as a “climate of fear”, whereby line supervisors use threats of replacement to suppress workers from speaking out about workplace hazards [87].

Despite the high rates of workplace injury and illness, the majority of workers were not able to get access to proper medical care and often were penalized for seeking care [27,80,88]. Workers had to wait for two to three months to be eligible for company-sponsored health insurance, even as the first months of employment have the highest injury rates. Even when workers were eligible for health insurance, many could not afford the premiums or copays. They often do not get paid time off or sick days to get medical care and have to wait weeks or months to get a referral to physicians after visits to plant health facilities [26,88]). And, they get punished if they seek treatment outside the company. Immigrant workers have more difficulties getting proper medical care because of cultural/language barriers, coupled with their lower socio-economic status and social structural factors [14,76,88]. The US government continues to fail to implement safety and health standards to protect workers [26].

The poultry processing workplace is also a prominent space reflecting racial and ethnic divides and social injustice, where immigrant workers experience exploitation, humiliation, harassment, and discrimination [25,26,87,89]. They routinely experience low wages and wage/hour violations. About 60 percent of workers in poultry plants in Arkansas experienced wage theft, such as being unpaid for all hours worked and overtime and deductions from paychecks for supplies, and more than 90 percent did not get sick leaves [84]. Immigrant workers, particularly unauthorized immigrant workers, were even more likely to experience wage theft, as well as minimum wage and hour violations. They were less likely to earn sick leave compared to US-born workers. Furthermore, more than half of poultry workers experienced discrimination and 44 percent experienced verbal or sexual harassment in the workplace. Overall, much higher proportions of immigrant workers experienced workplace discrimination compared to US-born workers. Many immigrant workers are not aware of their workplace rights, are not familiar with technical terms in English, and are hesitant to navigate the complex and costly procedures to obtain their rights [88].

Immigrant women are especially vulnerable [87]. Almost all of them reported that sexual violence is a serious issue; however, most do not speak out because of fear, shame, language barriers, lack of understanding about their rights, limited access to legal resources, precarious immigration status, and economic hardship. They feel powerless to protect themselves and enforce their rights [90]. These conditions represent gender-based discrimination in the workplace, as the right to women workers’ health is impacted by policies and practices that create practical barriers to managing menstruation or disproportionately impact pregnant workers by limiting regular access to restroom facilities [26].

3.1. Line Speed: Plantation Logic and Premature Disability

The “relentless push for faster line speeds” places workers in an ever more precarious situation resulting in “premature disability” [15] (p. 39).

Processing plant line speed is a major contributor to health and safety issues in the plant, often resulting in injuries (mostly cuts) while working on the line and repetitive motion syndrome in hands, wrists, and arms from cumulative trauma. Over the past three decades, the poultry industry has rapidly increased the pace of processing [15]. Poultry processing line speeds are regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Services (USDA FSIS). Large-scale federal inspection started in 1957 through the Poultry Processing Inspection Act, which facilitated the modernization and consolidation of the industry. The USDA FSIS replaced the Poultry Processing Inspection Act in 1977. As a result of poultry industry lobbying, processing line speeds increased from a maximum of 35 birds per minute in 1970 to a maximum of 70 birds per minute in 1979, standardized across the industry and regulated by the USDA. After continued lobbying, it was increased to 91 birds per minute in 1984 [91,92].

The Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection in 2014 and the New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS) privatized inspection and deregulated line speed, resulting in a maximum line speed increase from 91 birds per minute to 140 birds per minute [93]. In response to continued lobbying by the National Chicken Council that further line speed increases were needed to “level the playing field” and compete with China and other global competitors, in 2018 the USDA announced that as part of NPIS, it would accept applications from poultry plants to increase the line speed to 175 birds per minute [93]. By June 2020, the USDA had approved the applications for 15 plants [94].

Under the Trump administration, oversight of meat and poultry companies was weakened, further undermining workers’ rights to safe and healthy working conditions [26]. The USDA/FSIS line speedups extract surplus value and steal time from the majority Black, Latino, and refugee workers, resulting in premature disability [15]. Each speedup “carries forward the plantation logic which values standardization and high productivity over human and non-human life” where “body breaking line speed ups become acceptable because these are jobs no (white) American wants” [12] (pp. 13,15). On 22 January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order withdrawing the line speed provisions of the controversial NPIS. While industry advocates opposed the move, labor activists applauded the decision as a “true victory” for poultry workers [95].

3.2. The COVID-19 Pandemic: National Sacrifice Zones

Finally, meat and poultry processing workers were (and still are) one of the most vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. On 28 April 2020, President Trump issued the executive order Defense Production Act (DPA) commanding meat and poultry processing plants to remain open as essential businesses. Tens of thousands of workers tested positive for COVID during the early phase of the pandemic, and workers exposed to the virus were forced to show up for work [96]. The companies were just testing workers for fever, letting the virus spread via asymptomatic cases. Immediately after the DPA, industry allies in the state and federal government secured immunity legislation to shield meatpacking companies from lawsuits involving workplace infections [21].

In July 2020, the CDC reported that 87 percent of cases in meatpacking plants occurred among racial or ethnic minorities [97]. COVID left immigrants and refugee workers even more vulnerable because of limited English proficiency, barriers to basic information (e.g., COVID testing sites, how to file unemployment benefits, how to call in sick), social services (e.g., food pantry), and transportation. Undocumented immigrants were especially vulnerable due to their lack of access to health or unemployment insurance or stimulus checks [18]. By the end of 2020, at least 239 meatpacking workers had died and 45,000 had contracted the virus, but these deaths were underreported because OSHA had not inspected 26 out of the 65 plants [98,99]. Because poultry processing is overrepresented by racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and refugees, the executive order represented a strong base of anti-working-class racism [84]. In the South in general and the poultry industry in particular, the devastating consequences of COVID are the result of the longstanding destructive dominance of the “plantation bloc” and “racial capitalism”, where a disproportionate number of deaths were concentrated in Southern states [100].

These structural inequalities are institutionalized in the meatpacking and poultry industry through firm strategies and government policies that prioritize industry profit and national consumption over workers’ health and well-being. Carrillo and Ipsen [18] extend the Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) framework’s concept of “Sacrifice Zones” into the hazardous worksites of the meatpacking and poultry facilities, where workers tolerate socio-ecological risks in everyday practice and their bodies are considered essential yet expendable asset. When the meatpacking facilities were classified as critical infrastructure with state enforcement and industry protection, the frontline workers were forced to stay in sacrifice zones with limited workplace protections. Industrial consolidation and labor marginalization interacted to produce a precarity convergence of amplified systemic vulnerability. COVID brought greater awareness of the importance of food workers to the food system as a whole and raises critical questions regarding the coercive conditions that enable the global production of cheap food [12]. COVID revealed that the agrifood system lacks “the resilience to effectively respond to such a severe, multi-dimensional shock” [19] (p. 579).

4. The Southern Model Revisited: Corporate Power, Labor, and Resilience

“Tracing the production of cheap meat, from the perspective of labor, illuminates the ways in which the industry both depends on and maintains precarity for its low-wage workforce with lessons for the expansion of global meat production as state and corporate interests work to disorganize and displace labor” [9] (p. 137).

This paper began with this quote: “This is the Old South. They freed the slaves and put them to work in the chicken plants” [1] (p. A1). We stress that the modern poultry industry—specifically the broiler industry—is rooted in the racial and labor history of the US South, what Constance [6] refers to as “The Southern Model” and what Stull [7] calls “Chickenization”. This model developed by Jesse Jewel in Georgia and then perfected by Don Tyson and other integrators based on flexible accumulation and informal labor relations in both production and processing has serious ethical implications [8,31]. “The system that Tyson pioneered is now entrenched in the American economy and American way of life” [101] (p. 12).

A key point is that the Southern Model is a remnant of slavery and sharecropping, of the plantation system. Unique circumstances “drew the poultry industry south” where racism, sexism, and anti-unionism kept the workers “relatively docile” and “loyal to the plants” [16] (p. 130). Now, this Southern Model is being diffused around the world as the preferred model of agrifood globalization [7,21,101]. “The surplus value produced across the American South bolsters industrial poultry expansion throughout the global south” [9] (p. 135). The poultry integrators are the new global planters, spreading this sharecropping system around the world [102].

The events of the case speak to how the globalization of the agrifood system is grounded in neoliberal philosophies that privilege the market over the state and subordinate groups as it pursues flexible capital accumulation strategies that avoid market regulation and labor protections [29,61]. The informalization of labor is a central dimension of this corporate agrifood regime [103,104]. In the meat processing sector, this mostly means replacing White men in unions with non-union women, minorities, and immigrants as the workforce, replacing formal economy workers with informal economy workers. Global neoliberalism cuts the safety net in sending countries, as happened in Mexico, thereby providing low-cost immigrant labor to staff the low-wage and high-risk jobs in the meat and poultry processing industries. This pattern of informal labor pools created in the poultry industry was forcefully adopted in the beef and pork industries and now is spreading to other sectors of the agrifood system and society in general [7,52,101].

The poultry industry is the preferred model of agrifood globalization due to its flexible work arrangements in production and processing. From the Black union busting in the 1980s to the ICE raids in the 1990s and the sacrifice zones of COVID, this paper documents the climate of fear processing workers face. Poultry processing workers staff risky jobs for very little compensation, suffer wage theft, are denied proper medical care, are discouraged from joining unions, experience sexual violence, and suffered disproportionally during the COVID pandemic. Because they are vulnerable minorities and/or immigrants and lack functional access to legal recourse, they are too often exploited in racialized, morally objectionable ways [89].

In the US South today, poultry processing lies within a larger web of carceral geographies that extend from the prison walls to the processing plant, grounded in the history of racial capitalism, the Plantation Bloc, and the production of unequal vulnerability, premature disability, and premature death [12,15]. The anti-state state is essential and complicit in this system “by removing protections against workers’ premature death” [20] (p. 34). Through Plantation Bloc politics and right to work agendas such as union busting and processing line speedups, the state (both national-level and state-level) enabled multiple forms of workplace precarity that converged prior to COVID. Following COVID, the state restored supply chain production by transforming processing plants into sacrifice zones. The state used its power to grant employers legal impunity while passing deadly risk onto workers, thereby deepening the precarious conditions long central to the meatpacking labor market disproportionately comprised of people of color [18].

Agrifood scholars have warned that consolidation in the food system has placed the control of our food in the hands of a few companies, creating conditions for labor, environmental, and food security crises [48,51,105,106]. Consolidation and corporate power create fewer options for workers, resulting in the deskilling of jobs, decreased wages, and increased vulnerability. As the industry pursues marginalized labor pools, the systematic imposition of health risk onto workers depends on various forms of vulnerability, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. COVID brutally exposed “the flaws of our modern food system” as meat and poultry processing workers were “deemed essential but provided little protective gear or means of social distancing” [19] (p. 579). The DPA’s classification of meatpacking facilities as critical infrastructure restored production, but in doing so risked plant workers’ lives. The COVID crisis revealed this brutal crossroads of labor, environmental, and health precarities [18].

The poultry industry offers a particular view of this lack of resiliency. First of all, the concentration of production in the American South, and consolidation of the industry into regional monopsonies and national oligopsony have eliminated smaller farms and businesses that could provide redundancy of role and function, leaving the industry with few overlapping systems that can back each other up in the face of a global pandemic [105] and limiting its adaptative capacity to change, a key feature of resilience [107,108]. Before the pandemic, Nyström et al. [109] (p. 98) showed that “simplification and intensification of [agriculture, food and fuel production systems] and their growing connection to international markets has yielded a global production ecosystem that is homogenous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks”. Weaker, masked feedback loops leave systems open to shocks that can trigger unintentional changes. In the case of poultry processing plants, only an intervention by the government siding with industry at the expense of workers kept the plants operating. Second, the industry’s reliance on globally interconnected networks of workers made workers particularly vulnerable during the pandemic [18]. With travel constraints and policy measures forcing them to work, they had limited capacity to choose alternatives to protect themselves, illustrating the lack of another fail-safe mechanism. As Worstell and Green [110] note, modular connectivity—the ability to be connected to larger networks but not completely reliant on them—provides important adaptive capacity and stability.

The control over poultry workers exerted by the dominant firms and their interconnected networks of labor resources is both an ethical issue and an issue of resilience. A system oriented to productivity and efficiency, like the poultry industry, eliminates redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms, which also tightens control over producers and workers. When a multidimensional shock like the pandemic hits this system, the strongly interconnected nature of efficient food production cannot absorb it causing multiple failures like the workplace sacrifice zones and the simultaneous ecological disaster of euthanizing poultry and other animals that cannot be processed without sacrificed labor [18,19]. This Southern Model of poultry production, long criticized as unsustainable, which Tendall et al. [108] (p. 8) define as “lacking the capacity to preserve the system in the long-run”, is also not resilient. It does not have the system capacity to maintain itself over time in the face of shocks, and its effects are morally objectionable [89].

We have demonstrated the Southern Model raises ethical concerns that also constrain its long-term sustainability and limit its adaptive capacity, which is key to resilience. Many agrifood sectors, poultry included, have become precarious in the face of shocks like the pandemic and climate change; by this, we mean at risk of losing their core identity in the face of disturbances [105]. In poultry, the core identity of productivity and efficiency threatened by the COVID-19 shock was maintained through government actions and the willingness of those in power to sacrifice workers and ecologies. This suggests that we should be asking different questions about resilience. Hodbod [111] and Biggs et al. [112] argue that socio-ecological structures are resilient if they can persist and adapt to maintain core identity, or if they can transform to support an intentional new identity. It is an unintentional change that makes a system less resilient. This is where the ethical concerns over the treatment of labor intersect with ideas of resilience. Clearly, labor in the poultry sector is often coerced by structural conditions into unsafe work, lacking choices and opportunities; often treated as a tool, a cog in the machinery of producing poultry and profits; and exploited by racial bias and immigrant status, all considered key ethical concerns [89]. This focus on productivity and efficiency has made poultry production less sustainable and less resilient. These shortcomings suggest that changes are necessary in the position of labor in the poultry industry in particular, and the agrifood system overall—changes that could lead towards a more sustainable, ethical, and resilient poultry industry and agrifood system.