How the meatpacking industry exemplifies the challenges of American workers

Angelina and Plácido began working at Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the United States, the year the Twin Towers fell. Tyson Foods was founded in Springdale, Arkansas, in 1935 and is still headquartered there. It is the second largest global meatpacking company. It employs 141,000 people and operates 241 plants in the US, including facilities in twenty Arkansas communities. A Tyson facility is like a black hole, and nothing in a town escapes the pull of the billion-dollar company. Tyson’s supplies grocery and restaurant chains like Arkansas-based Walmart, McDonald’s, and Burger King, in addition to countless schools and prisons. In 2022, the company reported $53 billion in sales and produced one out of every five pounds of chicken, beef, and pork sold in America. Tyson is one of the top three meat suppliers to Walmart, and sales to Walmart account for about 18% of the meatpacking company’s annual sales.

The meatpacking industry is dominated by a handful of companies like Tyson that wield extraordinary influence. The four largest meatpacking companies in the United States control 54% of the poultry market, 70% of the pork market, and 85% of the beef market. The few companies that run the meatpacking industry have reported record profits over the last decade, and have often lobbied to change state and federal laws and relax industry oversight. In 2021, Tyson reported a net income of approximately $3 billion, and, in 2020, a net income of $2 billion. In comparison, JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world, reported $3.047 billion in net income in 2021. Despite such profits, industry wages have remained low for the industry’s many immigrant workers. In 2021, poultry processing wages at Tyson Foods’ plants in Arkansas put many workers at the poverty line, even as profits soared. Low wages didn’t translate into lower prices for consumers, either.

Injury in the meatpacking industry can be slow and even boring, a series of interactions in which medical coverage is denied to a worker or a visit to a doctor is not approved. As companies like Tyson have shifted to using apps and artificial intelligence to interact with workers, the party responsible for disabling or killing a worker has become nameless and faceless. Who is responsible for the injury or death of a worker in the age of artificial intelligence? While the bureaucratic inner workings of Tyson may seem too dull to be of interest, workers’ lives hang in the balance.

Tyson builds its plants in small, rural towns, becoming the primary source of employment for residents, most of whom are immigrants. It’s estimated that undocumented workers make up between 30 to 50% of the meatpacking workforce. Latinx workers like Plácido and Angelina make up 34.9% of the meatpacking workforce, greater than the percentage of African Americans, Whites, or Pacific Islanders employed. Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US, with an average of twenty-seven workers a day suffering amputation or hospitalization. For immigrants and refugees who have little schooling or are illiterate, it is one of the few jobs that pays above minimum wage.

Nothing is more American than meatpacking, an industry that employs almost 500,000 workers nationwide. But the US continues militarizing the border with Mexico and criminalizing immigration as though unaware of who plants, picks, and produces our nation’s food. This immigration system, which makes immigrants’ lives precarious, functions exactly as planned because workers who live in fear are easier to underpay, mistreat, and silence.

Tyson hourly workers who undertake dangerous, physically challenging labor are 29.5% Hispanic and 26.8% Black. Workers at plants like Tyson are immigrants and refugees from all over the world, citizens and undocumented, literate and illiterate—making it harder for them to organize and band together. One individual plant can have workers from fifty countries who speak dozens of languages. What they have in common is the daily strength and endurance to work in conditions most would not tolerate.

Even with a steady supply of undocumented workers, Tyson has experienced labor shortages. In 2001, Tyson Foods was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to recruit illegal workers from Mexico and transport them to fifteen Tyson plants in nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

The company blamed a few managers—Jimmy Rowland, a former Tyson manager at a plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, among them. In April 2002, shortly after the federal government’s indictment was made public, Rowland was found with a rifle wound to his chest. The coroner ruled it a suicide.

Tyson Foods representatives have discussed their management style, including in a May 2000 interview that was originally recorded for internal company use, Leland Tollett, who was the CEO at Tyson from 1991 to 1998 and interim CEO in 1999, admitted, “Our system, the way our business is run now, does not lend itself to the development of good general managers.” He clarified that if managers kept costs down, “I could care less about how the guy does his job, how he accomplishes the tasks.”

Government investigators said that two Tyson executives knew the company was smuggling undocumented workers and helping them obtain counterfeit work documents. The case represented the largest in which Immigration and Naturalization Service had acted against a major American company for issues involving the smuggling of immigrants. However, in 2003, a federal jury acquitted Tyson and three managers of smuggling.

Employers like Tyson profit from hiring undocumented workers. The labor of undocumented workers underpins the national food system. In 2020, meat processing companies spent $4.1 million lobbying the US government. Between 2000 and 2021, for example, Tyson spent $25 million to block climate policies, decrease the chance of being inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and shield concentrated animal feeding operations from EPA fines.

In the interview, Tollett summed up how the company viewed immigrant and refugee workers. He said, “I think these people, these so-called immigrants, and we basically call them Hispanics because that is the biggest population in the workforce, I think they are learning the … I think they’re learning the culture better, too.” He also said that 1999 was the worst year at the company “in terms of death.”

In the same internal company interview, Tollett said, “We would rather run a union-free environment because I think, you know, in the years we have convinced ourselves, took no convincing really, that our people are better off dealing with our company. We are fair people. And if we’re not fair to people in something, we need to figure out how to make sure that those people do understand that we’re trying to be fair.”

While the average Tyson line worker might make as little as $22,000 a year, an associate director at the corporate office could make over $150,000. In that same May 2000 internal interview, Buddy Wray, who served as president of Tyson from 1991 to 2000 and was on the board of directors from 1994 to 2003, said of immigrant line workers, “Without those employees from other countries that don’t speak English we’d be out of business. The percentage of Hispanics and the percentage of other nationalities that we hire today are just increasing every year, and I don’t see that changing.” Wray wasn’t worried about foreign workers assimilating to the US because “We brought Black people here that could not speak English from Africa. And they were the people working in the South. And in the North, we had Italians, and we had Irish, and we had Europeans, which a lot of them didn’t speak English, the Chinese in the West. So, we don’t have anything different today than we had in the early 1800s. And time will resolve that.”

Excerpted from Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company by Alice Driver and published by One Signal Publishers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.