Worker abuse documented -- yet again -- in the South's poultry industry

The next time you pick up a House of Raeford product at the grocery store -- Black Forest Turkey Ham, perhaps, or maybe some Chicken Tenders -- you should stop and think about the human suffering that's not listed among the ingredients.

This week the Charlotte Observer is featuring an investigative series titled "The Cruelest Cuts," examining the plight of workers at the poultry giant's Carolina facilities. A team of reporters and editors spent almost two years analyzing documents and interviewing more than 200 poultry workers -- most of them Latino, and many in this country illegally.

The team found compelling evidence the North Carolina-based company failed to report serious injuries such as broken bones and carpal tunnel syndrome, plant officials often dismissed workers' requests for medical care, and regulators failed to take action to protect the workers. Editor Rick Thames places the findings in the context of the South's long and tragic history of worker exploitation:

...[T]he neglect of these workers exposes an ugly dimension to a new subclass in our society. A disturbing subclass of compliant workers with few, if any, rights.

I say disturbing because North and South Carolina share some regrettable history of building economies on the backs of such workers.

Before the Civil War, slaves and poor sharecroppers powered the region's tobacco and cotton plantations. Early in the 20th century, children as young as 8 were put to work in Carolinas textile mills to help feed their poor families.

Consider the parallel to illegal immigrants. Same as slaves and sharecroppers, same as the cotton mill workers derisively termed "lintheads," this subclass is now a scorned bunch.

And yet they help power our economy. We live in houses they built. We drive on highways they paved. We eat the chicken and turkey they prepared.

This is not the first time the poultry industry's abuse of workers in the South has been brought to the attention of the public and regulatory authorities. In 1990, the Institute for Southern Studies' own Southern Exposure magazine won a National Magazine Award for the series "Ruling the Roost," an exposé of threats to worker safety and public health posed by the South's poorly regulated poultry industry.

The same year the series was published, North Carolina fined subject Perdue Farms $40,000 when it was revealed that 36 percent of the workers in two of its plants suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. But it's one thing for a regulatory system to react to a problem that's been exposed -- and quite another to take a proactive approach and prevent workers from being hurt and abused in the first place.

Let's hope this latest investigation will serve as a wake-up call for our government officials at long last to create the kind of regulatory system that protects those who do the hard work of feeding us, and to transform the region's reputation into a place where workers are treated with respect, dignity and humanity.