The hands behind the turkey

Before you slice that ham or carve that turkey this Thanksgiving, take a moment to reflect on the hidden costs of bringing that food to your table.

Throughout the South, in rural areas along the hog belt and poultry belt, thousands of workers labor in poultry and meatpacking plants, sorting, cleaning, pulling, deboning, gutting, cutting, slicing and packaging turkeys, chickens, and hogs every day. Whether for Virginia-based Smithfield Foods or Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, these workers perform some of the most dangerous factory jobs in the nation and are subjected to repeated injury and inhumane treatment. Yet their plight is often overlooked. These workers have very few rights in an industry that has been allowed to exploit its workforce due to a lax regulation and enforcement.

Moreover, many of the workers doing the dangerous work of meatpacking are immigrants, often undocumented, and thus more exploitable. Companies have increasingly come to rely on an immigrant workforce that may not complain about harsh conditions for fear of being fired or deported.

The changing demographics of the rural South are key to supplying this booming industry. For instance, North Carolina, the second largest turkey-producing state and the second-largest swine-producing state, has the fastest growing Latino population in the country. According to the U.S. Census, the Latino population in North Carolina grew from some 76,000 in 1990 to almost half a million today.

Agribusiness in the South today is rapidly consolidating and growing on the backs of cheap, increasingly undocumented immigrant labor. At the very top are large multibillion-dollar companies who make profit by underreporting injuries, ignoring regulations, and busting unions.

Life in the Fast Line: 30 Turkeys Every Minute

During the 1900s, the harsh and deplorable conditions facing immigrant workers inside Northern meatpacking plants were adeptly chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. Muckraking exposés like The Jungle and immigrant unionization would go on to advance better federal regulation and oversight, as well as better conditions and higher wages.

Even during the 1980s, meatpacking plants in the Northern cities saw high levels of regulation and unionization. Then the companies began to migrate to the rural South in search of cheaper labor and states hostile to unions. Conditions and wages plummeted, and unions loss influence.

The poultry belt now extends from the Southeast to the Deep South -- North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas -- where agribusiness-friendly lawmakers encourage deep levels of investment with promises of low wages and lax regulation.

Earlier this year, The Charlotte Observer published findings from their 22-month investigation into the poultry industry in the Carolinas, uncovering the way workers -- many of them here illegally -- are being routinely mistreated, and how policies set in place by state and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are tilted in favor of protecting businesses and industry, not protecting workers. For instance, state inspections and fines at poultry plants have dropped to their lowest point in 15 years, reports the Observer.

Injury has become endemic to the industry. With rapid line speeds, poultry workers handle as many as 30 turkeys a minute. Furthermore, in these poultry plants, workers are surrounded by dangerous machines and toxic chemicals, and they're often required to make thousands of cuts with sharp knives each day, according to the Observer. Making more than 20,000 cutting motions a shift, workers can end up with lacerations, debilitating nerve and muscle problems, or missing fingers.

As the Observer reports:

The government does as little as possible to protect poultry workers from mangled hands, severed digits or crippling musculoskeletal disorders. It leaves it to poultry plants to police themselves, and gets involved only when companies report problems. Workers who have no way to speak out pay the price in pain and in injuries that leave them disfigured and unable to do simple tasks.

One company that the Observer investigated was the House of Raeford, a poultry processor in eastern North Carolina that has been cited for 130 serious workplace safety violations since 2000 -- among the most of any U.S. poultry company. The Raeford-based company is one of the nation's top chicken and turkey producers, with about 6,000 employees and eight processing plants in the Carolinas and Louisiana. The Observer found that the company has ignored, intimidated or fired workers who were hurt on the job, and masked the extent of injuries and broke state law by failing to record injuries on state logs.

Last month, a House of Raeford chicken-processing plant in Greenville, S.C. was raided by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. ICE officials arrested 331 workers in the largest immigration raid ever conducted in the Carolinas. The Greenville raid was the latest in a series of immigration crackdowns in the South. In August, ICE officials arrested 600 suspected illegal immigrants at a Mississippi electrical transformer factory -- the largest single workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.

Six minors were among 331 workers arrested at the Greenville raid, a fact that has re-focused attention to child labor in the meat-processing industry. The Observer found that than 20 former and current workers at three House of Raeford plants -- in Greenville, West Columbia, S.C., and Raeford, N.C. -  frequently hired underage workers.

Yet enforcement of child labor laws has decreased, and U.S. Department of Labor investigations have dropped by nearly half since fiscal year 2000, the paper reports.

The Long Battle at Smithfield Foods

Over the years Facing South has reported on the ongoing struggle to unionize Smithfield Foods' meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.

Tar Heel meatpackers, the majority of whom are Black and Latino, have been trying to organize a union with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) for almost 15 years. Tar Heel's Smithfield Packing Plant is the largest pork-processing plant in the world and has roughly 5,000 workers who slaughter up to 32,000 hogs a day.

Last month Smithfield Foods and the UFCW finally reached a settlement. Smithfield agreed to allow a union election and to drop racketeering charges against the UFCW. (Smithfield filed suit against UFCW when the union launched an aggressive campaign in June 2006 that included calls for boycotts and other actions Smithfield deemed extortion.) As part of the settlement, the UFCW agreed to drop its "Justice at Smithfield" international campaign. The secret-ballot election is scheduled for Dec. 10 and 11.

Smithfield has a notorious history of labor rights abuses at its Tar Heel plant and is known for using fear and intimidation to keep workers in line. Workers labor under poor conditions and at unsafe production line speeds, leading to scores of injuries. Workers are routinely denied worker's comp for job-related injuries. Sometimes they're fired even for asking for compensation. The dangerous working conditions and mistreatment of workers led Human Rights Watch to single out Smithfield as a poster child of labor rights violations.

Smithfield has also pulled out its heavy union-busting arsenal over the past decade. In this hostile climate, Tar Heel plant workers tried twice in the 1990s to organize. Smithfield responded with illegal union-busting tactics to intimidate workers and to interfere with the vote -- including worker surveillance, deportation threats, sexual harassment, intimidation and violence.

In May 2006 a federal court found Smithfield in violation of labor laws and ordered the mega-agribusiness to stop its anti-union tactics and its "intense and widespread coercion," which also included retaliatory firings and beatings by plant security.

Two years ago this month the nation witnessed a historic walk-out of workers at the Tar Heel plant. More than 1,000 workers participated in a wildcat action to protest labor abuse and unfair mass firings of workers at the plant. The company had been using Social Security "no match" letters as a reason to fire a growing number of workers.

While the Tar Heel story has become a nationwide symbol of labor abuse and union busting, it has also come to represent the struggles workers in the South have found in confronting agribusinesses that had gone largely unregulated for years.

All the Waste That's Left Behind

These mega-agribusinesses often seek out Southern states where environmental regulations and pollution control measures are lax or non-existent, often locating their factory farms in poor rural communities and communities of color.

The growth in hog and poultry production over the last decade has wrought one of the greatest environmental crises in the South, posing tremendous risks to public health and ruining the quality of life in many communities, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC).

For example, factory hog farms in eastern North Carolina produce 19 million tons of waste each year -- far more than the coastal ecosystem can absorb, according to SELC. Untreated hog excrement is poured into "lagoons" that can and do overflow, polluting nearby waterways and land. According to the watchdog nonprofit Food & Water Watch, millions of gallons of waste from Smithfield's lagoons have contaminated North Carolina's rivers and creeks, threatening the health and livelihoods of people living nearby.

So this holiday season, remember that most of the food that crosses our dinner plates has a troublesome history rooted in the changing dynamics of the South and a renegade industry in need of better regulation and reform.

(Photos by UFCW)