Lives on the line: An interview with Alice Driver

Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where Tyson Foods is headquartered. Facing South editor and former investigative reporter Olivia Paschal, who also reported on working conditions for processing workers in Arkansas and around the South during the pandemic, spoke with Driver about the process of reporting the book, conditions for poultry workers, and what’s next for the poultry workers organizing for better working conditions in Arkansas.

You and I were both in Arkansas, reporting on poultry processing workers and the actions of poultry processing companies during the pandemic. But your book, Life and Death of the American Worker, has a much more expansive timeline. What's the backstory of the book and how did you come to the final structure?

I was living in Mexico City when the pandemic hit. I was working as a freelance journalist there for years, and I would come back and forth depending on what stories I was working on. But I had been thinking about doing a meatpacking story for a long time. In my book, I talk about my mom. My mom was volunteering with the Karen from Myanmar in Clarksville, Arkansas where there's a Tyson plant. Most of them work at Tyson. I thought, wow, this is very interesting. What is it like to be from Myanmar, to not speak any English, and to suddenly be dropped into rural Arkansas? We know how meatpacking plants run on the line. You have to be close together to maintain production. So how is there going to be social distancing?

The first article I worked on in Arkansas was published by the Arkansas Times. In Arkansas, Tyson is a very powerful force, and I got a lot of pushback from everybody, including editors, saying why are you doing this? No one cares. This is not a story. Anyone could do this. Okay, it's true. Anyone could do this. And why aren't they doing it? The Arkansas Times or the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette here in the state, neither of them were investigating Tyson, in my opinion. After that article came out, I started working on a second article, and that's when workers started dying of COVID. I ended up placing that article with the New York Review of Books. It took about a year to publish it. It came out in April 2021, and within a week, I had book editors writing me and saying, this should be a book.

The book opens with a couple, Angelina and Placido, who worked for Tyson for about two decades. Placido died of COVID. You follow their story and many others over the course of the book. Could you talk a little bit about them?

They’re from El Salvador, and their story is really central. Angelina was one of the few, because she no longer works at Tyson, who said, “You can use my name, because the thing that I care most about is getting justice for my dead husband.” And her husband had a story. When I went into this, it was the pandemic, and I was asking, what are work conditions like? What are you doing every day at work? And when workers started dying, the interesting thing for me was that several of the workers who died had also been in a 2011 chemical accident which destroyed part of their lungs. Placido predicted his own death. He said, “If I get COVID, I will die.”

And so I wanted to look at not only conditions during COVID, but labor conditions at Tyson, which is the largest meatpacking company in the US. What has created this environment in which there's really very little oversight of safety? Of health?

You talk in the book about “Tyson doctors” and the company's healthcare apparatus, which the workers you talk to see as essentially running cover for the company. Why is that such an important piece of the working environment at Tyson?

Coming into this, I did not know that Tyson has these on-site clinics. A lot of the [workplace-related] things that are complicated, the company distances themselves from because they're third-party hires. For child labor, it's usually a third-party hire through a sanitation company. With the medical on-site, it's nurses that are on-site, and if workers want to go to a different nurse or doctor, they have to pay for it themselves. Many of them can't, so they're going to the on-site nurses.

I did interview one nurse. That was probably the hardest interview to get for me. I didn't think anyone was going to speak to me who said, “Yeah, there's a lot of pressure.” The pressure is to say, we have no injuries on a daily basis — so how can we achieve that? And we have supervisors and managers who are coming to the clinic and in the room, they're not medical personnel, they have no training, and they're giving their opinion of what should be done to help injured workers.

It was interesting to me, too, that the workers themselves say “Tyson nurses” and “Tyson doctors.” I communicate regularly with the PR directors at Tyson — there have been three during the years that I've done this — and they say, oh, we don't have doctors, which is true. Tyson does not hire doctors. But from the workers’ perspective, which is what I'm interested in, they're saying, “These are the Tyson doctors, and we don't trust them, because they're telling us consistently that we're not ill, that we're not injured,” when, in fact, often they are.

I was thinking about the difference between reporting pieces like the New York Review of Books feature, and reporting a book. Obviously the amount of work is very different, but I'm curious too about what changed in your understanding of the situation for poultry workers.

When I started working on this, I was following a lot of workers who were part of the organization Venceremos, which was founded primarily by meatpacking workers, all women. So what was beautiful for me about this — because obviously this was a hard book to write, and it was hard to witness a lot of what went on — was the workers organizing. That's something that I would not have seen if I hadn't followed this over four years. The difficulty of organizing, but also the really moving parts of it. For example, when all of the Venceremos workers went to Florida to meet with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and to see another organization that's worker-led agricultural workers that has been extremely successful. Of course, they have 20 years of organizing behind them, whereas Venceremos has only a few years. So that was one of the really important things to me. I know this is a hard book, but I also wanted to highlight what workers are doing to organize themselves and to speak about labor conditions.

You went on this trip with Venceremos to Florida. What do Venceremos organizers see in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers model, which is different from a traditional labor union? What are they excited about in that model  for organizing a place like Arkansas, where it's hard to organize, and where Tyson has a very active presence?

I think Florida and Arkansas have a lot in common. They were the first two states to ever pass right-to-work legislation in 1944. They’re both states that are traditionally conservative, anti-union, anti-labor, and so organizing is a feat. Workers in agriculture and in meatpacking are often workers who are illiterate. Angelina, the former Tyson worker from El Salvador, has never been to school. So when you're teaching people their rights, CIW has this whole model of going to where the workers are — go to the fields, or wherever. And they teach about labor rights with photos and pictures and plays — which is something that the director of Venceremos, Magaly Licolli, who has a background in theater, is really interested in.

When we were in Florida, the Immokalee Workers put on a play that they had created. At that time, they were organizing around an issue where Wendy's was buying tomatoes from farms that are known for employing modern slavery, and they wanted to force Wendy and the head of Wendy's — who also lives in Palm Beach and is around a lot of conservative figures — to recognize what he was doing, and change the sourcing of tomatoes to farms that had labor conditions in place to keep workers safe.

The challenges of reporting on and organizing workers at Tyson or any of these poultry companies in Arkansas is another thread throughout your book. What kind of response did you get from the company?

The process for investigative journalism is that you communicate with the public relations director, you summarize the main points of the article, and you give them time to respond. And so I was in regular communication with Tyson, because I wrote several articles.

They did a couple things that made me feel a little bit nervous and scared. For example, they would email the editor of the publication. They emailed the editor of the New York Review of Books and said, we don't think Alice is telling the truth, and how can you prove that she is? Then the editor had to explain to them investigative journalism, independent fact checking, that all my interviews are recorded and all of that. The second thing they did was that I would give them the main points of the article, ask them to respond within, let's say, a week, and they would not respond. But after the article was published, they would email my editor and say, we weren't allowed to respond to this. You have to make a correction. So what, thankfully, my editors did was add a note saying, “Tyson had this amount of time to respond. They didn't respond until after the article was published.”

Then, when Tyson didn't like things I posted on Twitter, they would email me. That was weird. I would share anonymous quotes from workers — because workers cannot publicly share videos and things like that — and they would email me things like, “Your tweet is a lie.” Then one public relations director called me, and I thought he was going to respond to some of my questions, but he said, “Look, we know you're not telling the truth.”

What about workers?

The hardest thing with workers was that they know that if they speak to a journalist and it is found out that there will be retaliation. Whether they'll be fired or there's a ripple of implications — some of them are undocumented, some of them are supporting extended family, and many of them, their entire family works at Tyson. They’re not only worried about themselves, they're worried about their family members. And people did wonder, were they being followed? Was I being followed? And the director of Venceremos told me she put a camera on the back of her car because she worried that she was being followed. I went through a lot of insomnia over that, because it's just something you don't know.

Where does the class action lawsuit workers filed against Tyson stand?

The lawsuit was closed. Venceremos and the workers that organized to be a part of the lawsuit lost the lawsuit. I wanted to be hopeful, but knowing Arkansas, I had my doubts about what would happen. My book was already turned in, but the end of the book was the lawsuit, which hadn't concluded. And so then when the lawsuit ended not in favor of the workers, I had to add that into the ending of the book.

What needs to change in the state, the South, the nation, the world, to address some of the problems, not only that workers are facing in these jobs but these systemic forces that are pushing them into jobs like this?

 There’s two things that I would hope readers would get from my book. One is that labor organizing and unions and worker-led organizations are so important to keep people safe, which I would think everybody would be in agreement with. Unfortunately, the South has always been a testing ground for anti-labor legislation, and right now, Arkansas is basically at the forefront of, you know, the pro-child labor movement. Fourteen-year-olds can work, and you don't need parental permission. So I'm thinking, who is the target child here? The target child is an unaccompanied immigrant, a minor who doesn't have parents here. That’s the target worker, and that's who you will find if we could get into the chicken houses and Tyson plants at night working sanitation. The South has really become a testing ground for all kinds of anti-labor legislation, which leads to injury, disability and death for workers.

And I hope readers take away from this book the power of worker-led organizations like Venceremos in Arkansas and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida. We should listen to the immigrant and refugee workers, including undocumented people and children, who form the backbone of our food system in the U.S.