I grew up in rural Arkansas, the home of the largest meatpacking company in the U.S.: Tyson Foods. Tyson and other meatpacking companies often rely on third-party providers for services such as sanitation, which allows them to take advantage of child labor without taking responsibility for the hiring process.
Many migrant children like the ones I spoke to for Life and Death of the American Worker The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company work in meat and poultry processing and related industries around the U.S. In February 2023, the U.S. Labor Department discovered 102 children ages 13-17 working in meatpacking plants across the nation, including six at the Tyson plant in Green Forest that appears in my book.
In March 2023, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the Youth Hiring Act, which rolled back protections for children ages 14-16. According to the legislation, the state no longer must verify the age of those under 16 before they take a job. Although children are prohibited from working in dangerous jobs such as those in the meatpacking industry, the rollbacks in child labor protections are ripe for abuse. In 2024, other states including Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey, Missouri, and West Virginia introduced or approved similar bills. To roll back child labor protections at a time when children, mostly immigrants, are being disabled and dying on the job, is morally corrupt.
On their way to the Tyson plant on Berry Street in Springdale, Angelina and Plácido would drive past a series of banners touting the company’s safety record, including one that read, “Safe work is the only work at Tyson.” From the road, they could see Tyson Foods semitrailers covered in advertisements for crispy strips—giant-sized pieces of breaded chicken floating on a red background. Angelina and Plácido would pass through an authorization point titled “Team Member Entrance” to reach the employee parking lot inside the expansive fenced property.
Once they entered the plant, they were required to leave their phones and other belongings in a common area—workers hung their backpacks or purses on hooks. The state Ag-Gag law prohibits workers and visitors from taking photos, videos, or audio recordings inside the plant. However, meatpacking companies framed this as an effort to protect trade secrets. Six states have ag-gag laws, including Arkansas, which authorizes farms and businesses like Tyson to sue for as much as $5,000 per day if a person records audio or video inside company installations. Plácido and Angelina would put on white aprons made of chicken feathers, which were woven into a fabric that looked like synthetic material—the company wasted nothing. Tyson also made the workers’ hairnets out of feathers, which workers said looked like any other hairnet but smelled terrible. Then the workers picked out safety equipment, hoping they could find what they needed in the correct size. OSHA is the national agency that oversees health and safety in the meatpack- ing industry. It requires meatpacking companies like Tyson to provide workers with personal protective equipment, including helmets, steel mesh gloves, wrist and forearm guards, water- proof aprons, footwear with nonslip soles, hearing protection, and goggles. Any power tools the workers used needed safety guards and shutoff switches, and each worker’s knife needed to be sharp and have guards to prevent the hand holding the knife from slipping over the blade. However, Tyson did not have a system to provide workers with equipment that fit. Plácido and Angelina competed against their co-workers daily to get protective gear in the correct size, a grim game that someone lost every day, potentially to their peril.
Tyson plants are sprawling facilities, often between 100,000 and 300,000 square feet, with stunning, bleeding, scalding, de- feathering, evisceration, and carcass-chilling areas. Live chick- ens are delivered and killed in the open air; consequently, those areas are subject to the weather. The parts of the plant where the carcass is divided up, packaged, and chilled are cold or below freezing. Much of the work is mechanized, and the high noise levels endured by the workers over the years can cause hearing damage. The smell of the hundreds of thousands of chickens slaughtered each day wafts out of the plant, blanketing small towns with the ripe odor of rotting meat and chicken poop. Inside, line workers toil under a flood of fluorescent lights doing repetitive motion work for eight- to ten-hour shifts. Between the chilling of poultry and the nightly sanitation of work areas, facilities are host to a menagerie of hazardous chemicals. Sanitation workers, often contracted via a third party so Tyson can avoid liability for accidents, work at night, typically for twelve-hour shifts. A 2023 investigation by the New York Times found minors working in sanitation at some Tyson plants.
At the Tyson plant in Springdale, Plácido and Angelina soon discovered that even walking was a challenge. Plant floors are covered in a mixture of the oil used for frying, the mucus that clings to chicken, frozen bits of chicken, and blood. Even en- tering the cafeteria was like walking on Crisco. Plácido and Angelina had to brace their entire bodies and walk deliberately to avoid falling. It took them some time to understand the plant layout and the killing process.
Tyson employs a vertically integrated model in which they control every aspect of animal production (breeder flock, pullet farm, breeder house, hatchery, broiler farm, processing, and dis- tribution). The process begins at chicken houses owned by small and independent farmers contracted by Tyson. The chicken houses are an average of thirty-four miles from the poultry processing facility they supply. On any night, entering the chicken houses spread around rural Arkansas, you can find young men, some of them fourteen- or fifteen-year-old immigrant children, grabbing up to four chickens in each hand to cage them. With mechanical ferocity, they hurl roughly eighty chickens into each cage, and then the cages are loaded onto a semitrailer.
This is how poultry processing begins, when the chickens are sleeping—although as soon as the birds become aware of the catchers, they peck and scratch furiously, digging into the catchers’ flesh. The catchers wear long-sleeved shirts and pants but lack protective gear. They breathe in the sharp smell of ammonia as well as dust that contains manure, feed, and feathers. These children make around $2.25 for every thousand chickens, money many of them give to their parents. In 2023, two indigenous immigrant minors from Guatemala who worked as catchers requested support from an Arkansas-based poultry workers’ labor rights organization. The underage workers wanted to recover unpaid wages from a Tyson supplier. The children, who spoke only their indigenous language, had been working sixteen-hour days.
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