The Perilous Life of Case Farms Poultry Workers

Case Farms four poultry plants are among the most dangerous workplaces in the United States. In 2015 alone, federal workplace safety inspectors fined the company nearly two million dollars. "Last September, OSHA determined that the company's line speeds and work flow were so hazardous to workers' hands and arms that it should 'investigate and change immediately' nearly all the positions on the line." [1]

Case Farms is not alone, however, as in 2015, meat, poultry, and fish cutters, "repeating similar motions more than fifteen thousand times a day, experienced carpal-tunnel syndrome at nearly twenty times the rate of workers in other industries. The combination of speed, sharp blades, and close quarters is dangerous: since 2010, more than seven hundred and fifty processing workers have suffered amputations." [2]

Catching chickens to be slaughtered for the market is one of the major jobs at Case Farms. Workers told the reporter, Michael Grabell, that they are paid around $2.25 for every thousand chickens. Two crews of nine workers each can bring in about seventy-five thousand chickens a night.

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that undocumented workers had the right to complain about labor violations, but that companies had no obligation to rehire them or to pay back wages. The year that Case Farms was founded, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made it illegal to 'knowingly' hire undocumented immigrants. Current and former workers at Case Farms' plants said the company has an unspoken policy of allowing them to come back  with a new I.D.

The Sharing Work Era May Be on Life Support
Law professor Charles A. Reich believes that what he calls Consciousness II is giving way to Consciousness III, the outlook of a rising generation whose virtues include direct action, community power and self-definition. Reich has written that Consciousness III people "simply do not imagine a career along the  old vertical lines." This is not necessarily a healthy development, as a study shows that those who have relied on gigging -- work sharing --  to make a living, are less satisfied than those who had other jobs and benefits, and gigged for pocket money: another sign that the system was not helping those who most needed the work. "Instead of simply driving wealth down, it seemed, the gigging model was helping divert traditional service-worker earnings into more privileged pockets" -- excluding those most dependent on the work. [3]

The fear about the shared work economy is that the lack of the benefits and protections found in what we might call the traditional occupations create vulnerabilities to the misfortunes of life and leave such workers bereft of pensions or other types of retirement income.

ADDENDUM:
*"Over one hundred thousand American miners have died in the pursuit of coal, a death toll higher than the combined losses in the Korean and Vietnam Wars." "In 1940, there were 130,457 miners in the state, producing 126,619,825 tons of coal in West Virginia. By 1997, there were only 20,542 miners left." [4]

Footnotes
[1] Michael Grabell, "Cut to the Bone," The New Yorker, May 8, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Nathan Heller, "The Gig is Up," The New Yorker, May 15, 2017.

[4] Laurence Learner, The Price of Justice (New York: Times Books - Henry Holt and Co., 2013, p. 35).