Lady Business: Farm workers, immigration raids, and animal rights

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 90th issue, published January 19, 2020.

The Human Factor

“Have you been to a commercial farm before?” In July, I was finishing up reporting on this article about foie gras and the small businesses that sell it. A feature that had started out as a profile of a survivor entrepreneur, it had been somewhat overtaken by a pending New York City ban on foie gras. And I was about to travel to upstate New York, to visit one of the only farms in the entire country that raises ducks to force-feed them and eventually harvest their resulting fatty livers.

Had I visited a working animal farm before? I hadn’t, and my questioner -- an anthropologist who studies food systems -- wanted me to manage my own expectations. This was a relatively small farm, without the tight cages and famously bad animal-treatment conditions of Big Chicken; but it was still a commercial poultry farm with a working slaughterhouse, one where the sights (and the smells) wouldn’t be entirely pleasant. 
 
As it turned out, the entire place stank of manure and animal, but that was the worst of it, animal-wise. The ducklings roamed wide barns, the older ducks had space in open-air pens, and the slaughterhouse was done for the day and being scrubbed down; by the time we got into the next chilled room, with duck carcasses in various pieces being cut down, it was almost as familiar as my local grocery's butcher counter.

Except for the people working the line. They were almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Central America; and, it was pretty clear from the research I’d done on the farm before coming, almost entirely very low-paid. Like, in some cases making-less-than-$400-per-week-low paid (although some also live on the farm rent-free):
 

Like other forms of poultry farming and processing, the work is hard, smelly and low-paying, culminating in a fast-moving line to pluck, butcher and package the duck for sales. Workers stand shoulder to shoulder in the steamy processing rooms, each taking a few seconds to put the ducks on hooks, snip off the head or feet, strip the neck, vacuum-seal the breasts.

For Ms. León, who feeds the ducks, the workday begins at 6 a.m., with the first feeding, and ends around 1 a.m., when she finishes the third. In between feedings, she grabs what sleep she can in a little white clapboard bungalow provided to her family by the farm. About one-third of the workers live on the farm.

Which is an added wrinkle in the narrative of foie gras and the fight over this food of the 1 percent. It is, as this nuanced New York Times article about the economic impact of the bans points out, largely produced by people who could never afford to eat it.
 
Yet so is pretty much all the rest of the poultry Americans eat. Our commercial farms are, in general, staffed and run by low-paid immigrants, more than a million of whom are thought to be living in the country without documentation. Some of those Big Chicken farms were the target of ICE raids this summer, which highlighted just how terrible this work can be:
 

Koch Foods, one of the companies raided in Mississippi, … paid nearly $4 million last year to settle a complaint brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Latina workers at the company's plant in Morton, Miss., accused the company of both racial and sexual harassment. The company admitted no wrongdoing.
 
Another of the companies raided this week, Peco Foods, had two workers suffer amputations last year at a chicken processing plant in Arkansas.
 
The chicken industry boasts that its processing plants have gotten safer. The rate of workplace injuries was cut by half between 2003 and 2016. But poultry workers are still twice as likely to suffer serious injuries and six times as likely to contract a workplace illness as other private sector employees.
 
…"The industry is totally dependent on finding workers who will not raise issues and who, to a degree, live in fear of the company and they'll just keep their head down and do the work," says [former OSHA chief of staff Debbie] Berkowitz. "For the last 30 years that's been immigrant labor."

 
The U.S. House of Representatives in December passed a bill, with bipartisan support, that would provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrant farmworkers in the country without legal immigration status. However, “it is very unlikely to be taken up for a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate,” the Wall Street Journal reported then. “President Trump hasn’t indicated whether he would sign the deal.”
 
Meanwhile, as the New York foie gras producers are fond of pointing out, none of the City Council members who proposed or voted for this recent ban visited the farms. Some of their low-paid immigrant workers told the Times that working in the foie gras industry has been a safe haven from dangers they fled in their home countries, and they worry that the ban will “destroy us more.”
 
So it’s a complication confrontation of animal rights, workers’ rights, and immigrants’ rights, and the reason I’ve been thinking about that question of expertise and expectation setting. If you’re going to assess one particular type of operation, what do you want to see? What do you expect to see? Have you visited one before?
 

Lady Bits

 
--I’m pretty excited about my first feature -- and cover story! -- for Fortune. It will be out tomorrow, and part of our very snazzy redesigned print magazine and website. I’m looking forward to talking all about it in next week’s Lady Business. But to read my article, and most other Fortune stories I link to in the future, you’ll need to create an account on Fortune.com. It’s free to register; we’ll eventually be requiring a paid subscription to access most Fortune articles, but more to come soon.
 
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