Undercover in a Chicken Factory

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There are two identical processing lines where I work. Each takes a whole chicken, cuts it, marinates it, and breads it. With about 20 to 25 workers, each line processes what we've estimated to be about 80 birds a minute or 40,000 pounds of chicken a day. The lines are effectively divided into four sets of machinery: cut up, marinade, breading, and rebreading. Conveyer belts move the chicken from one section to the next. The birds are hung on the line, cut by rotating saws, injected with marinade (whose flavor changes depending on the day), and sent through a series of contraptions that lightly breads the parts. From there, the chicken is conveyed to another area to be cooked, packaged, and placed on tractor-trailers. Live birds enter the plant at one end; patties and nuggets depart from the other.

My coworkers are an interesting and diverse bunch. Of the 20 or so on the lines, two (excluding myself) are white Americans. Most white workers left the poultry plants during the region's economic boom in the 1990s, and those who remain tend to fall into two categories. An older group has been working at Tyson for more than 20 years, and they're hanging on to the benefits that seniority bestows. The few white workers who started more recently have few other options. Jane, for example, is well into her 60s. Factory work is all she knows. The language barrier keeps her from conversing with most of her coworkers, but she has a peculiar habit that endears her to nearly everyone. When the line stops, she often dances with an unsuspecting young man, embarrassing the victim but giving everyone else a much-needed laugh.

Most line workers are women, many in their 40s and 50s. In a plant where about two-thirds of the workers are male, this fact is telling. On-line jobs are the worst in the plant -- monotonously, even dangerously, repetitive. These workers stand in the same place repeating the same motions for an entire shift. Women are concentrated in on-line jobs because they're excluded from all jobs that involve heavy lifting or running machinery. Mario, Alejandro, Roberto, Juan, Jeff, Carlo, and I come from all over the world, but in the plant we are "young" men who clean up waste, bring supplies, lift heavy objects, and operate hand carts and forklifts. As auxiliary workers, we do on-line work, but only intermittently.

I am to be the harinero, the breading operator, or as my 22-year-old supervisor Michael likes to call me, the little flour boy. Michael can't do the job himself and his instructions are simple: "Do what Roberto does." With five years on the job, Roberto can do every task on the line, fix the machines, and carry on a conversation at the same time. But he gives me little formal training, which makes learning my new job a bit tricky. Roberto is neither friendly nor cool at first; and unlike virtually everyone else in the plant, he is unimpressed that I speak Spanish. We would eventually talk about everything from his wife's struggles at a nearby turkey plant to his kids' achievements at school. I would even visit his parents in Mexico. In the beginning, however, I just watch, hoping to gain his respect and learn enough to survive the first week.

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