Oxfam Report: No relief, denial of bathroom breaks in the poultry industry

[ioplokon]

(published May 9, 2016)

Chicken is the most popular meat in America, and the poultry industry is booming. But workers on the processing line do not share in the bounty. Poultry workers 1) earn low wages of diminishing value, 2) suffer elevated rates of injury and illness, and 3) often experience a climate of fear in the workplace.

Despite this,

Comments

[ericadawn16]

This makes me glad I gave up chicken but why does our country have to suck on so many levels?

[littlelistmaker]

i feel like there is no ethical way to eat while poor and it constantly upsets me.

[un_fantasma]

Tbh there is no ethical way to eat in the US, period. Until there is dramatic reform, no food here is obtained ethically unless it's from a local farm, and even then, I've heard horror stories even there. Not to be a bummer :/

[ioplokon]

ugh yeah, i understand that feeling. but ultimately i think consumer choice is a totally ineffective model for real change re: working conditions & product safety, for these very reasons & because it's easier for companies to lie/rebrand than actually do something.

What really needs to happen is greater support for workers' rights (unions, actually funding for OSHA to do something, higher fines for non-compliance - the most they can fine someone right now is like $1400!) & better protections for undocumented workers.

But I still feel so horrible re: my own consumption & how it fuels these practices. :/

[un_fantasma]

"Supervisors deny requests to use the bathroom because they are under pressure to maintain the speed of the processing line, and to keep up production."

I hate this sentence. It's so insidious. It implies that these poor supervisors, they just have noooo chooooice but to deny their workers basic human rights, poor them, they're under pressure too despite not having to do hard labor, won't we think of the poor supervisors? :(

[ioplokon]

Good catch; I totally missed that. I think in context it's because one of their recommendations is better training & accountability for supervisors, but yeah it does seem to imply that they're just caught up, rather than actually complicit. At least the rest of the report is fairly critical of supervisor abuses?

[pairatime]

In a case like this the state and federal governments should be stepping in. If these actions aren't breaking all kinds of rules I'll be very surprised.

[moonshaz]

Seriously, where the fuck is OSHA?

[pairatime]

Yes really, a single call and they should be sending someone out, but given what they are saying there should be more then one call, and you don't even have to give your name to call in a tip. like really the government can't do anything if you don't tell them something is wrong. Now if they are being told and still doing nothing bad on OSHA.

[ioplokon]

I probably should have copied it out, but in the full report it says that b/c of how understaffed they are, it'd take them 100 years to visit every facility once. :(

edit: I realized I wasn't sad, I was really angry about this. It's so horrible how all public services and worker protections in this country are basically neutered in this way. Same for the EPA, same for enforcing the minimum wage, even stuff like the post office. & basically what we get instead is companies paying private safety contractors to help them self-regulate when they get bad press. It's so completely infuriating, that even the small laws we have for our protection aren't even being enforced!

[thedabara_cds]

Great first post!

We're lucky enough to live in a city with a good co-op where we can buy organic meat from small local farms, but even then I feel guilty eating poultry/meat at all. And for so many folks this simply isn't an option.

[ioplokon]

ah thanks!

I'm vegetarian, and for me that is tied to my labor activism*, but I think it's really important to stand up and say, no this isn't a consumer choice issue, this is a federal enforcement & regulation issue!

*I also have all sorts of anxieties about food and eating, and this seems to be how I can balance that without like totally losing it.