Tyson Foods
announced late last week that it was raising pay for workers on its chicken processing lines across the U.S., to at least $10 an hour.

It might be coincidental that this news comes just ahead of a pair of reports of a negative nature about chicken processing.

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* HARD ON HUMANS: Think Progress writes about a new report today from Oxfam about the “hellish” conditions on the chicken lines. It said, in part:

In a report released on Tuesday, Oxfam America is launching a new campaign to address what it says are rampant health and safety issues, as well as low pay and few benefits, that face the people who process chicken in the country’s plants. Consumer demand has been growing such that the average American who consumed about 20 pounds of chicken a year in 1950 eats 89 pounds today, and today the industry sells 8.5 billion chickens a year, earning $50 billion.

That demand has come with increased pressure on processing line speeds, which are twice as fast today as they were in 1979, with an upper level of 140 birds per minute today versus 91 back then. But the report claims that speeds can go even higher than that, given that each line is run by a supervisor with the capacity to slow it down or speed it up at any time. In interviews it conducted with current and former workers in Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, they reported averaged between 35 and 45 birds per minute, or processing more than 2,000 chickens an hour and 14,000 a day.

Workers have to hang, cut, trim, bread, freeze, and package chickens, actions that require multiple motions on each bird. That means that the average worker has to repeat the same motion — cutting, pulling, hacking, twisting, and hanging — 20,000 times a day with force, although some reach as many as 100,000 of the same motion each shift.

This speed, coupled with repeated motions, is a recipe for injury.

The article includes Tyson’s defense of pay and working conditions.

* HARD ON CHICKENS: Mercy for Animals has announced a news conference Wednesday morning in Little Rock to discuss an undercover investigation that it says has found animal cruelty at an unnamed major company’s chicken slaughterhouse.

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