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Lives on the Line: An Interview With Alice Driver

Alice Driver, Olivia Paschal Facing South
Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where Tyson Foods is headquartered.

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Tyson Poultry Workers Say Their Bosses Have No Regard for Their Lives

Jason Ramirez/Alex N. Press Jacobin
AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAMIREZ Few industries in the United States expose workers to COVID-19 at higher rates than the meatpacking and food processing sector. We spoke with a worker at a Tyson poultry plant in Arkansas about his fear of getting sick

Poultry and Prisons: Toward a General Strike for Abolition

Carrie Freshour Monthly Review
If the work of abolition is not only about stopping prisons, but also about imagining a future in which we win, then people cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry factory.

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How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

Jane Mayer The New Yorker
The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

Playing Chicken: Discovering a Diverse Working Class in Trump Country

By Patrick Dixon Working Class Perspectives
Focusing on places like McDowell County, West Virginia, perpetuates the image of rural America as populated primarily by people of white Western European origins, a narrative that fit the media’s interest in white rural working-class voters. But while the economic suffering in McDowell might reflect the experiences of many working-class people outside of major metropolitan areas in the Trump era, McDowell’s whiteness is less representative.

New Study Reveals Just How Brutal Meat and Poultry Work Is for Workers

Elizabeth Grossman In These Times
The meat and poultry industry remains exceptionally dangerous, despite a decline in reported injuries and illnesses over the past 10 years, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Further, says the report, the injury and illness rates reflected in Department of Labor numbers are significantly underreported.
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