In September 2019, Human Rights Watch issued a scathing assessment of working conditions in the booming U.S. meatpacking industry. The report described a highly regimented shop floor where workers toil at high speed, slashing into animal flesh; where repetitive-motion conditions like carpal tunnel are rampant; where severe injury rates are high and likely undercounted; where federal enforcement of national occupational safety standards is largely spectral; where at least a third of the workforce are immigrants, many of them undocumented; where bathroom breaks are so hard to come by that some workers resort to diapers; where workers routinely breathe in the caustic fumes of disinfecting chemicals; and where pay is low (44 percent below the national average for manufacturing work). The report showed that conditions had improved little, if at all, since 2005, when Human Rights Watch released an equally damning study called “Blood, Sweat, and Fear.” The 2019 report’s title came from an interview with a worker at a pork slaughterhouse in Nebraska: “When we’re dead and buried, our bones will keep hurting,” he told the researchers.

Within six months of the report’s publication, the novel coronavirus alighted upon the United States. No one who read the report could have been surprised by how the pandemic would play out in the meat industry. Over the first year of the crisis, at least 59,000 workers employed by the big five transnational meatpacking firms tested positive for the virus, and at least 269 died. The outbreaks spilled out into surrounding communities as meatpacking plants emerged as prime hotspots for spreading COVID-19 into rural America. “Instead of addressing the clear indications that workers were contracting the coronavirus at alarming rates due to conditions in meatpacking facilities,” an October 2021 report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found, “meatpacking companies prioritized profits and production over worker safety, continuing to employ practices that led to crowded facilities in which the virus spread easily.”

Indeed, the transnational conglomerates that dominate the trade successfully lobbied the Trump Administration against emergency rules to protect their workers and pushed to speed up their kill lines, preventing workers from maintaining social distance on the shop floor. For their trouble, these companies brought home “record profits” during the pandemic, according to a White House statement in September 2021.

Despite these and other public airings of bad industry behavior and regulatory impotence—which included an extraordinary burst of excellent investigative journalism documenting the plight of meatpacking workers while COVID raged—little has changed on the shop floor since the pandemic’s end, even with the transition from the Trump to the Biden Administration.

Around 500,000 people perform the work of slaughtering and processing the annual 10 billion animals that comprise the nation’s meat supply. Nearly 40 percent are foreign-born, and of them 70 percent are undocumented. Black people make up 21.9 percent of the industry’s workers, about twice their share of the national labor force. The industry’s slaughterhouses operate at speeds that defy the imagination—at rates as high as 6.5 cattle, 21.5 pigs, or 140 birds killed per minute. The tasks are highly specialized. Next time you tuck into a chicken thigh, for example, consider that the person who slashed the leg from the carcass likely hustled through an entire shift making the required motion over and over again—as she had done the day before and would do the day after.

Thus, the 2005 and 2019 Human Rights Watch reports remain all too relevant. If current trends hold, one can readily expect yet a third such bill of horrors in 2033. How can the companies that satisfy the ravenous U.S. appetite for meat treat their workers so horribly? And if even the pandemic’s ravages didn’t inspire positive change, what could?

In her new book, Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, journalist Alice Driver points to some answers. Driver is uniquely qualified among white, non-working-class journalists to write such a book. The daughter of artists, she grew up in the 1980s in a small commune in Arkansas’s Ozark mountains. They raised chickens in the yard for meat. “I close my eyes and see chickens running through the yard, their bloody heads left behind,” she writes in the book’s introduction. She reports that in the 1970s, migrants from Mexico and Central America began to stream into the area, looking for agricultural work and cheap housing. At the local Walmart, she writes, “one of the few grocery stores within an hour of where I grew up, I would see immigrants with scarred wrists, infected hands, and missing fingers. Some of them were disabled and rode around the store in motorized carts. Their labor was invisible, but I could see the marks of it on their bodies.” What she was seeing, it turned out, was her first hint of what it meant to live in a region where one of the largest employers was Tyson Foods, whose globe-spanning meat empire started in Arkansas with the mass production and slaughter of chickens.

After earning a doctoral degree in Hispanic studies from the University of Kentucky and doing a stint in Mexico as an academic, where she turned her dissertation into a book about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, she spent much of the 2010s as a freelance journalist working from Mexico City. She returned to Arkansas in 2020 as the coronavirus was spiraling through, and—using her Spanish-language skills, local contacts, and reportorial chops—formed relationships with several Mexican and Central American poultry workers, learning about their lives as they endured the trauma of the pandemic. The result is an extraordinary account of a catastrophe abundantly foretold in documents like those Human Rights Watch reports.

Driver opens by introducing us to Plácido Leopoldo Arrue and his wife Angelina Pacheco, immigrants from rural El Salvador who had been working at chicken plants in Arkansas since 2001. Plácido, who had spent all those years at a Tyson facility in Springdale, died of COVID on July 2, 2020. By then, Angelina, we learn, had been repeating the same cutting maneuver on the line for so long that she had for years been working in her sleep—repeatedly driving an “imaginary knife into the flesh between the chicken wing and body.”

Her hands moved against her will, gnarled as they were. With clenched fingers, she repeated the same disembodied motions. As if possessed, she worked through the night. Plácido sometimes found her hands moving like ghosts. In the mornings, Angelina woke up tired.

In the rest of the book, Driver weaves a narrative—involving several other Tyson workers whom she got to know—that puts Plácido’s death into the context of his long tenure on the chicken line, and of Angelina’s “quest to make sense of his life and death.”

One key plot point involves the release of chlorine gas at Plácido’s Arkansas jobsite in 2011 after a worker erroneously mixed two incompatible chemicals. Chlorine gas is noxious stuff. It can cause severe and potentially deadly inflammation of the lungs. (That property caught the attention of World War I-era Wilhelmine Germany, which infamously deployed it as a chemical weapon.) In a report on the incident, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that only 17 percent of the workers present during the accident spoke English as their primary language. Most of the rest spoke Spanish (68 percent) or Marshallese (12 percent). Tyson’s failure to account for these linguistic factors helped make the mistake possible. The worker who mixed the two substances “had limited English skills, and was unable to read the label on the drum that had been inadvertently left in the wrong place,” the CDC report states. The agency concluded, “This chlorine release and its resultant health effects were preventable.”

Six hundred workers were in the plant at the time, of whom 152, including Plácido, were hospitalized. Driver reports that Tyson required him to return to the line soon after his discharge, as it did with other exposed workers. In the years after, he had a persistent cough and pain in his lungs that interfered with his sleep.

Driver talks to another exposed worker, Rosario, who says she was required to return to work even though she felt a burning sensation in her lungs. “On her first day back, Rosario fainted while deboning chicken,” only to have the on-site nurse dismiss her symptoms as trivial. In a detail emblematic of Driver’s visceral method, she reports on the mental anguish the accident inflicted on Rosario:

Rosario has a recurring nightmare. She sees the greenish-yellow toxic gas, and she can’t breathe. But the line is still moving, so Rosario knows she can’t leave. Her vision dims. She sees only pink as the chicken carcasses move down the line, each calling for her knife as her lungs heave. She keeps her eyes on the line, but her eyes burn, and she feels like she is suffocating.… When Rosario wakes up, she thanks God she survived.

Driver makes clear that the 2011 chlorine poisoning at the Arkansas chicken plant where Plácido worked was an extreme example of what remains a routine occurrence: workers being exposed to caustic fumes. Another one is ammonia, a gas used as a refrigerant. She points to a 2023 CNN analysis of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, which found that “Tyson plants have experienced at least 47 ammonia leaks between 2012 and 2021, leading to almost 150 worker injuries.” The report added, “Of the 20 facilities that reported the most chemical release-related injuries to the EPA over that time period, five are Tyson meat plants, more than any other company.”

Backed by experts like Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the Obama era, Driver shows that in-house medical care like the company nurse who treated Rosario, common throughout the industry, results in significant undercounting of injuries. She suggests that the industry intentionally maintains a high turnover rate, replacing workers with chronic injuries with new, ever more desperate ones, including prisoners and refugees fleeing atrocities in their home countries. Thirty percent of the workforce at Tyson’s Springdale, Arkansas plant are immigrants from the Marshall Islands, an archipelagic nation in the western Pacific that served as the site of at least 67 nuclear bomb detonations by the U.S. military between 1946 and 1958, rendering entire islands uninhabitable. In compensation for this abuse as well as the ongoing heavy U.S. military presence there, the U.S. government signed a treaty in 1986 allowing Marshallese people to travel to and work in the United States without the need for visas. More recently, members of the Karen minority of Myanmar, hounded by their nation’s military government, began settling in Arkansas around 2010 and are a growing part of Tyson’s employee base, Driver reports. Despite low pay and harsh living conditions, Karen workers and their families told her they preferred the rigors of Arkansas poultry work to military terror at home.

Hiring desperate workers who speak different non-English languages redounds to Tyson’s benefit. Driver quotes Magaly Licolli, a Mexican-born labor organizer who co-founded Venceremos, a worker center focusing on Arkansas’s poultry industry: “It creates the perfect environment for the company to keep workers divided…. [T]herefore, it is going to be difficult to unite workers and fight for better working conditions.” For the meatpacking industry, Licolli adds, “The most vulnerable are the best workers.”

Driver presents the 2011 chemical spill—along with routine exposure to harsh disinfecting chemicals that workers often breathe in as they work—as a kind of preexisting condition that in 2020 worsened the effects of COVID, an upper-respiratory disease. No one can prove that Plácido’s case of the illness, contracted at the height of the pandemic during his time at Tyson, turned fatal because of his previous inhalation of poisonous chlorine gas. But enduring an acute lung injury less than a decade before certainly didn’t make him more resilient to the virus.

What’s clear is that, during the first deadly wave of the pandemic, Tyson expended much more effort on keeping its plants humming than it did on protecting its workers. By the spring of 2020, even as absenteeism rose because of high rates of infection among workers, the company kept its kill lines going at maximum speed. Protective masks were in such short supply that “the company asked workers to make their own masks,” Driver reports. As their colleagues went missing from the line, others had to pick up the slack, “either by doing the work of two or three people or by managing machinery they hadn’t been trained to operate.”

At company HQ, things played out differently. On March 13, the company mandated remote work for its “nonessential” (i.e., white-collar) employees and suspended corporate travel. Behind the scenes, presumably from the safety of their homes, Tyson execs and peers from other meatpacking giants worked with Donald Trump’s Department of Agriculture “to force meatpacking workers to stay on the job despite unsafe conditions,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis later alleged. One glaring example: Tyson’s legal department drafted an early version of Trump’s infamous April 28, 2020 executive order designed to insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments. “The final order that was eventually issued adopted the themes and statutory directive laid out in the meatpacking industry’s draft,” the subcommittee found.

Driver’s book lays bare the gaping power discrepancy between the people who process America’s meat supply and the executives and shareholders who collect the profits it generates. The industry’s political influence, while it reached a spectacular crescendo under Trump during COVID, is hardly limited to Republican politicians. As Tyson ascended to national and global prominence in the 1980s, then-CEO Don Tyson, son of the company’s founder, maintained a tight relationship with then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. “Don and Bill would form a mutually beneficial relationship, a political and financial quid pro quo that would last for decades,” Driver writes. “Bill rode around with Don in his Bentley and private plane. Tyson received nearly $8 million in state tax breaks for plant expansions under then-governor Clinton.”

Life and Death of the American Worker doesn’t offer much of a happy ending. In the wake of the pandemic, Driver reports, 34 former poultry workers and their family members—including Plácido’s widow, Angelina—filed a lawsuit in an Arkansas state court alleging that Tyson’s “misrepresentations, gross negligence, and willful and wanton disregard” for its workers “led to extreme emotional distress, illness, and death.” Driver presents the organizing and marshalling of resources it took for Angelina and her peers to challenge Tyson in such a public way as a kind of touchstone that could lead to further organizing in the future—and finally, some structural improvements in working conditions for the people who stock our supermarkets and restaurant kitchens with meat.

Inspiring poultry workers to publicly challenge Tyson was no easy task. “We are in very isolated, rural, white communities where workers get punished for talking bad about Tyson,” Licolli, the labor organizer, tells Driver. “There is no space or environment for workers to speak up.” Her group, Venceremos, arose in Springdale to provide just that. Getting 34 people on board for the lawsuit was one of its early achievements.

But in April 2024, the court dismissed the case. Thus the U.S. court system, like the occupational-safety regulatory agency, OSHA, can’t be counted on to protect these struggling workers from corporate power. In her conclusion, Driver makes an appeal to consumers as the ultimate hope for change: “Changing the meatpacking industry requires reimagining the US food system, moving away from thoughtless consumption, and moving toward eating as a political act that acknowledges labor rights, animal rights, and the realities of climate change.”

While such a mass discovery of ethical eating in our fast-food nation would certainly be welcome, I finished reading Life and Death of the American Worker convinced that the only hope lies in the herculean task taken on by people like Magaly Licolli: organizing a diverse, multilingual, intentionally intimidated group of workers to publicly expose the abuses of their employers and demand their human rights.

There’s already evidence that such hellraising is catching the ear of lawmakers. Back in November 2021, with memories of the pandemic’s horrors still fresh, Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California announced the Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers Act, a bill that would direct OSHA to come up with an industrywide protocol for protecting workers from repetitive stress injuries after evaluating the hazards of each job on the line, with worker participation in the protocol’s creation. It would also crack down on abuse of employees around bathroom use, requiring, among other things, that OSHA lean on companies to allow “employees to leave their work locations to use a toilet facility when needed and without punishment” and cut down on bathroom lines by providing enough toilets to match the size of the workforce. The bill never had a chance, given the meat lobby’s influence. Developing worker power as a countervailing force is the challenge.

For journalists and scholars, the imperative is to amplify workers’ voices, as Driver has done so movingly and impressively here.