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No company better exemplifies the industry's successes and failures than Tyson, based in Springdale, in the heart of Arkansas' poultry belt. Tyson, whose 1992 sales of $4 billion are nearly twice the size of the Arkansas state budget, produces 20% of America's chickens. Last month, after sharing a dinner of grilled chicken with a TIME reporter, vice chairman John Tyson -- son of the chairman -- boasted that the growth in the company's earnings per share from 1980 to 1990 ranked No. 1 among FORTUNE 500 companies. Total profits have increased fourteenfold in the past decade.
Very little of that bonanza has filtered down to chicken-plant workers. The industry's average pay is $7 an hour, vs. $10 for the food-processing industry as a whole. In Arkansas the typical wage is a bit lower than in such states as Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina. Production per worker in the poultry industry nearly tripled from 1960 to 1987, yet pay rose only half as fast as chicken prices did during that time, according to a 1989 report by the Institute for Southern Studies. Most chicken laborers are unskilled and barely educated; their only alternative in many cases would be a minimum-wage job.
One mid-size processor, Mark Simmons of Simmons Industries, says he is keenly aware of the problem. At Simmons' two plants in Arkansas, the starting wage is $5.70 an hour, while the average pay is just 50 cents more. "I realize it's not enough for a single mother," says Simmons sadly. "But most people have two jobs. This may be their town job, and they also work on a farm." Simmons says that with continued technological innovation, "we hope to use fewer workers and pay them more."
Frances Ketcher, 63, doesn't have much longer to wait. She has been employed at a Simmons plant for 24 years, a remarkably long time in an industry where employee turnover often reaches 100% a year. She earns only $6.10 an hour. "To work here you need a weak mind and a strong back," she says with a smile. The pace at the Simmons plant is so frantic that chickens sometimes spill onto the floor, where they lie for as long as an hour. "Sometimes there's a real pile-up," says Grover Myers, a federal inspector at the plant since 1959. "I just wish the plant supervisors had their own initiative, without inspectors telling them to pick up the chicken and rewash it."
Most poultry plants are cramped and noisy, with floors constantly wet and slippery. Some rooms are cold, others hot and malodorous enough to bring a visitor close to vomiting. Employees are sometimes splashed with feces, blood, guts or chicken fat. Even more odious is the industry's rising injury rate. Labor Department statistics show that 27% of poultry workers suffer on-the-job injuries and illnesses each year, making fowl processing one of the nation's most hazardous jobs. In terms of repetitive-motion disorders, poultry work is exceeded only by meat packing. In a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1 in 3 chicken workers was found to have a work-related muscular-skeletal disorder resulting in moderate or extreme pain. Many employees become permanently disabled.