![]() It reportedly generated more than $2.3 billion in revenue last year. ![]() In 2016, Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy.įounded in Little Rock, Arkansas, but incorporated in Delaware, Mountaire has operations in five states. Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures, including Ronald Cameron, Mountaire’s reclusive owner. These vulnerable workers are technically hired by temp agencies, relieving poultry plants of accountability if documentation is lacking. ![]() The industry, which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire, has grown increasingly concentrated, expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees. Unlike meatpackers, two-thirds of whom belong to unions, only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor-and those who are unionized face mounting pressure. Between 20, on average, a slaughterhouse worker lost a body part, or went to the hospital for in-patient treatment, about every other day. Government statistics indicate that poultry and meat-processing companies report more severe injuries than other industries commonly assumed to be more hazardous, including coal mining and sawmilling. The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula-a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia-was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation-one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken-conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.” Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted COVID-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.įor the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers-without the option of staying home-have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors.
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