No matter who’s in the White House, the poultry-processing lines move ever faster

The first time I met Alex Paul he wore a stylish patterned shirt and a wide smile. Paul, an immigrant from Haiti, came to the U.S. in the summer of 2023 and got a job at Amick Farms, a poultry processing plant in Delmar, Delaware, earning $15.60 an hour.

That December, two weeks after he started at Amick, the 39-year-old was walking with a large bowl of chicken parts when another employee ran into his ankle with a forklift. About 20 minutes later, the injury had become “excruciating,” he said in Haitian Creole through an interpreter. His whole leg was swollen and so painful that he was limping and had a hard time pulling on his boot. Paul’s supervisor took him to the on-site clinic where a nurse gave him some kind of medication, presumably for the pain. Then he was told to go back to work.

Later that afternoon, Paul climbed a ladder to clean a belt about 13 feet in the air. As he made his way back down he stepped on a rung with the injured foot and lost his balance, landing on his back on an iron belt that was supporting the ladder, fracturing his lower spine.

If he hadn’t been sent back to work after his first injury, Paul said, he wouldn’t have fallen from the ladder. “If my supervisor had treated me like a human being he would have given me a little break,” he said. “He sees the job. He doesn’t see me as a human.”

Such accidents happen at alarmingly high rates in the poultry industry. Poultry processing has long been a dangerous job, one that requires workers to move quickly, perform repetitive tasks with knives and other sharp objects, and clean equipment with harsh chemicals. After the birds are killed, cleaned, and inspected, a largely automated process, they are sent to the so-called “cold side” for workers to debone, butcher, and package. Evisceration belts move fast—up to 175 birds a minute—and they never stop. The risk to workers is compounded by the fact that the industry relies on immigrant laborers, many of whom, like Paul, speak little or no English and, workers and advocates say, are provided little to no training.

The line speed is a contentious issue, with unions and food-safety groups claiming faster lines increase the risks, while companies push to process as many birds as possible. “The faster workers can process these chickens, the higher the profit is for the manufacturer,” explained David Michaels, a professor at George Washington University who served as assistant secretary for labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency responsible for overseeing worker safety in the U.S.

And yet the Trump administration just gave the industry permission to keep lines running at elevated speeds. In March, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the agency was going to “eliminate outdated administrative requirements that have slowed production and added unnecessary costs for American producers” by extending existing waivers that have allowed dozens of plants to maintain higher line speeds since the start of the pandemic. She also promised to go further by starting rulemaking on line speeds “immediately,” although the USDA declined to explain what the rulemaking will entail.

“Increased line speeds will hurt workers – it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite – and increased production speeds will jeopardize the health and safety of every American that eats chicken,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that represents over 15,000 poultry workers, said in a statement in response to the announcement. “Issuing waivers to a multi-billion dollar industry with no oversight to ensure it’s done safely and properly is a recipe for disaster.”

The industry’s quest to process poultry faster has a long history. After a failed effort to increase line speeds under President Obama in 2014, 20 plants were allowed to run a pilot program to increase speeds up to 175 birds per minute. The industry saw an opportunity under the first Trump administration and petitioned to allow plants to be granted waivers to operate without “arbitrary line speed limitations” at all.

Then during the pandemic, some processing plants shut down; workers fell ill or stayed away (at least 59,000 meatpacking workers got sick and nearly 300 died of Covid-19 in 2020 alone); and demand for poultry and other foods dropped at restaurants, schools, and other institutions. Poultry processors warned of having to euthanize chickens; John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, took out full-page ads in newspapers saying “the food supply chain is breaking.” The Trump administration responded by allowing processors to apply to increase their line speeds from a maximum legal rate of 140 birds a minute to 175.

It was considered an emergency response, presumably temporary, and yet today, long after the Covid lockdowns have lifted, and even after four years of a Democratic administration, nothing has changed; line speeds remain at 175 at dozens of plants, and an industry with already high illness and injury rates has seen those rates climb. Between 2017 and 2019, the injury and illness rate in poultry processing was less than four per 100 workers, compared to 2.7 for the private sector as a whole. In 2020 it jumped to 5.9 per 100 workers, and has only dropped to 5.7 in 2021 and 2022. And those figures are almost certainly an undercount, given the widespread underreporting experts and government officials have found in the industry. 

In January, the Department of Agriculture released a long-awaited report on poultry plants operating line speeds above 140 birds per minute that found a staggering 81 percent of workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, driven by handling a high number of chicken parts per minute, and that 40 percent reported moderate to severe upper extremity pain caused by the work. “I have never seen conditions like this in any industry in my experience,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a practitioner fellow at Georgetown University who worked at OSHA from 2009 to 2015.

Now the Trump administration is poised to grant the industry’s longstanding wish and allow them even more latitude to run lines at rapid speeds.

On the Delmarva Peninsula, where Paul and many thousands of other Haitian immigrants have moved in recent years, jobs in poultry plants are among the easiest to get for those with limited English. A Mountaire Farms billboard in Seaford pictured a smiling Black man in protective gear and invited people to “join the family” in Creole. Most new arrivals end up taking these jobs, which means putting their bodies on the line.

The average American eats more than 100 pounds of chicken a year. Many of those birds are raised, slaughtered, and processed on the Delmarva Peninsula, a diamond-shaped piece of land that juts into the Chesapeake Bay and is bisected by the Delaware-Maryland border. This region is one of the nation’s top producers of broiler chickens, processing more than 600 million birds and producing 4.4 billion pounds of chicken last year. 

About an hour inland from Delaware’s famed beaches, beyond the strip malls that sprawl along Sussex Highway, are poultry processing plants owned by some of the biggest brands in the industry: Allen Harim Foods, Amick Farms, Mountaire Farms, and Tyson Foods, the leading chicken supplier in the country. Perdue Farms, which clocks in at number four, is headquartered in Salisbury, Maryland, just south of Delmar, and there are more than 10 poultry plants within a 70-mile radius of the town. Those plants employ nearly 19,000 people.

The workers in these plants used to be mostly Black Americans until the 1990s, when Latin Americans immigrated to the area in huge numbers and started working the jobs. But after President Joe Biden expanded temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants, hundreds of thousands have come, and many have flocked to Delmarva and its poultry jobs. 

Workers at these plants are crowded together in wet, often freezing conditions. Those doing “live hang” wrangle living birds so they hang upside down on hooks, risking getting slashed by talons and being defecated on. After slaughter, birds are dunked in peracetic acid to kill bacteria and pathogens. The acid can cause nose, throat, and lung irritation in humans. In the January USDA report, five out of 11 plants examined had amounts of peracetic acid in the air that exceeded recommended limits. The birds are then chilled to near freezing and sent down a conveyor belt where workers use knives and scissors to debone and butcher them, cutting through tough tendons and bones. Workers are given quotas that push them to work as fast as they can and reprimanded if they can’t keep up. Accidents, including bad cuts and even the loss of fingers or limbs, are not uncommon.

In 2020, meat and poultry workers were injured or sickened at work at three times the private sector average, and poultry workers suffered amputations due to work-related injuries at five times the average. “The injury rate is astoundingly high,” said Michaels, the former OSHA official.

The force and awkward positioning required in the highly repetitive line tasks, such as reaching up to put birds on hooks or bending their arms at strange angles to make cuts, also leaves workers at a high risk of chronic conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. In 2014, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health published inspections of poultry plants in South Carolina and Maryland and found that 42 percent and 34 percent of the workers, respectively, had evidence of carpal tunnel syndrome, and 57 percent in South Carolina had at least one symptom of a musculoskeletal injury. A 2017 study, published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, similarly found that 58 percent of poultry workers had hand or wrist issues, and three-quarters had nerve damage. In the recent USDA report, nearly 40 percent of poultry workers with moderate to severe work-related pain considered quitting or changing positions or the pain interfered with their lives outside of work.

Bernadette Jean-Jacques worked for Perdue in Milford, Delaware, for 11 years, and her body is still warped by it. Her first job was packing chicken parts in Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap. Things moved so quickly that she said she couldn’t count how many she handled every minute. “They killing you,” she said. Later she worked hanging freezing chickens on the line—40 a minute, she said—to be cut into parts.

At one point her fingers got so swollen they looked like sausages bursting out of their casings, she said. Touching the cold birds made her hands “very black” and she said she lost all of her fingernails. The temperature made her feet ache and she still sees a podiatrist. Her shoulder cramps “tout jou,” she said in Creole, all day, and she takes medication for pain in her leg. Her hands still bear the marks of the work: discolored, so swollen her knuckles aren’t visible, covered in scars from knicks she got with knives and scissors. “My whole body just mess up,” she said in English. “I got pain all over in my body.”  

Like Alex Paul, when a worker is injured or becomes ill at a plant, they are typically sent to on-site clinics for first aid and encouraged to return quickly to work. It’s part of how the industry keeps the true toll of the work hidden.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which created OSHA, mandates that companies maintain records of injuries that require more than first aid or result in lost time or light duty. It arguably created an incentive for plant supervisors to push people to keep working—as Paul said he was after the forklift incident—and only offer minimal treatment when they get hurt. When a worker gets hurt inside a poultry plant, they are referred to the on-site clinic, typically staffed by a nurse or emergency medical technician who offers things like Band-Aids, ice, and ibuprofen. Government investigations have found that clinic staff frequently give workers medicine like ibuprofen in such quantities that they risk developing stomach ulcers and kidney injuries; those with hand and shoulder pain tend to get sent back to work instead of to a doctor. Anything more serious—short of a lost limb or finger—is referred to occupational therapists or physical trainers, which OSHA has agreed to classify as first aid. And that’s when workers report problems at all; the USDA found that 44 percent of those who had moderate to severe work-related pain didn’t report it to their supervisors or the on-site nurse.

“They never get to see a real doctor who can diagnose them and give them the proper treatment,” Berkowitz said. If workers seek out their own doctors, the companies typically won’t cover the cost and often claim the injuries aren’t work-related so they don’t have to record them.

OSHA’s investigatory resources are limited, but when it has gone into plants it’s found plenty of evidence of these practices. In 2015, for instance, OSHA cited Allen Harim in Delaware for nine violations, including “deficient medical mismanagement.” The agency described a first aid station at the plant staffed by unlicensed EMTs whose purpose was to “prevent worker injuries from becoming OSHA recordable or worker compensation cases.” Only 15 percent of musculoskeletal cases were referred to a doctor; some workers were seen 10 or more times without being told to get medical attention. 

The practice is effective; many plants report bafflingly low injury rates. The Mountaire plant in Millsboro, Delaware, reported just 57 injuries and illnesses to OSHA among its 2,404 employees last year; the Perdue plant in Salisbury reported a mere 11 injuries and no illnesses among its 599 workers.

Tom Ryan, director of corporate communications at Perdue, said in an email that worker safety is the company’s top priority. “All plants operate within the USDA line speed limits and Perdue does not operate under any waivers to increase the line speed above the well-established regulatory limit.” He said the company has operated on-site “wellness centers over the last few decades,” which “provide convenient no-cost medical care for our associates.” He did not respond to a list of detailed allegations. Allen Harim Foods, Mountaire Farms, and Tyson Foods did not respond to a request for comment. Amick Farms did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions.

Failure to properly record injuries is a violation of the law. But even if a company is caught it only faces a small fine. Meanwhile, the practice allows the industry to argue for even more speed. “Industry wants to promote the false narrative that they’re safe and therefore they can work their lines as fast as they want,” Berkowitz said.

In 2019 Emanie Dorival, a nurse practitioner, opened a clinic on the Delmarva Peninsula, with the goal of tending to her fellow Haitian immigrants. Located in Seaford, Delaware, about 90 percent of her patients work in the nearby poultry plants. They mostly come to her with work-related injuries; every week, she said she has to write notes so that patients who were injured on the job can stay home to recover instead of being forced to return to work.

Dorival says many of her patients describe a lack of training—particularly training provided in Haitian Creole—which she says can lead to avoidable accidents and injuries. She estimated that 60 percent of her patients have some kind of musculoskeletal issue—pain in their backs, shoulders, elbows, hands. Others get a tingling numbness from spending so much time in the freezing cold.

“There’s so much injustice in the poultry industry,” Dorival said. 

Madeleine Paul, Alex’s mother, has been working for a year at the same Amick Farms plant where her son worked. Her job is to watch chicken parts come down a belt and pick out any that still have bones in them; so many come so fast she says she can’t count them. The work and the cold make her feet, back, and shoulders ache. “It’s really difficult,” she said in Haitian Creole through a translator.

Because the line never stops, workers can’t step away for even a second. Paul often isn’t allowed to leave the line to use the bathroom; sometimes she’ll ask four times without getting a response, she said. At that point, she said she just leaves, risking the ire of her boss; she refuses to pee on herself. All that for $16 an hour. “It’s not really enough money for people to survive,” Paul said.

Dorival said she sees plenty of workers who, like Madeleine Paul, aren’t able to take bathroom breaks. For those on medication for things like hypertension and diabetes, which produces more frequent urination, she is “constantly” writing doctor’s notes to ensure they get enough breaks. 

Jacquex Victor started working at Amick Farms in Delmar in July 2023, on overnight shifts sanitizing the production line. He said no one trained him or told him what chemicals he was using. Soon after he started, he lifted a gloved arm and a chemical dripped onto his arm, burning him from his wrist past his elbow.

He was sent to an on-site medical unit, where he says he was instructed to wash the chemical off. He says he was then sent to an occupational therapist, where he was given a rash cream. By the time he got to Dorival, four days later, the burn had become a raw wound all along his forearm. “He shouldn’t have gone to occupational therapy,” Dorival said, or been given a rash cream; she cleaned his burn and dressed it, changing the dressing a few times every week. Had he not sought her out, she said, the burn would likely have become infected.

At the plant, “there’s a lot of risk,” Victor said in Creole through an interpreter. It’s not because he’s not careful, he explained; there are so many tasks and so many workers trying to get it cleaned quickly that it’s “trè difisil,” he said in Creole, not to get hurt. Victor lives in a ranch-style house with over a half dozen other Haitian immigrants, most of whom work in poultry, and nearly all of them said they had been hurt at work.

In September, more than a year after the accident, Victor’s arm was mostly healed, although a doctor had told him he would likely feel pain in his arm for the rest of his life. He was back working the same job, making $17.50 an hour. The high-pressure hose he uses to clean the plant hurts his hands to hold it, he said, pointing to his knuckles and wrists. “Even if you’re hurt, you have to still do the job,” he said. “You have to work to pay your bills so you don’t have any choice.”

This work could be safer, but the industry has enormous political power and it fights the kinds of regulatory changes that would improve working conditions in the plants. Poultry is just as powerful as the oil and gas industry, said Berkowitz. “They get what they want.”

Case in point: Rather than rescind the line-speed waivers after the pandemic, as requested in a lawsuit by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the Biden administration, after failing to get the case dismissed, convinced the court to let it study the impact of line speeds on workers instead.  The result was the study that was published in January, but while it finds high injury rates in poultry plants for workers who handle more chicken parts each minute, it still concludes, “Evisceration line speed was not associated with MSD [musculoskeletal disorder] risk.” The Trump administration is now citing that finding to justify allowing plants to keep line speeds high; Rollins said in her announcement that “extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries.”

But the study’s findings were due in part, it says, to the fact that the plants it examined had staffed up or lowered some line speeds compared to plants operating at lower speeds. “It could be plants who knew they were going to be in the study just added workers to the line,” Berkowitz said. When asked why the report would rule out evisceration line speeds as a cause of injury, she replied that the USDA is “a captured agency.” For example, when the industry protested over Kathleen Fagan, a former medical officer at OSHA, being one of the researchers working on the study, Biden Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack kicked her off.

In October 2024, a spokesperson at the Food Safety and Inspection Service said the agency  would use the findings of the study “to consider whether to conduct rulemaking.” Now the Trump administration is using it as justification for potentially enshrining higher line speeds for all plants.

Habacuc Petion, who has run the nonprofit Rebirth for more than 25 years, offering everything from worker safety training to a food pantry to the Haitian community, said that on the Peninsula, “The poultry industry is king.” Perdue’s Salisbury plant sits right on Main Street, next to a trendy café and across from a brewery. The mainstage of the Maryland Folk Festival in September was the Perdue Dance Stage, which was draped with a huge company logo. Jacob R. Day, the son of former Perdue CEO Randy Day, served as Salisbury’s mayor from 2015 to 2023, and most of those years overlapped with his father’s tenure at the company. The minor league baseball team, the Delmarva Shorebirds, plays in Perdue Stadium, and Salisbury University is home to the Perdue School of Business. 

Meanwhile, Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, while a subsidiary of Tyson donated $1 million. On top of the announcement about line speeds, the industry has already notched another win: in April the USDA withdrew from a Biden-era Salmonella prevention program that processors had lobbied heavily against.

Meanwhile, OSHA is severely underfunded. In 2023, there were just 1,875 inspectors for all of the country’s 11.5 million workplaces; it would take them almost 200 years to inspect each. It’s hobbled in other ways that make policing poultry plants particularly difficult. In 2000, OSHA issued an ergonomics standard to protect workers from musculoskeletal injuries, but Congress rescinded it months later and blocked the agency from issuing the same rule in the future. Without the standard, the agency has to rely on poultry workers coming forward so it can build a case based on its general duty clause—which requires employers to provide a safe workplace free from hazards—which will have to meet a much higher bar.

USDA inspectors are inside these poultry plants every day. About a dozen spots in the Salisbury Perdue plant’s parking lot are reserved for them. But their mandate is food safety, not worker safety, and Michaels and Berkowitz said the agency had rebuffed their overtures in the past to have inspectors consider workers. 

The USDA “certainly [has] the ability to do this,” said David Michaels, the former OSHA official, but it would take Congress or the White House forcing it to broaden its mandate.

Magaly Licolli, a co-founder of Venceremos, a human rights advocacy group for poultry workers, has mostly given up on filing OSHA complaints. Instead, she’s taking inspiration from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, agricultural workers in Florida who convinced restaurants and grocery stores that buy their products to pressure farm owners to implement better workplace practices. She’s working with poultry plant employees in Arkansas to create a code of conduct that she plans to take to chicken buyers. Such a campaign will require getting consumers educated and engaged about “the human cost of that chicken,” she said, so they can push the buyers, from grocery stores to fast food chains, to take action.

But Michaels believes the public is less concerned about the difficult conditions workers endure to bring them cheap chicken than about the well-being of the chickens themselves. “If consumers demanded that these poultry companies treat workers well, not just their chickens, we would prevent a tremendous amount of pain and suffering,” he said.

When I visited Alex Paul in his home in mid-September, his smile and fashionable clothes were gone. He was skeletal, sunken into a couch, an IV bag hanging from his stomach.

Instead of sending him to a hospital after his fall, the plant sent him to an occupational therapist, where he was told to do exercises that he said made the pain worse. He eventually had surgery on his back, but over the summer he came down with an intense fever that sent him to the hospital. It turned out to be a pancreatic abscess. Paul asked the doctors if it was work-related but they couldn’t say, although pancreatitis, which causes abscesses, can stem from traumatic injuries or surgery. Dorival is pursuing a medical investigation to see if his accident and a lack of proper medical treatment caused it. He was in so much pain in September that sometimes he couldn’t climb the stairs in his house. “It’s really difficult for me to move around,” he said in Creole through an interpreter.

Paul had been getting workers compensation payments initially, but those ended last May. The plant kept pressuring him to come back to work. Afraid to lose the job, he tried in early July, but after three days he could no longer stand. He said they asked him again to return to work at the end of September; he wanted to go in just so they could see his condition. “The company doesn’t need me,” he said. “They need my work.”

“I don’t think you’re going to see me again,” he said to me. “Se lavi,” he said in Creole. That’s life.

The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future helped facilitate reporting for this piece.