by Eyal Press
Eventually, I did receive a statement from Sanderson Farms about its workplace policies, a two-page press release that had originally been issued in response to a report published by Oxfam America. Titled “No Relief,” the Oxfam report focused on the denial of bathroom breaks to workers in poultry slaughterhouses, a problem it portrayed as pervasive. Although Sanderson Farms had declined to address these allegations when initially contacted by Oxfam’s researchers, once the report appeared—and received some press coverage—it wasted no time refuting its validity. “The Company does not deny any person the use of restroom breaks,” asserted the press release I’d been sent. “Sanderson Farms strictly follows Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards stating that restroom facilities must be available to employees upon need.”
“Sanderson Farms’ most valuable assets are our employees,” the press release went on, “and we treat them with dignity, respect and the utmost appreciation for their dedicated work.”
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At one point, Flor Martinez was given an opportunity to see what would happen if workers on the disassembly line actually were treated with dignity and respect. It came when she was assigned to serve as a floor worker at the plant in Bryan. The job was a hybrid position, she told me, combining line work with some supervisory duties—duties that Flor tried to dispense with compassion. If a worker on the line looked exhausted, she would replace her so that she could rest. Instead of shouting, she smiled and offered encouragement.
The approach went over well with Flor’s coworkers, who responded by breaking the record for the number of birds processed in a seven-hour shift on her third day on the job, she told me with pride. It did not go over as well with her superiors, who berated her for being too lenient. One time, a supervisor told her to give each worker one pair of gloves and, if anyone asked for another pair, to say there were no more. “But we got a full box in the office,” Flor objected. “These are people—they need the supplies.” The supervisor was adamant. “Flor, please—just do what I say,” he demanded.
Watching the supervisors browbeat the workers, Flor would have flashbacks to her childhood, when she’d stood by helplessly as her grandfather intimidated her grandmother. The job was particularly demeaning to women, she felt. It was women who risked getting bladder infections when denied bathroom breaks. It was women who were subjected to sexual harassment. (“Move it, move it like you did last night!” supervisors sometimes shouted at female workers on the lines.) Addressing such harassment was among the goals of the workshop at Our Lady of Guadalupe Hall, which opened with a presentation delivered by two attorneys from Austin. The lawyers explained what qualified as sexual harassment and how employees could contest it, as had been happening with growing frequency in the media and entertainment industries, where women inspired by the #MeToo movement had begun to expose the powerful men who had abused or assaulted them. To sit in on the workshop in Bryan, which took place in the fall of 2018, about a year after the sexual predations of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein were first exposed, touching off a cascade of similar revelations, was to appreciate how quickly the #MeToo movement’s impact had spread. But the workshop also underscored the barriers that the movement faced. It was hard enough for Hollywood actresses and female news anchors with access to lawyers to file complaints, given the retaliation and public shaming that could ensue. It was immeasurably harder for Latino immigrants in an industry where workers feared being subjected to retaliation for voicing any complaints. And retaliation from employers was not the only problem. After the attorneys from Austin spoke, a discussion unfolded, during which a worker from North Carolina told the story of a woman at a poultry plant who complained to management about a supervisor who had repeatedly harassed her. When the woman’s husband found out, he was livid—not at the supervisor, but at her. The gender dynamics on the disassembly lines all too often mirrored the gender dynamics in workers’ homes and families, the worker said, leaving female workers with few safe places to turn.
When Flor turned to her husband, Manuel, to voice her frustration about the harsh treatment she was expected to dispense as a floor worker, he told her that she needed to stop feeling so much and think more like a supervisor. To think like a supervisor meant to care only about the bonuses you’d get for processing more chickens, Flor concluded. When Manuel came home at the end of the year with his bonus, he would show her the check, expecting her to be happy. Flor did appreciate the money, which enabled them to cover their expenses and, eventually, to move out of the trailer home in Bryan, where they’d lived for many years, into a two-story house in neighboring College Station. But over time, she began to feel bad about the bonus that Manuel brought home—and to see the check as dirty money.
“I’d say to him, why did you move the speed of the lines? Why are you killing the people—you’re killing us!” she recalled. “And I wouldn’t say Sanderson Farms is killing us. I would say you are killing me. Why are you doing this?
“He had the power; he had the power to go up there,” she said.
By “up there,” Flor meant the meetings where supervisors conferred with senior managers. There was no excuse not to speak up for the line workers at these meetings, she felt. Yet as Flor acknowledged, the real power at these meetings did not belong to the supervisors. It belonged to the managers who set the production quotas that determined how fast the lines ran—managers who addressed the supervisors in a tone that was equally belittling, Manuel would tell her. The supervisors were merely doing the dirty work for high-ranking corporate executives, in other words, while people like Joe Sanderson reaped the benefits.*
“MATTER OUT OF PLACE”
Flor and the other workers I spoke to were convinced that the workers on the kill floors could be mistreated because management saw them as docile immigrants who would never dare to stand up for themselves. “That’s why they do it, because they think we can’t defend ourselves because we don’t speak English well,” said Libia Rojo. It was not easy to defend yourself when you had few other options and felt socially invisible, several workers told me. Yet the truth is that the workers were not invisible. They were highly conspicuous, an imagined “other” inveighed against frequently in Brazos County—a county that, like the rest of Texas, both relied on “shadow people” and vilified them. In 2017, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed SB 4, a law that banned municipalities in Texas from serving as “sanctuary cities” for undocumented immigrants and required law enforcement to honor ICE detention requests. On my way to interview one of the workers at Sanderson Farms, I tuned in to a local radio show where the subject of immigration was discussed. The host of the program was delivering a harangue about how the Latino immigrants inundating Texas “hated America” and threatened its heritage and values. The host did not say the immigrants were dirty, but he might as well have, casting them as intruders who could not be absorbed into the body politic without corroding and polluting it.
All the workers I interviewed told me they had heard more and more such talk during Donald Trump’s presidency. It was something new and ominous, they said, fueling hatred and violence.* Yet in Texas, it was also something familiar and old, recalling an earlier era when aspersions were cast on Mexicans even as they were relied on to do difficult, unpleasant jobs. As the historian David Montejano documents in his book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, in the 1920s and 1930s commercial farmers throughout Texas hired migrant workers from Mexico to toil in the fields. The migrants were appreciated for their work ethic and for keeping wages down. (“Without the Mexican, the laboring class of white people … would demand their own wages and without doing half the labor the Mexican does,” one grower remarked.) As neighbors and fellow citizens, they were appreciated far less. Most of the towns in rural Texas were strictly segregated, as were most schools. As Montejano notes, a recurrent theme in popular sentiment was that separation was necessary because Mexicans were “dirty,” a term that connoted not just lack of hygiene bu
t social untouchability. Among Anglos, “the Mexican was inferior, untouchable, detestable,” a perception reinforced by the grubby jobs that migrant laborers performed, which came to be seen as “Mexican work.” Mexicans “had to be taught and shown that they were dirty and that this was a permanent condition. They could not become clean.”
Classifying Mexicans as dirty helped neutralize a perceived threat to the “social order,” Montejano contends, ensuring that migrant workers would know their place even as they were depended on. As Montejano acknowledges, his analysis owed a debt to an influential work of cultural theory, the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Published in 1966, Douglas’s book defined dirt as “matter out of place,” something that came to be seen as repellent not because of its inherent foulness but because its existence could not be reconciled with the patterns and assumptions undergirding the existing social order. “Dirt offends against order,” Douglas observed. For this reason, it was dangerous. Yet classifying something as dirty could also be affirming, because doing so implicitly marked off what was not dirty and needed to be kept clean. “Where there is dirt there is system,” Douglas posited. “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.” The inappropriate element could be inanimate: filth, excrement. It could also be what Douglas called a “polluting person,” a member of the community who has “crossed some line which should not have been crossed” and with whom others strained to avoid contact, not least to shore up their own standing as pure.
Whether the Mexican migrant workers in Montejano’s study earned this designation because of what they did or because of who they were is unclear. In this respect, they were hardly unique. In India, a similar fate had long befallen dalits, or “untouchables,” impoverished outcasts who were forced to perform defiling tasks like cleaning toilets and forbidden to have physical or social contact with upper-caste Indians. In Europe, no formal castes existed, but some ostracized groups still came to be seen as “polluting persons,” among them Jews who served as moneylenders, an activity that was denounced as evil even as it became an increasingly ubiquitous and necessary feature of Western commercial life. There were plenty of Christian moneylenders in medieval Europe, but it was Jews who came to be regarded as the profession’s most ruthless and cunning practitioners, greedy usurers accused of lending money to Christians at exorbitant rates. Church leaders condemned this as a mortal sin, even as many were quietly relieved to see the practice of lending money at interest (which the Bible forbade) outsourced to members of a rival faith whose salvation was not their responsibility. As Pope Nicholas V put it, it was preferable that “this people [Jews] should perpetrate usury than that Christians should engage in it with one another.”
The repercussions for Jews were not entirely negative. As Simon Schama notes, moneylenders were the “potentates of England’s Jews,” sometimes living in lavish manors replete with elaborate fountains and hunting grounds. For the Jewish community as a whole, it was another matter. In 1518, a group of guilds in Regensburg, Germany, submitted a grievance charging that they and their fellow Christians had been “sucked dry, injured in their body and goods” by usurious Jews. One year later, more than five hundred Jews in Regensburg were summarily expelled. Arguably more damaging than any specific act of retaliation was the image of the “dirty Jew” that the association with moneylending instilled in the popular imagination, a stereotype that long outlasted the prohibition on charging interest. The machinations of “Jewish usurers” were described in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a canonical text in the literature of antisemitism. Several decades after the Protocols appeared, the official platform of the Nazi Party called for “the breaking of interest slavery,” a practice that German antisemites, like their peers in other countries, associated with Jewish financiers. It scarcely mattered that as far back as the Middle Ages, Christians had frequently demanded higher interest rates on loans than Jews, much less that the earnings of Jewish moneylenders in places like England often wound up in the royal treasury, either through taxes imposed on the Jewish community or through confiscation upon death. “When a Jewish lender died, a third (at least) of their property reverted to the Crown, so that the hard bargains the Jews might have driven became a source of instant profit for the ever-voracious treasury,” observes Schama. “The Jews were obliged to do the dirty work and get the odium while the Crown got the profit.”
* * *
How would the “kill floors” in slaughterhouses continue to operate if fewer immigrants were around to do the dirty work? In August 2019, a revealing answer surfaced in Morton, Mississippi, after the Trump administration conducted a series of immigration raids on Mississippi’s poultry plants. More than six hundred immigrants were arrested in the raids, which, in Morton, opened up jobs at a local chicken plant for members of Trump’s political base, the white working class. Yet as The New York Times revealed in a story about the aftermath of the raids, few white Mississippians ended up applying for these jobs. Most of the applicants were African American, drawn by the fact that the plant paid $11.23 an hour, which was several dollars more than fast-food or retail jobs in the area paid. The extra income was appreciated. The accompanying moral complications were not. Many of the newly hired Black workers expressed misgivings about the raids, which they saw as racially motivated. “The way they came at the Hispanic race, they act like they’re killing somebody,” one worker told the Times.
In Mississippi as elsewhere, Black and brown workers were hired to do a job that many white people had evidently concluded was beneath them. In April 2020, a study found that whites made up just 19 percent of the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers. People of color—Latino immigrants, African Americans, Asian immigrants from places like Vietnam and Myanmar—made up almost 80 percent. Nearly half of these workers lived in low-income households.
One of the low-income households I visited while in Bryan was Flor Martinez’s residence, where she invited me for dinner one night. We sat in the kitchen of her two-story home, eating sopa de nopal (a Mexican stew flavored with cactus and tomatillo), while listening to the chirping of her pet parakeets, which lived in a white cage in an adjoining parlor. Over the course of the evening, Flor introduced me to her son and youngest daughter, both of whom still lived at home. She did not introduce me to Manuel, who no longer lived there. As Flor proceeded to explain, they’d gotten divorced, which meant she now had to make ends meet on her own, a challenge compounded by the fact that she no longer worked at Sanderson Farms. For the second—and, she assured me, final—time, she’d quit. She was now working at a Taco Bell in College Station, earning nine dollars an hour.
Flor did not hide the stress this had caused, mentioning a letter she’d just received from Wells Fargo, which informed her that if she didn’t come up with eleven thousand dollars, she would soon be evicted from her house. Yet she did not express regret about her decision to stop working at Sanderson Farms. She simply had to stop, she said. When I asked her why, she reached for her iPhone, scrolled through some videos, and turned the device toward me. On the screen was a video she’d recorded of her right hand, which was curled into a ball and which she was massaging, methodically kneading the joints and knuckles with the fingers of her other hand. Every morning, she told me, she would go through this routine to try to alleviate the pain, which made it difficult for her to extend her fingers outward and turned simple tasks like getting dressed into forbidding challenges. “You see my finger—you see how it gets stuck,” she said, pointing to the middle finger of her balled-up hand, which she kept trying to unfurl in the video, only to have it droop back down toward her palm, as though the tendon were a rubber band that had snapped. Sometimes, it took twenty minutes to coax her fingers open, she said. The indignity of the ordeal was compounded by the obligation she felt to document it. She’d made the video, she told me, after a nurse at the slaughterhouse told her she needed “proof” o
f her condition. Eventually, a doctor at the plant performed some tests and told her that the source of the pain was either lupus or arthritis, congenital problems that were not work related and therefore not the company’s responsibility. “Your case is closed; it’s been denied,” a nurse informed her. Flor later went to see a doctor not connected to the plant who disputed this diagnosis, informing her that she did not have lupus or arthritis.
By this point, Flor said, “I was so angry. I hated the supervisor. I hated human resources. I hated everybody.” Feeling hatred was not entirely new to Flor: as a teenager, she used to fantasize about killing the stepfather who tried to sexually abuse her. But the depth of her bitterness was new. The poverty of her upbringing, the drunken tirades of her grandfather, the experience of running away from an abusive home and making her way as an undocumented immigrant: none of this had managed to darken her sunny disposition. No matter how bleak things seemed, she had always believed that happiness was within her reach and that she would find a way to experience it. Working at Sanderson Farms shook this belief. As she felt it coming undone, she decided that keeping her job wasn’t worth it—that, to preserve her self-respect, she had to leave.
* * *
Some time later, I learned that Flor had gotten a new job, at the Centro de Derechos Laborales, where she had volunteered on occasion and where the same qualities that had struck the owner of the Chick-fil-A years earlier—her diligence, her cheerful smile—drew the notice of her peers. The center was part of a coalition of labor and faith-based organizations that sought to educate and empower immigrants to fight back against degrading workplace conditions, both through workshops like the one I’d attended on sexual harassment and through direct actions like the demonstration that had followed it. At the demonstration, a group of protesters stood on a patch of grass by the entrance to Sanderson Farms, directly in front of the gate and private property sign, waving banners (EL BAÑO POR FAVOR) that decried the denial of bathroom breaks to workers on the lines. The protest received some coverage in the local news, which proved sufficiently embarrassing to Sanderson Farms that afterward the restrictions on bathroom breaks were eased. Some abusive supervisors were even fired.