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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 14KB | 282 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 52

Arkansas Pecking Order


No single industry has brought more jobs to Bill Clinton's Arkansas
than poultry. But most of those jobs are not worth crowing about.

By RICHARD BEHAR/SPRINGDALE


    In touting his economic credentials, Bill Clinton boasts
that more than 200,000 jobs were created in Arkansas since he
first became Governor in 1978. The claim is rightful -- his
state is currently No. 1 in job creation. Yet there is a
downside to the Arkansas success story. As many as 20% of those
new jobs were generated by just one industry: poultry. Big
Chicken has become to Arkansas what microchips are to Silicon
Valley and autos to Detroit. Arkansas produces 1 billion
broilers a year, more than any other state. Poultry is by far
the state's dominant employer, providing support for 1 of every
12 citizens.

    But in nurturing this growing industry, Clinton has shown
the trade-offs he would be willing to make -- and tolerate --
in the quest to create jobs and encourage business. Thousands
of chicken growers and processing-plant workers suffer from low
wages and harsh, even crippling working conditions. Their cheap
labor and high productivity has enabled poultry's Pashas to
enjoy explosive success in the past decade while keeping
chicken prices low for consumers. In Arkansas, poultry workers
are probably no worse off than their brethren in Mississippi or
Georgia, but their numbers are greater, and they are
increasingly angry that their share of the chicken boom is so
meager. "I think the poultry industry has been a blessing and
a curse for Arkansas," says Carol Tucker Foreman, a former U.S.
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and the sister of Arkansas'
Lieutenant Governor. "In some places, the workers are treated
very badly."

    Clinton has made job creation a higher priority than the
immediate quality of those jobs. The result is that he has been
reluctant to challenge the state's economic giants on behalf of
those who sit at the bottom of the pecking order. Clinton has
sought few improvements in the industry's working conditions,
while at the same time showering the largest chicken producer,
Tyson Foods, with millions of dollars in tax breaks for
expanding its plants and work force. It is a cozy relationship
in a state where the powerful often rub elbows. Tyson has
provided free airplane rides for the Governor and his wife, for
both personal and business trips, and the company's chairman,
Don Tyson, is a major contributor to Clinton's presidential bid.
Tyson's general counsel, James Blair, is married to one of
Clinton's top campaign advisers, Diane Blair. The two couples
often vacation together.

    Clinton's defenders dismiss the allegations that he is
cavalier about the working conditions. "Bill is not in sensitive
to the hard, tough nature of those jobs," argues his
spokeswoman, Betsey Wright. "I recall at least one brutal public
piece of warfare where Bill made a comment about these
near-minimum-wage jobs, and the entire poultry industry came
down on our heads very hard."

    The industry has grown tremendously because Americans have
been forsaking pork and beef over the years and consuming far
more chicken: 66 lbs. per capita last year, up from 28 lbs. in
1960. Health is not the only reason -- consumers also know a
bargain. At an average 88 cents per lb. for a whole broiler,
chicken costs 50% less than it did three decades ago, after
adjustment for inflation. One reason for the low prices is that
fowl production is concentrated in poor rural areas of the
South.

    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.

    Some companies, including Tyson, are responding to the
crisis by implementing job rotation, better knife designs, and
posture-improvement programs. But health experts say the
industry will not see big results until the work pace is slowed
down. The assembly line typically moves carcasses past the
workers at a rate of 70 to 90 birds a minute. Many employees
perform repetitive motions on every other bird at the rate of
one every two seconds. "We are pushing workers to produce more
and more, and failing to design their work stations properly,"
says David Cochran, a University of Nebraska ergonomist who has
studied poultry plants. "It's just not right to put someone in
a job where you know there's a high probability they will become
disabled."

    The industry relies on a constant stream of fresh labor;
many employees quit within a year because they have become
injured or disgruntled. At the Tyson plant in Dardanelle (pop.
3,722), workers complain that the lines have sped up, real
salaries have declined, older injured workers are sometimes
forced to quit and 30% to 50% of the employees have some form
of repetitive-motion disorder. (The company's official estimate
for its overall work force is 2% to 3%.) Worker