Modern Day Sharecropping
Tyson has aggressively consolidated its power in the chicken industry—and workers and farmers are hurting.
blog.ucsusa.org
As detailed in our report,
Tyson Spells Trouble for Arkansas, we analyzed US Department of Agriculture data and sales data from the Arkansas poultry processing industry and found that:
- Tyson operates like a monopoly in the Arkansas chicken industry. It accounts for more than two-thirds of the state’s poultry processing. And in some parts of the state, Tyson really has the market cornered: In seven counties, Tyson was the single company controlling all broiler chicken production.
- Tyson has been aggressive in buying up companies and assets in its quest for poultry industry domination. Since 1990, it has made 47 acquisitions (far more than its leading competitors) up and down the supply chain, acquiring not just processing plants but also chicken breeders and even the mills that make chicken feed.
- Tyson’s increasing stranglehold on the industry since 1990 has coincided with a loss of half of the poultry farms in Arkansas. That has happened even as the number of chickens raised in the state every year has risen 1,000%.
- Finally, the concentration and scale of Tyson’s operation has also led to a concentration of chicken manure and other waste around the farms and plants clustered in Northwest Arkansas. That affects the people who live in the region. And the two most affected counties are counties with a large share of Arkansas’s Latino and Native American population, already disadvantaged communities who now also have to live with the air and water pollution that Tyson has created.
That level of market share gives Tyson a lot of power, and we’ve seen examples of how the company uses it. Early in the pandemic,
Tyson flexed its political muscles to keep plants across the country open even as its workers were contracting and dying from COVID-19 in alarming and tragic numbers. But long before the pandemic, farmers, workers, and commercial chicken buyers have been accusing Tyson of
price fixing and
wage suppression schemes that go back years. Some of these allegations have gone to court and
ended in settlements, while others are
still pending.
Blocking independent farmers by controlling the market. Just like Armor did back in the Slaughterhouse days of Chicago/Stockyards.
Eastern Shore of Maryland is a perfect example of modern day sharecropping/indentured servitude.
perfectunion.us
www.arkrepublic.com
