Tyson Foods = Evil

Yum, yum, chock full of sexism and salmonella!

If procrastination was an art, then I would be in galleries all over the world, for my skills in this arena are unsurpassed. So whilst I was attempting to double check my tax return yesterday afternoon, I drifted off into the world of Facebook in an attempt to distract myself from the woe of HMRC’s Byzantine self-assessment form. A comment from a friend about a video of pigs being abused at a farm that supplied a company called Tyson Foods caught my eye, so I did a quick bit of Googling and what I discovered totally appalled me. The Humane Society of the United States had gone undercover at a farm in Wyoming and had documented foul, endemic abuse of animals. If you have the stomach for it, you can watch the video and see the slideshow here. In summary, the images show:

“ … workers kicking living piglets like soccer balls, swinging sick piglets in circles by their hind legs, striking mother pigs with their fists and repeatedly and forcefully kicking them as they resisted leaving their young. In one case, a mother pig with a broken back leg endured a very heavy worker sitting and bouncing on top of her hindquarters as the pig screamed in pain. The investigator also found pigs with untreated abscesses and severe rectal and uterine prolapses, mummified piglet corpses, and baby piglets who had fallen through floor slats to either hang to death or drown in manure pits.”

Pretty disgusting, right? I know this is fairly typical of the industrialised meat industry, and I wasn’t particularly shocked, but it did make me very angry. Part of being a responsible human being is to treat other living creatures with a modicum of decency, and most of us don’t, either by our direct actions or by our consumer choices. Which saddens me greatly. So I decided to post the above link directly to the Tyson Foods Facebook page, with a comment about how disgraceful it was. They replied nearly immediately with a mealy-mouthed excuse about how it wasn’t actually their farm, it just supplied Tyson Foods, blah, blah, blah*. I replied saying that wasn’t good enough; a company has a responsibility to check out the organisations that supply them, to make sure that they meet basic standards, whether those standards are related to workers’ rights, health and safety or animal welfare. They didn’t respond.

My interest in Tyson Foods was piqued and I decided to do a little more research into what this company was all about. After several hours of reading newspaper articles, lawsuit judgments, human rights files and governmental environment reports, I lay back on my bed, absolutely flabbergasted at the sheer depravity of what this company gets up to whilst in the process of selling frozen burgers to the world.

My first stop on the research trail was Wikipedia where I learned that Tyson Foods is the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, with the Brazilian multi-national, JBS, taking the top spot.  It’s also the largest meat producer in the world. It’s one of the biggest suppliers of fresh and frozen meat to American supermarkets, fast food joints and restaurants in the US. It provides meat to KFC, Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and Wal-Mart, as well as a load of other American chains that I’ve thankfully never had the misfortune to eat at. Basically, their meat is everywhere in the US. And they are trying to bring it to the rest of the world.

Then I dived into the shameful depths of Tyson Foods’ exploitative, abusive behaviour. There could be books written on it. There probably already are. Below I will give you a quick rundown of some of the lowlights of their business activities.

• In February 2011, Tyson Foods was charged with conspiracy and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for years worth of bribes paid to Mexican vets and government officials to ensure their factories passed animal welfare and health and safety inspections. Tyson Foods settled and were fined $4 million plus costs. Even though senior executives were found to be involved, not one was charged or prosecuted.
• Mind you, Tyson Foods have form on the old bribing front, as in 1997 they pleaded guilty to lavishing Mike Epsy, the US agriculture with $12,000 worth of flights, gifts and freebies whilst Epsy’s department was considering taking action on matters that might affect Tyson Foods. The company had to pay $6 million worth of fines and costs, but the plea bargain included a clause that meant Don Tyson and his son, the born again Christian (ah, the irony), John Tyson (now the current chair in 2013), immunity from prosecution.
• The animal rights abuses are too many to list here, but as well as the pigs, PETA also conducted an undercover investigation at Tyson Foods’ chicken factories in Alabama and Tennessee in 2007 where birds were tortured and urinated on.
• Quick, someone tell Tyson Foods about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement! In 2006 Tyson Foods settled two racial discrimination lawsuits for the sum of $871,000. They were charged with “maintaining a racially hostile work environment at the Ashland facility – including a racially segregated bathroom facility, racial slurs, and intimidation – and retaliating against employees who complained about the unlawful conduct”. Whites only signs were pinned to bathroom doors.
• But it’s not just African Americans they don’t like, they also aren’t too fond of women, as in 2011 they agreed to pay rejected female job applicants $2.25 million for sexual discrimination. Hmmm, so it seems like if you’re not male, pale and stale, you ain’t getting a job with this here multi-national.
• As well as their business practices making you puke, it looks like their food will too! In 2009 Consumer Reports carried out tests which showed that two thirds of chicken tested was contaminated with salmonella and campylobacter, which cause illness in humans. One of the worst offenders was, you guessed it, Tyson Foods.
• Even though they give loads of money to the Republicans (not known for love of newcomers from south of the border), Tyson Foods aren’t averse to a bit of human trafficking if it’s going to increase their bottom line. In 2009 Tyson Foods were taken to court for transporting and hiring illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They were eventually acquitted, but two former managers took plea bargains and testified for the state, and said that they were just following company policy and had been asked by managers to smuggle in around 2,000 workers. Of course, illegal workers can be paid less, have no rights under employment law and undercut local wages. But profits are up, so who cares?!
• Work for Tyson Foods if you want to get shafted! The company is virulently anti-union and has used threatening and intimidating tactics against workers who try and organise, don’t provide adequate health and safety measures for workers and don’t allow them time off sick and threaten workers with the sack if they continue to ask for better working conditions. You can read more here and more extensively in the Human Rights Watch report about the meat industry.
• The whole family can work there! In 1999 Tyson Foods was fined just shy of $60,000, the maximum amount allowed at the time, for violation of child labour laws when a 15 year old boy was killed by electrocution when he walked into one of the ventilation fans.
• Continuing Tyson Foods’ belief in family values, whilst Don Tyson was chair of the board “the company provided an estimated $3 million US in … personal benefits to Tyson, his wife, their daughters, and three close personal friends, including $8,000 for a horse, $20,000 for oriental rugs, $84,000 for lawn maintenance at the family’s homes, and $203,675 in personal housekeeping services”. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took Tyson Foods to court and the company had to pay  $1.5 million worth of fines and Don Tyson had to pay $700,000. So less than a third of the money he actually enriched himself and his family with. On top of profits, obviously.
• But at the same time that that Don Tyson was spending money that wasn’t his on oriental rugs, he was refusing to pay his workers for hours worked. They were taken to court by the US Department of Labour from 1 December 2012 all workers at Tyson Foods poultry farms would actually be compensated for all of their labour. A novel idea, I know.
• Tyson Foods respects the communities it operates in! As well as handing out a few food parcels and cheques here and there, it dumps polluted waste on its next door neighbours! Despite numerous warnings and legal injunctions about its conduct between 1996 and 2001, Tyson Foods was eventually fined $7.5 million for releasing untreated water, filled with chemicals and farming antibiotics, from its factory in Missouri into the water table.

Of course, when Tyson released its annual sales figures in November 2012, the company recorded that in the last quarter profits were up 91 %, publishing a net income figure of     $185 million.

To say that I was outraged after reading after reading through the reams of documentation that demonstrate the pure evilness of this corporation would be an understatement. So I thought the least I could do would be to annoy Tyson Foods and give them a little bit of bad publicity. I went back to their Facebook page and started posting short comments about their misconduct (in a polite way, of course, though a note of sarcasm might have crept in once or twice) backed up with links to various articles and government reports. I filled their whole page with documentary evidence of their racism, child labour violations, corporate manslaughter, abuse of workers’ rights, environmental damage. The last post I wrote was about the salmonella content of their chickens. They clearly were most bothered about this accusation, as they immediately took down the whole Facebook page. When it went back up online about 10 minutes later, they had removed all of my posts and blocked me so I could no longer even see the site. Although I can from other people’s accounts. So the official Tyson Foods Facebook page is no longer filled with a library of their various abuses, but just bland press releases about good works, charitable donations and customers asking about the thickness of their chicken slices. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a corporation that is involved in people smuggling doesn’t bat an eyelid about censoring (true) posts about its business misdemeanours.

So what now? Well, I would ask two things of you, dear reader. First of all, spam their Facebook page** into the Stone Age. I don’t mean abusive posts – what’s the point? But short, polite messages, (even if they don’t deserve it) questioning their practices, backed up by links. You can use the ones from this post. And maybe a few messages asking them why they are censoring their page. If you don’t like being accused of awful things, then don’t do them, right?  And if you really want to make me happy, then screenshot your messages (what I should have done) and send it to me, before they censor and block you! If a couple of ignorant food bloggers on their payroll, or random passing customers moaning about the quality of Tyson Foods chicken breasts catch sight of what this company is actually doing, it might cause them pause, take stock and decide not to fund such a despicable organisation. That makes it worth it doing.

Secondly, we all need to think about what we put into our mouths. I have no doubt that Tyson Foods is one of the worst offenders in agribusiness. But all of the big companies who provide cheap, factory farmed meat are participating in this type of behaviour. So think about it. Next time you stuff some frozen chicken nuggets into your mouth, bought from Tesco or Wal-Mart and their ilk, realise that by buying and eating this poisonous sludge, your money is supporting and enabling corporations to abuse animals in horrendous ways, to deny workers basic rights like a safe environment to work in, sick pay and the right to protest without fear of being sacked, to pollute the environment with chemicals and to destroy the rainforest to grow soy cattle feed, and to bribe government officials. So stop it. There are various ways to achieve this. Become a vegetarian, if you fancy it. At the very least, don’t buy meat processed by these bastard behemoths.  Don’t buy factory farmed meat or dairy generally. Buy organic meat from local farmers who don’t behave in this manner. Okay, it might be a little more expensive, but cheap crap is cheap crap for a reason, and in this case, Tyson Foods’ products are cheap because they don’t treat their staff or their animals properly and are trashing the environment. If you keep buying their goods, you are tacitly supporting these practices. And at the end of the day, the only language these corporations and their soulless executives understand is money. That gives us the power, as consumers, to hit them where it hurts. If we don’t, then basically we are saying that our desire to eat cheap, tasteless meat is more important than anything else. And that really would be depressing.

*For reasons that will become clear later on in my post, I can’t give you a direct quote of our conversation, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

** If the link doesn’t work properly, or you are not able to comment on the page, then just search for Tyson Foods on Facebook and you should be able to find it, in all its diabolical glory.