| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 7, 2000 |
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TYSON FOODS ON TOP TEN LIST Seven worker deaths and a massive worker lawsuit has earned Tyson Foods a place on the list of the nation's ten worst corporations of 1999. In its special year-end edition, Corporate Crime Reporter cited the Arkansas-based poultry giant as the only poultry company with worker fatalities in 1999. In addition to dangerous working conditions, Tyson was also cited for cheating workers out of their pay. Thousands of workers joined together in a lawsuit against Tyson seeking back wages for unpaid work time. (Perdue Farms, another leading poultry company, is also facing a worker lawsuit for failure to compensate workers for all their work time and for failure to properly credit worker retirement accounts.) Earlier in the year, UFCW members waged the first successful strike against Tyson. It shut down operations at its Corydon, Indiana plant for over 2 months while workers picketed to protect living wages and decent working conditions. In July, 1999, James Dame, Jr. and Mike Hallum fell into an open pit of decomposing chicken parts and suffocated from the methane gas at Tyson's Robards, Kentucky facility. On October 8, 1999, Charles Shepherd died from head trauma after a fall in the chiller room in the Berlin, Maryland Tyson plant. There were two fatalities at the company's Harrisonburg, Virginia poultry plant and two Tyson chicken catchers were killed during the summer, both from electrocution in chicken houses. Following state safety investigations, Tyson was fined by $139,500 by Kentucky OSHA for confined space violations in the Robards plant and $22,000 by Maryland OSHA for violation of the lock-out standard at the Berlin facility. While the safety problems, strike and worker lawsuit may have contributed to a 22 percent drop in stock value, it did not prevent Tyson from increasing year-end executive bonuses by 78 percent this year, as reported in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The conditions at Tyson are symptomatic of the entire poultry industry, where in the past ten years, profits have skyrocketed by over 300 percent while real wages for poultry workers have fallen. The U.S. Department of Labor found that over 60 percent of poultry plants violated basic wage and hour laws. Tyson is the largest poultry processing company in the U.S. with 50,000 employees at 59 plants. It dominates the market with 27 percent of sales nationwide. The UFCW represents 1.4 million workers in the retail food, meat packing, poultry, food processing, footwear, garment and textile, healthcare, and chemical industries. -30- |
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