Tyson Foods:  Overview

"Tyson is now a kind of Wal-Mart of meat, seeking to control every step of production from farm to supermarket." (Business Week, 9/20/04)

Tyson dominates the poultry and meat industries controlling 27 percent of sales across the U.S.  One out of every four pounds of chicken, beef and pork consumed in the U.S. is a Tyson product. 
 
It is the largest poultry processing company in the U.S. with 50,000 employees at 59 plants.  Tyson is also the world’s largest supplier of premium beef and pork, as well as a diversified producer of hundreds of consumer-ready food products. The beef and pork operations depend upon independent livestock producers to supply their plants. The company buys millions of cattle and hogs each year to supply 10 beef plants and six pork plants.  About one of every three steaks and one of every five pork chops sold in the U.S. come from product produced at a fresh meats plant. Tyson's slogan "Tyson. It's what your family deserves.®" is part of their "comprehensive, integrated communications program focused on Tyson's commitment to families and communities." 

• Blood, Sweat and Fear, a recent report by Human Rights Watch, condemned Tyson for violating the basic human rights of its workers by allowing unsafe working conditions at many of its production facilities. Find the report at: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/usa0105
  
  
• Tyson Foods forced thousands of workers into the cold and onto picket lines at the company’s plant in Brooks, Alberta, for three weeks in the late fall of 2005 after waiting more than a year for their first contract.  Workers were asking for basic human rights and safety protection on the job, but were only been met with violence and racism on the picket line.  Click here for background info
  
•  Tyson forced workers at its Jefferson, Wis. plant to strike from February, 2003, to January, 2004, after the company demanded huge wage cuts and catastrophic cuts to workers' health insurance and retirement plans.   The strike ended when workers accepted a sub-standard agreement and Tyson has continued to take its hard bargaining stance to workers in the U.S. and Canada.
  
  
• Tyson is fiscally sound, with little or no corporate debt and soaring stock price, which increased 25% in 2004.
  
  
• In 2002, Tyson Foods earned a place as one of Sierra Club's "Ten Least Wanted." In 1999, they made the Corporate Crime Reporter's list of the nation's ten worst corporations.
  
  
• Tyson Foods is facing a national wage and hour lawsuit that charges the poultry giant with violating federal overtime provisions. The suit charges that Tyson fails to pay workers for all the time spent working on the line and time spent putting on and taking off required safety equipment such as gloves, hairnets, aprons, etc. The company could face fines of nearly $600 million in back pay to its employees.
  
  
• Tyson's demands to eliminate paid breaks for workers, reduce overtime pay rates, and gut contract protections forced UFCW members to strike against the company. The strike shut down operations at its Corydon, Indiana plant for over 2 months while workers picketed and won living wages and decent working conditions.
  
  
• Serious health and safety violations are rising at Tyson poultry plants - 46 serious violations in 1998, up from 17 in 1997. These violations indicate "substantial probability of death or serious injury."
  
  
• In 1999, seven Tyson Foods employees were killed on the job. No other poultry company reported fatalities this year?only Tyson. 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• In February, 2000, Tyson's Henderson, Kentucky complex was slapped by Kentucky OSHA with a record-breaking $269,000 in fines from citations for 73 serious health and safety violations.