In September the U.S. Department of Labor issued its first citation against two meatpacking plants for failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus. At those plants alone, almost 1,500 workers have been infected and at least 12 have died, but the fines totaled just $29,000—an amount criticized as far too lenient by experts, former government officials, and worker advocates alike. This meager penalty underscores that, during the first six months of the pandemic, in no community have the foundational inequities in U.S. society become more visible than among poultry and meatpacking workers. They are the most impacted group of workers in the United States, but under the current federal health and safety enforcement regime, perhaps the least protected.

One of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the country, the slaughter and processing of the meat we eat relies heavily upon rural workers—disproportionately immigrants, refugees, and people of color—who have few better options. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), which has tracked the spread of the coronavirus in this industry since April, as of September 22 at least 42,708 people in 496 meat and poultry plants have been infected with COVID-19, and at least 203 have died.

These figures and the lives they represent highlight how race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class status intersect to shape individual and collective life chances. They also illustrate the ways in which population health outcomes are shaped by labor policies and practices.

As the media work to highlight the impact of COVID-19 among meat and poultry workers, reporters have sought reliable data to deepen our understanding of this industry. Their first and most basic question: Who are the people who labor in this node of America’s food chain? What is the racial and ethnic composition of the workforce? Where are they from? Which languages do they speak? What do we know about their immigration status?

Some of the existing ethnographic data—including from our own research—provides vital insight into the rich textures of workers’ lives on the line and at home, but unfortunately often can’t answer these questions at the macro level. Here, we set out to explore how existing demographic data—most of which comes from government surveys—might help provide a broader scaffolding for answering these questions on a national scale and by state.

While data from the U.S. Census Bureau continues to be the best source of demographic data available, some of what we found was not consistent with what we have learned in ethnographic research about the profiles of meat and poultry workers. This blog post explains why that might be the case and urges caution, particularly when relying on state-level breakdowns of those data.

National data

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which is based on data reported directly by employers to unemployment insurance agencies, provides the best available estimate of the total number of workers nationwide in animal slaughtering and processing by state. It reports the five-year average, as of 2018, as 498,848 people (230,733 in poultry and 268,115 in red meat). The QCEW estimates shown in Table 1 list the top five meatpacking and poultry states, by number of workers, and serve to corroborate what is widely known—that the poultry industry has flourished in the states of the Deep South, while meatpacking is concentrated principally in the Midwest and Plains states.1

The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects the names and locations of animal slaughter and processing plants by state and zip code. Overlaying this data with available public health data about viral outbreaks has allowed FERN and other investigative outlets to map out the strong correlation between this industry and rural COVID-19 hot spots.

But missing from these important analyses are data on the social demographics of the people who work in these dangerous industrial sectors. What is known about the age, race, gender, country of origin, language, and citizenship status of the poultry and meatpacking workers in these areas? Reliable estimates of these demographic characteristics could aid public health efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 in areas where these plants are located.

The best existing data source to answer these questions is the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey of the U.S. population administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, with a sample size of approximately 3.5 million addresses. The ACS data allow us to tabulate the characteristics of meat- and poultry-processing workers at the national level.2

Nationally, the ACS data confirm some of what the best ethnographic information has shown to be true: As Table 2 indicates, the meat- and poultry-processing workforce is predominantly male and overwhelmingly made up of people of color, with a large percentage of immigrants and refugees. Among these, a majority come from Latin America, with smaller numbers from Asian and African countries. The vast majority of immigrant workers are noncitizens; however, these data do not indicate the percentage of the workforce that is undocumented.

Comparing the meat and poultry industries

When we compare the makeup of the workforce in the top five meatpacking states to that of the top five poultry states, we see some significant differences that correspond with our ethnographic and historical knowledge of the distinctions between these industries. We do this in Table 3, where the data show that a greater share of meatpacking workers are male compared with poultry workers, and a much higher percentage are foreign-born—double the share of poultry workers. The immigrant workers in both groups hail mostly from Latin America. The immigrant workers in meatpacking are somewhat more likely to be naturalized citizens than their counterparts in poultry. Meanwhile, the poultry workforce includes more women than the meatpacking workforce, along with a much higher percentage of Black workers.

These distinctions in the present moment build upon a past in which the historically more urban meatpacking industry has relied heavily on immigrant men of diverse backgrounds for over a century, a trend that continued as the industry shifted production to more rural areas. Meanwhile, in much of the rural South, poultry processing operated predominantly on the backs of local African American women and men (and poor white women) until the industry’s more recent turn to immigrant labor.

Notably, as Table 3 also shows, meatpacking workers in the top five meatpacking states earn nearly a third more than poultry workers in the top five poultry processing states. They are also less than half as likely to live in a household that subsists below the poverty line. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the vibrant history of unionization in hog and beef processing, a tradition the poultry industry sought to skirt by establishing itself in the rural, “right-to-work,” Jim Crow South.3

State-level estimates: A note of caution

In addition to looking at the ACS data nationally and comparatively across the top poultry- and meat-processing states, we sought a more granular approach. Reliable information about the characteristics of workers by state and county would allow a deeper understanding of who may be suffering disproportionately in COVID-19 animal-processing hot spots such as Waterloo, Iowa, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, or Carthage, Mississippi. This information could help state health departments and local agencies better mobilize and serve these communities.

Unfortunately, when we conduct our analysis by state, we notice sharp divergences between ACS data and what our detailed ethnographic research has found. To illustrate, Table 4 shows the results from Mississippi, a state Angela Stuesse knows well as a result of her nearly two decades of research with poultry workers there.

Mississippi is home to a higher percentage of African American workers than most other meat and poultry states, and the ACS data reflect this historical fact. However, the number of workers from Latin America there has increased dramatically since the 1990s, thanks to the industry’s efforts to actively recruit and hire new immigrants as part of a strategy to keep worker organizing at bay.

The state’s newcomers hail principally from Mexico and Guatemala, but also—because of recruitment efforts in Miami, Florida—from countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Given this recent history, in today’s Mississippi, the census categories of Latinx, foreign-born, and noncitizen are nearly synonymous among animal-processing workers.

Stuesse’s ethnographic research with poultry workers, labor organizers, and industry executives indicates that in some Mississippi plants, immigrants now outnumber U.S.-born workers. In others they are the predominant labor force on the night shift, or in particular departments, such as on the debone lines. And more than a quarter century after the industry began recruiting them in earnest, Latinx Mississippians are tightly woven into the social fabric of poultry communities.

But Table 4 shows a different story, one that diverges from Stuesse’s lived reality as a qualitative researcher embedded in Mississippi’s poultry communities over a period of six years. It reports that only 9.5% of the state’s animal slaughter and processing workers are Latinx, and only 8.4% are foreign-born. These data simply do not jibe with what we know, ethnographically, to be true—that a much higher percentage of new Latinx immigrants work in Mississippi’s meat and poultry plants than is accounted for in these figures. For these reasons, our confidence in the available ACS estimates of workers’ characteristics at the state level is low.

We suspect these surprising estimates of immigrant workers shown in Table 4 from the ACS Mississippi data are primarily due to undercounting of the undocumented population, despite the Pew Research Center’s estimate that approximately 90% of the unauthorized population is captured in Census Bureau surveys.4 The size of the five-year sample of animal slaughtering and processing workers in Mississippi is 540, which is large enough to provide a relatively precise estimate of the share of these workers who are foreign-born. However, among those 540, only 34 reported being born outside the United States.

It is well known that the Census Bureau faces significant challenges when trying to sample undocumented communities, not least of which is that the precarity of living and working without authorization makes participation potentially risky. Unauthorized immigrants were already fearful of interfacing with governmental authorities and agencies, but widespread fears—stoked by the Trump administration—that the decennial census could be weaponized against them have likely intensified this reticence. Reluctance to interact with government agencies may be even stronger in states such as Mississippi where the political environment is often hostile toward immigrants, who make up a small minority of the population.

Conclusions and caveats

The ACS comprises the most complete national data set on the demographics of workers in animal slaughter and processing. It is vital that this data be as accurate as possible. We present and summarize these data—both nationally and comparatively by top poultry and meatpacking states—because we see value in making the best extant data more readily available to policymakers, scholars, the media, and the broader public.

However, as our discussion of Mississippi’s workforce reveals, we have serious concerns about the granular validity of the ACS estimates. Specifically, ethnographic research suggests that the ACS likely significantly undercounts people in undocumented poultry and meatpacking communities, suppressing the numbers of Latinx and other foreign-born and noncitizen workers represented in the data. We therefore qualify our presentation of the extant demographic data on workers in this industry.

Although we firmly acknowledge the importance and value of the ACS and the decennial census, we must urge the public and policymakers to use caution when using ACS data to support claims about the makeup of the poultry and meatpacking workforce. Due to what we suspect is a substantial undercounting of foreign-born—and especially undocumented—workers, we are concerned that local, state, and federal lawmakers may rely on data that offer an incomplete picture of the industry, at best.

We call for a concerted effort to collect more and better data on workers in this essential industry, similar to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), a targeted data collection effort focused on the nation’s non-H-2A crop production workers. We also urge the policymakers who dictate the terms of national census data collection—and the agencies carrying out these directives—to reflect on the shortcomings of the data and make sincere and well-resourced efforts to better reach undocumented and immigrant communities in future census counts, and in ways that encourage their safe participation.

America’s food chain workers have long lived with the economic, social, and health effects of neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia. These intersecting ills have set the table for the COVID-19 pandemic to dramatically and disproportionately infect meat and poultry workers across the country and around the world. We hope our contribution can help provide a clearer picture of our nation’s animal slaughter and processing workers so that their stories may be more accurately told and policies enacted to better support them, advancing possibilities for worker justice across the United States.

Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and author of the award-winning book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.

Nathan T. Dollar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of migration, labor, and population health. He also serves as chair of the governing board for the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program.

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Notes

1. Contrary to how it has been used in recent media coverage of COVID-19 hot spots in beef, hog, and poultry plants, the term “meatpacking” traditionally includes the slaughter, processing, packaging, and distribution of cattle, hogs, sheep, and other livestock, but generally excludes poultry.

2. Because we are interested in information on a small population we use the 2018 five-year (2014–2018) ACS data, accessed via the Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database . ACS is the only existing data source with a large enough sample size to provide relatively reliable estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of workers in the animal slaughtering and processing industry. Unfortunately, the NAICS codes in the ACS data do not allow us to distinguish between workers in poultry versus those in meat processing.

3. It is worth noting that the meatpacking industry learned from poultry processors and by the 1980s had also sought to decrease union density and labor costs, restructuring and moving into the rural Corn Belt and High Plains states. While unionization dropped in hog and beef processing as a result, organizing is again on the rise, and the importance of union protections in the COVID-19 moment cannot be understated.

4. These Pew Center estimates of the undercount refer primarily to Mexican immigrants and may be substantially larger for subgroups.