Arkansas Pecking Order

By RICHARD BEHAR SPRINGDALE

IN TOUTING HIS ECOnomic credentials, Bill Clinton boasts that more than 200,000 jobs were created in Arkansas since he first became Governor in 1978. The claim is rightful -- his state is currently No. 1 in job creation. Yet there is a downside to the Arkansas success story. As many as 20% of those new jobs were generated by just one industry: poultry. Big Chicken has become to Arkansas what microchips are to Silicon Valley and autos to Detroit. Arkansas produces 1 billion broilers a year, more than any other state. Poultry is by far the state's dominant employer, providing support for 1 of every 12 citizens.

But in nurturing this growing industry, Clinton has shown the trade-offs he would be willing to make -- and tolerate -- in the quest to create jobs and encourage business. Thousands of chicken growers and processing-plant workers suffer from low wages and harsh, even crippling working conditions. Their cheap labor and high productivity has enabled poultry's Pashas to enjoy explosive success in the past decade while keeping chicken prices low for consumers. In Arkansas, poultry workers are probably no worse off than their brethren in Mississippi or Georgia, but their numbers are greater, and they are increasingly angry that their share of the chicken boom is so meager. "I think the poultry industry has been a blessing and a curse for Arkansas," says Carol Tucker Foreman, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and the sister of Arkansas' Lieutenant Governor. "In some places, the workers are treated very badly."

Clinton has made job creation a higher priority than the immediate quality $ of those jobs. The result is that he has been reluctant to challenge the state's economic giants on behalf of those who sit at the bottom of the pecking order. Clinton has sought few improvements in the industry's working conditions, while at the same time showering the largest chicken producer, Tyson Foods, with millions of dollars in tax breaks for expanding its plants and work force. It is a cozy relationship in a state where the powerful often rub elbows. Tyson has provided free airplane rides for the Governor and his wife, for both personal and business trips, and the company's chairman, Don Tyson, is a major contributor to Clinton's presidential bid. Tyson's general counsel, James Blair, is married to one of Clinton's top campaign advisers, Diane Blair. The two couples often vacation together.

Clinton's defenders dismiss the allegations that he is cavalier about the working conditions. "Bill is not insensitive to the hard, tough nature of those jobs," argues his spokeswoman, Betsey Wright. "I recall at least one brutal public piece of warfare where Bill made a comment about these near- minimum-wage jobs, and the entire poultry industry came down on our heads very hard."

The industry has grown tremendously because Americans have been forsaking pork and beef over the years and consuming far more chicken: 66 lbs. per capita last year, up from 28 lbs. in 1960. Health is not the only reason -- consumers also know a bargain. At an average 88 cents per lb. for a whole broiler, chicken costs 50% less than it did three decades ago, after adjustment for inflation. One reason for the low prices is that fowl production is concentrated in poor rural areas of the South.

No company better exemplifies the industry's successes and failures than Tyson, based in Springdale, in the heart of Arkansas' poultry belt. Tyson, whose 1992 sales of $4 billion are nearly twice the size of the Arkansas state budget, produces 20% of America's chickens. Last month, after sharing a dinner of grilled chicken with a TIME reporter, vice chairman John Tyson -- son of the chairman -- boasted that the growth in the company's earnings per share from 1980 to 1990 ranked No. 1 among FORTUNE 500 companies. Total profits have increased fourteenfold in the past decade.

Very little of that bonanza has filtered down to chicken-plant workers. The industry's average pay is $7 an hour, vs. $10 for the food-processing industry as a whole. In Arkansas the typical wage is a bit lower than in such states as Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina. Production per worker in the poultry industry nearly tripled from 1960 to 1987, yet pay rose only half as fast as chicken prices did during that time, according to a 1989 report by the Institute for Southern Studies. Most chicken laborers are unskilled and barely educated; their only alternative in many cases would be a minimum-wage job.

One mid-size processor, Mark Simmons of Simmons Industries, says he is keenly aware of the problem. At Simmons' two plants in Arkansas, the starting wage is $5.70 an hour, while the average pay is just 50 cents more. "I realize it's not enough for a single mother," says Simmons sadly. "But most people have two jobs. This may be their town job, and they also work on a farm." Simmons says that with continued technological innovation, "we hope to use fewer workers and pay them more."

Frances Ketcher, 63, doesn't have much longer to wait. She has been employed at a Simmons plant for 24 years, a remarkably long time in an industry where employee turnover often reaches 100% a year. She earns only $6.10 an hour. "To work here you need a weak mind and a strong back," she says with a smile. The pace at the Simmons plant is so frantic that chickens sometimes spill onto the floor, where they lie for as long as an hour. "Sometimes there's a real pile-up," says Grover Myers, a federal inspector at the plant since 1959. "I just wish the plant supervisors had their own initiative, without inspectors telling them to pick up the chicken and rewash it."

Most poultry plants are cramped and noisy, with floors constantly wet and slippery. Some rooms are cold, others hot and malodorous enough to bring a visitor close to vomiting. Employees are sometimes splashed with feces, blood, guts or chicken fat. Even more odious is the industry's rising injury rate. Labor Department statistics show that 27% of poultry workers suffer on-the-job injuries and illnesses each year, making fowl processing one of the nation's most hazardous jobs. In terms of repetitive-motion disorders, poultry work is exceeded only by meat packing. In a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1 in 3 chicken workers was found to have a work-related muscular-skeletal disorder resulting in moderate or extreme pain. Many employees become permanently disabled.

Some companies, including Tyson, are responding to the crisis by implementing job rotation, better knife designs, and posture-improvement programs. But health experts say the industry will not see big results until the work pace is slowed down. The assembly line typically moves carcasses past the workers at a rate of 70 to 90 birds a minute. Many employees perform repetitive motions on every other bird at the rate of one every two seconds. "We are pushing workers to produce more and more, and failing to design their work stations properly," says David Cochran, a University of Nebraska ergonomist who has studied poultry plants. "It's just not right to put someone in a job where you know there's a high probability they will become disabled."

The industry relies on a constant stream of fresh labor; many employees quit within a year because they have become injured or disgruntled. At the Tyson plant in Dardanelle (pop. 3,722), workers complain that the lines have sped up, real salaries have declined, older injured workers are sometimes forced to quit and 30% to 50% of the employees have some form of repetitive-motion disorder. (The company's official estimate for its overall work force is 2% to 3%.) Workers also dispute Tyson's reported injury rate, which is one-fourth the industry average and is based on lost workdays. Labor officials claim that plant supervisors pressure injured workers to quit or show up for "light duty." Tyson fiercely disputes those allegations.

Workers portray a grim picture of their daily routine. "If you asked everyone who hated this place to step outside, you'd clear the entire plant, and maybe half the supervisors too," says Travis Coe, 21, a floor-jack operator with a pregnant wife and a second job as a construction worker. Chris Turic, a colleague, says his fingers sometimes lock up so badly, he has to pry them open. Turic, 30, suffers from a repetitive-motion illness that he says is the result of his job as a "backup killer" at Dardanelle for the past nine years. Specifically, Turic uses a long knife to whack the necks of any chickens that are missed by a circular saw. By day's end he is often covered with feces and blood. For this he gets about $7.10 an hour, more than most workers -- because, as John Tyson explains, "the messier the job, the more the pay." The last time Turic complained about his fingers, he says, he was given even heavier work scrubbing down rooms. "You get punished for getting hurt," he says. "Supervisors who treat people well don't last."

For the 6,000 farmers who raise rather than process the fowl, the main problem is not safety but low pay. Says Anita Scates, a single parent and grower for Arkansas-based Hudson Foods: "You worry about making your monthly bills. You smell like a chicken all the time. It's a full-time job and a rough life. I bring in around $45,000 and, after expenses, earn about $12,000 to $15,000."

The traditional agreement that binds the growers to the processors makes the farmers virtual serfs on their own land. The processors supply the farmers with chicks, feed, medicine and transportation of the chickens. The growers must provide chicken houses, labor and equipment, and pay all other expenses. The deal brings farmers about 4 cents per lb. of chicken, which is less than they received 30 years ago, after adjustment for inflation.

Growers say that when they complain about the arrangement, the processors sometimes retaliate by terminating the relationship. Other growers say they have been penalized by processors who underweigh their chickens or give them ailing chicks to raise. In a trial in Arkansas last June, a former manager for Cargill, a major turkey producer, testified that "if you've got ((a grower)) you've just had it with, you might give him the bad ((birds)) just so he'd quit." Despite the testimony, the grower was unable to prove his case.

So far, neither growers nor plant workers had found much success in organizing or in finding powerful advocates. "The workers didn't feel they could organize and maintain their jobs, because many plants have an economic stranglehold on their towns," says Kelly Mitchell-Clark, an official of the Women's Project, a nonprofit group in Little Rock that conducted a study of the state's poultry belt. "Sometimes it's a big deal for these people just to be able to get off the processing line to go to the bathroom."

Fewer than 10% of Arkansas poultry plants are unionized. The main impediment to organizers is high job turnover, which means that most employees are new and feel fortunate just to have a job. When asked about the absence of unions in all but two of his 23 Arkansas plants, John Tyson says this is the desire of the workers. "In 1984 we bought a plant in Dardanelle," he points out. "Last year 80% of the workers signed a petition to get rid of the union. They just didn't want it." But in July a judge overturned the decertification of the Dardanelle union because the employee who led the drive was an "agent" of Tyson who "threatened" new hires into signing the petition. In a stinging 44-page decision, Judge Wallace Nations concluded that the company's main witnesses were "not credible." Tyson has appealed the decision. "The union is the only hope these people have of achieving any dignity and a decent wage," argues Bill Burns, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers. "Just try to raise a family on $6.25 an hour. It's impossible."

Growers too have been frustrated after decades of attempting to organize. But a year ago, 35 growers from nine states met in a hunting lodge in the Arkansas Ozarks and launched a national group. Since then, hundreds of farmers in Arkansas alone have signed on, many of them paying dues anonymously. "Yes, I'm afraid," says grower Don Allen, a leader of the Arkansas movement. "And that's a terrible thing to say in the land of the free and the home of the brave." Last February a Tyson memo to managers urged them to spread the word that the organizing was being led by "shady characters" such as socialists and animal-rights activists.

None of this agitation seems to trouble poultry's millionaires, who include James ("Red") Hudson, the affable 68-year-old chairman of Hudson Foods (1991 sales: $765 million). During an interview, Hudson invited a reporter into his Mercedes for a tour of his country club. "The poultry industry is the greatest example of the free-enterprise system on earth. We should be applauded for our economics," he declared, noting the low price of chicken. Reminded that his state's per capita income is $14,600, he exclaimed, "I'd be shocked if anyone in our company was making that little." But Hudson's own plant in the town of Hope -- where Bill Clinton grew up -- starts laborers at $5.90 an hour, or less than $12,300 a year.

During the campaign, the Republicans have accused Clinton of being biased against business and too partial toward government regulations. But if he wins the presidency on a pledge to create jobs across America the way he did in Arkansas, his real challenge may be to make sure that those jobs are better, safer and more lucrative than the ones he nurtured as a Governor.