Down on the Factory Farm

Like slaughterhouse employees, workers on factory farms are underpaid, overworked, and hardly ever represented by unions. But they also have added problems: They are charged with managing thousands of animals who are packed into filthy warehouses, and they face serious illness and injury from the bacteria, toxic gas, and other hazards that go hand-in-hand with factory farming.

Many farm workers fall ill because they work in close contact with fecal matter and animalborne diseases. One study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that in a sample of chicken catchers, more than 40 percent tested positive for campylobacter bacteria, which can cause diarrhea, stomach cramps, and fever.⁷⁴ The American Veterinary Medical Association warns that workers on factory farms frequently suffer from hearing loss because of the constant loud noise of animals and machines on the farm.⁷⁵ Workers are also often injured when they are kicked or rammed by cows or pigs, and they may be regularly exposed to dangerous chemicals used on the farm, such as pesticides and industrial-strength cleaning agents.

Constantly inhaling dust from confined animals contributes to respiratory ailments in many factory farm workers: A 2002 study by Iowa State University and the University of Iowa Study Group found that up to 70 percent of U.S. factory farm workers suffer from acute bronchitis, and 25 percent battle chronic bronchitis.⁷⁶ One report describes the breathing hazards faced by chicken catchers this way: “Saturated with ammonia and thick with the dust of feed and feces, each breath feels like sandpaper scraping against the lungs. … Moving from one chicken house to another, the catchers barely have time to stop and eat a sandwich or even freshen up. Wherever they walk their boots kick up whirlpools of powder, and when they emerge at dusk, after 10 or 12 hours, they shimmer in the pale ash that covers them from head to foot. … It’s no wonder they are chronically ill.”⁷⁷

The fumes from manure pits pose another serious hazard to factory farm employees: Since the 1970s, at least 24 people in the Midwest have died after inhaling toxic gases from animal excrement.⁷⁸ According to an investigative report that appeared in the Dayton Daily News, “Some workers spend 70 hours a week inside confinement buildings, breathing manure fumes from hundreds and sometimes thousands of livestock.”⁷⁹ Kevin Harmon, a 32-year-old chicken catcher in Virginia, told reporters, “The ammonia rises up from the manure and it takes your breath away. I used to throw up a lot; cough a lot, too. I have diarrhea all the time.”⁸⁰

A factory pig farm in Colorado owned by Hormel Foods was recently threatened with fines of $10,000 a day because it failed to take steps to properly dispose of pig excrement and dead pigs. The buildup of excrement caused the barns to become filled with hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas that can cause death. Workers at the farm were repeatedly forced to enter the barns to drag out the corpses of pigs who had died from inhaling toxic fumes.⁸¹

People who work on farms must deal with these conditions every day. One factory farm worker, Arturo Ramirez, details his work-related injuries for a report by Salon.com on the exploitation of employees by the farmed-animal industry. Ramirez works six days a week for 12 to 16 hours a day. Like many working in factory farms and slaughterhouses, he receives minimum wage with no overtime pay. The report notes that “Ramirez, like other dairy workers, is regularly kicked by cows and is exposed to toxic gases in the manure, such as hydrogen sulfide, that may cause permanent neurological damage.”⁸² He contracted a lingering skin infection from wading through lagoons of cow feces as part of his job, and the infection has spread to his wife and children.

Echoing the sentiment of countless workers in the farmed-animal industry, Ramirez, who is an illegal immigrant, says, “I worry every day that I will break my hand or get hurt, but I never say anything for fear I’ll lose my job. No American would do this job. This is a shit job, for shit money.”⁸³ Learn more about how factory farms sicken workers and surrounding communities.

Read more about how the chicken industry abuses farmers.