I shouldn't have read this as I was eating. Anyways, this is another example of why I switched to a vegetarian diet. I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that there are people handling food products while defecating in an adult diaper. If they can't get bathroom breaks, that means they have to wear that dirty diaper until they are allowed to leave the line.

I don't know what interest Oxfam would have in pushing false allegations about the poultry industry, so this should be taken very seriously by these companies. They need to look at managers' and team leaders' incentives around time limits, etc. If a team leader is being motivated by a strict quota, if they are enough of a sociopath it could lead to terrible working conditions to those immediately below them.

I'm not sure that being a vegetarian protects you from the effects of poor working conditions in American factories. As long as there is widespread exploitation of undocumented or otherwise vulnerable workers, I think conditions like these will continue to be fairly common.

Lots of reasons to be a vegetarian, or just eat a lot less meat. This is one from a moral standpoint.

From a heath standpoint that might not be the case: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_1148.html

"Conditions observed at multiple such firms in the state of Puebla included human feces and toilet paper found in growing fields and around facilities;"

Edit: remember folks, wash your veggies!

I share your vegetarian beliefs but such labor practices can easy reach beyond poultry, beyond agriculture and into mass production of many different markets.

Poultry (also fish) is one of the sketchier markets of produce industry, but to me this illustrates more widespread view of what we consider acceptable treatment of low-skill labor workers.

Maybe this is an indication of how out of touch I am, but I don't see why there is a push to lower the cost of chicken meat.

It is already super cheap. You can get a whole rotisserie chicken at Safeway for $5 or less. That's a whole damn chicken, and the labor of someone cooking it for you!

Unless you're eating a ridiculous amount of chicken at every meal, which you probably shouldn't, the cost of chicken could be higher if it means better working conditions and humane treatment of the animal.

>Unless you're eating a ridiculous amount of chicken at every meal, which you probably shouldn't, the cost of chicken could be higher if it means better working conditions and humane treatment of the animal.

This is a privileged viewpoint.

When dealing with food policy you need to view the food system from the perspective of those impoverished.

Cheap food is a big deal, and often it's the only thing keeping millions of people in this country from starving. As such, keeping food cheap is an cornerstone of governmental policy because hunger=revolution.

Yes and the reason many of those people are poor are low paying jobs.

Keeping food cheap, or rather, as cheap as possible makes good food a luxury item. Redistribution of wealth would be much more effective.

Funny how animal welfare activists, environmentalists opposed to factory farming, and minimum wage increase labor reformers should all be working together on this. I would've never thought of that coalition.

Redistribution of wealth faces the problem of fleeing capital from your country.

Remember that the global elite (people who control the vast majority of the capital) is highly mobile and from their perspective there's no difference between being robbed and having their wealth "redistributed".

It should also be taken into account that even if the wealth was redistributed, each poor person would only receive a minute amount, for example let's say 1 share of Google, Amazon and a few more shares.

They would almost immediately have to sell this wealth to transform it into income for current needs.

In this case, redistribution would be raising wages. It doesn't matter if "the global elite" is mobile. They're not going to move their factory farming operations outside of the US, and if they do, you tariff them when they ship the product back in.

Cheap food isn't necessarily bad food.

Luxury food isn't necessarily good food.

No matter the political climate, or income inequality. People need to eat. The idea of cheap food is to completely remove it from the spectrum of politics.

Your full dinner should never be subject to political whims. It should be a constant.

That always blows my mind.

It's an animal's whole damned life. It was born, raised to a large-enough size to eat, housed, fed, slaughtered, plucked, shipped, cooked, and served to the customer, plus profits at every step of the way. For $5.

you just summarized why i stopped eating meat in one line. thank you for this. I will quote it in the future.

There seem to be a lot of factors, besides competition, pushing poultry prices down. Most notably, numerous government subsidies: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-shapiro/the-chicken-indus...

Have you found any commodity where there isn't a push to lower the cost? That's pretty much what capitalism does.

Given that capitalism is a balancing act, I wish there is a drive towards incorporating externalities like employee happiness, safety, environmental friendliness, etc., on to the products by introducing some sort of ratings and making sure that all the products include that.

Whole Foods provides ratings on its meat[1] -- but instead of $5 for an entire chicken from Safeway, it's more like $7/lb for boneless/skinless breasts at Whole Foods. It turns out that social responsibility is expensive.

[1] - https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/mission-values/animal-welfa...

Collage tuition or CEO pay? CD's are older, but used to fit.

None of those 3 examples are commodities.

I think that's arguable but how about: hardwood, crab meat, wolf pelts. Basically, anything with a finite supply and limited ability to mass produce.

It's not at all arguable, by definition each instance of a commodity is equivalent. Each CEO's value is not equivalent, nor is the music on any CD or each degree program available at every university.

Every cow is different that does not prevent them from being treated as a commodity. "In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Often the item is fungible. Economic commodities comprise goods and services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

Staff ex:Nurses are generally treated as a commodity in many economic models.

Music/Books/Movies can also be treated like this. Sure, as a consumer I might pick A over B, but movie theaters don't individually price movies based on quality.

They can be treated as a commodity as they are graded on value. How would a commodity market work if each instance of the commodity had a different value? Both live steers, and their resulting leather, beef and other byproducts are sold based upon weight and/or grade.

For example, 'a cow' is not a commodity... but a grade 3 live steer is.

Movie theatres do not price films based upon quality, but the distributors certainly do (I managed a movie theatre). You cannot commoditise a movie ticket, each theatre provides different facility and presentation quality.

Sure, cattle auctions sell the animal for an individual price based on health, weight, body size etc. At the extreme end animals can sell for 150,000+ if they seem to have good DNA for breeding. http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/bovine_beauty... Even if there just being butchered people make bids based on expected yields. This gets back to meat grades etc.

However, animals are also sold in bulk without individual prices.

So you make a Chicken processing company. Pay your workers $20 an hour and plenty of breaks. You sell Chickens for $4.

Another company pays workers $4 an hour and makes them wear diapers. Sells Chickens for $3.75.

Barring an outside force (regulation, feel good marketing campaign, ethics badge), which one gets 100% of the market, and which one gets 0%?

Sometimes, free market sucks.

It's the winner-take-all paradox, which was mentioned in an article here on HN earlier today.

Given only a small incremental competitive advantage, a company is able to capture the overwhelming majority of the market, essentially becoming a monopoly.

Hence the sad world we live in with ever decreasing wages ;(

Possibly rotisserie chicken is a bad example, at least there is an urban legend that the smell of roasted chicken makes people buy more at grocery shops. That means it makes them money even if they sell it for $1 or any other price - if the urban legend is true it is subsidized by increased sales of everything else you would buy there.

It's a loss leader -- something sold at a loss for the sake of attracting customers to a store. Maybe they go to the store with the specific intention to buy a chicken, or they choose the store over another because they can get a chicken along with other stuff that they need. Either way, they end up spending more money on other (profitable) things.

well the effect I heard is that even people who don't buy the chicken (ever, they just aren't chicken buyers) buy more of everything else due to the smell. So the store doesn't need to sell any at all, it just needs to be there. Though come to think of it this actually wouldn't affect price (because that smell effect would hold true if it's too expensive, right?) so perhaps it's a combination of both your effect (which affects chicken buyers) and the one I heard about (which affects non-buyers).

That doesn't really make much sense in a massive warehouse store like Costco. You're not going to smell the chicken unless you're very close to it.

Its also a somewhat common practice to cook raw food right before its self life is up to give it another shot at being sold. So by going through the expense of cooking it, they prevent the loss of having to throw it out. Not all stores do this though.

There are over a billion people who would have to spend 100% of their income for four days or more to afford that $5 chicken.

But they don't buy the $5 chicken, they buy their local chicken equivalent at their market rates. Maybe their market rates aren't as a screaming deal as $5 is for an american, but they also have a much better chance to raise their own chickens without an H.O.A. shutting them down.

Most of them simply don't have chicken at all. There are roughly 800 million people who don't have adequate access to food.

It doesn't seem like it if you like in a developed country, but for over 10% of the people in the world, the price of food actually is of extreme importance.

May be because it's exported to countries where not everybody can afford it at ever this prices?

Those are also (usually) loss leaders for the super markets. Not that that makes this acceptable, of course.

Those are generally subsidized, with the sides having vastly higher markups.

Why is there a push? Cause Machiavellian capitalism is rampant.

What a fucked up world we are creating. Developed countries seem to be going backwards.

It seems most companies are hell bent on lowering wages and conditions to the lowest possible denominator across the world.

That's the natural order of unregulated labor-based capitalism.

It's the natural order of regulated capitalism, the regulations just enforce a floor. The incentive to get as low as possible is still there- companies will push edge cases that aren't regulated until someone notices and builds a floor under that, too.

I should say, it's the natural order of regulated capitalism in the absence of strong unions. If you have unions they can push back against crappy working conditions on their own, with only nominal government backing (ie laws that encourage and legitimize unions).

This is the natural order of human nature. But it turns out that when you let people profit off of the productive capital they own, they end up investing a significant portion of their income into creating new capital.

This process of profit motivated investment leads to an increase in goods/services being generated per capita, and consequently, less need for manual labour, more leisure time, and a higher standard of living, for the masses:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

>Almost unnoticed, the world has reduced poverty, increased incomes, and improved health more than at any time in history.

^ improvements in the standard of living is the natural order of the world and even more so when there is a free market in place, as historical cross-country comparisons show us.

These attempts at making edgy anti-capitalism comments, which essentially imply that we should impose authoritarian prohibitions, that abridge the right to private property and engagement in voluntary market transaction, are embarrassing.

I think this is going too far in taking the criticism of an edge failure of capitalism as an attempt for wholesale elimination of capitalism.

Oxfam press release: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/poultry-industry-routinel...

Oxfam report (PDF): https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/No_Relief.pd...

I used to work in food factories while at college, it was good money (over double the minimum wage), but this is over 15 years ago..

I remember one line manager having a go at us, and blaming us for holding up the production line, he wanted us to be back on the line within the hour. When it takes 15mins to get around the factory floor and change.

Since then the work force has switched to Eastern Europeans (many Portuguese were coming over to work when I left), it really depends on who are the poorest counties in the EU. Now the pay IS the minimum wage (it would lower if it wasn't a legal requirement).

It's a shame we have this race to the bottom, with so many willing to compete. It does feel like some sectors are moving back to the Victorian era, where a persons quality of means very little (even animals have these standards). All some employers care about is that staff don't get maimed, only because of the expensive legal settlements and risk of shutting down factories.

This story was charging up the front page and then all the sudden it's near the bottom of page two. What's up with that?

Maybe someone influential down voted it? I'm not sure how the algorithm works, I think most people don't, but I use sites like "hckrnews" to just sort by time, so you never have that issue.

If you are interested in reading more about the food industry, I highly recommend Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation

Oh good, people defecating themselves while handling the poultry that ends up on our dinner tables.

But I guess it's worth it to maximize those corporate agriculture profits. Maybe with all this money we're saving on chicken I can buy some antibiotics.

Another issue that was in the media recently is the increased exposure to pesticides and harmful chemicals used in agriculture. I've heard that if most people saw how their food was made they wouldn't eat it anymore.

Until people are willing to pay more for the products and services they receive, complaining about the working conditions of workers is a bit of a paradox to me.

This seems like something that should be fined heavily by the FDA. Definitely does not seem sanitary in the least.

The article doesn't say but I imagine many of these workers are pushing up against the minimum wage. If the minimum wage is above the market wage for unskilled labor, other dignities are denied to the workers. There is plenty of non-monetary compensation workers enjoy, including free coffee, generous vacation, and yes bathroom breaks. When employers are forced to pay more that the market wage in monetary terms, they compensate by removing other benefits.

Bathroom breaks are not a form of compensation any more than than breathable air is a form of compensation. They are bare necessitates of life. That kind of thinking is what leads to this kind of dystopian shit.

If the company could get away with paying their workers $1/day, the would do it and still make them wear diapers.

Unions are good at solving these kind of problems.

The solution is simple. Stop buying this crap. Know your farmer and buy your meat directly from the source.

Can't tell if sarcasm or not....

I am absolutely serious and entertained by the fact my comment was down voted.

Spend any time around agriculture and you will realize that the cheapest super market meat is raised completely unethically.

To have a clear conscious 90% of my protein comes from farms and hunters I know directly. Dairy is still the tricky one I'm trying to figure out.

I think consumers and workers will begin to demand additional evidence of not bad (hopefully, good) conditions. I want to be able to see my product from beginning to end. Every moment of the product's life, from raw materials to reception, should be captured on video and I should be able to review the video before purchase.