The Poultry Worker Project (PWP) supports Workers’ Centers in the South building power in rural areas by:
- promoting organizational development,
- helping to build relationships among groups and to identify potential areas for collaboration,
- engaging other stakeholders, such as advocacy organizations, service providers, and labor unions;
- supporting campaigns to improve local and state policies, and
- advocating for national policy that protects and expands poultry workers' rights.
The PWP is currently focused on assessing individual worker center
needs, strategizing with groups to meet those needs, and connecting
centers to more effectively organize workers across the poultry
industry, and is exploring ways to have participating groups ill
convene regionally and collaborate through on-line and other creative
forums that will help historically insular communities to confront
labor issues collectively. . The project has also focused on breaking
down barriers of race and language between workers through
English/Spanish classes, mediated discussion, and political education
classes that teach disparate groups about shared history, organizing,
and power dynamics.
MORE ON POULTRY:
In 2001, the US Department of Labor reported that 100% of
the poultry plants surveyed were out of compliance with federal wage
and hour laws. Today, poultry workers remain locked in the struggle to
acheive basic enforcement of federal wage and hour laws; and protection
from workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, health and safety
risks. Despite the predictability and ease of preventing workplace
injury, poutlry workers incur some of the highest rates of injury in
the United States industrial sector. They regularly face intense
manipulation and intimidation by employers to continue working in dirty
and unsafe conditions even with injuries.
In the Southern US,
three poultry worker's centers--MPOWER, Mississippi, Western North
Carolina Worker Center, and Northwest Arkansas Worker Justice
Center--concentrate on improving health and safety conditions for
poultry workers in their states. In the passed few years, these worker
centers have joined with the Center for Community Change, Interfaith
Worker Justice, labor unions, and other allies to develop proactive
strategies to address the problems facing workers in the poultry
industry
