On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by UFCW Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.” Read more in The New Yorker. Illustration by Cleon Peterson
RSS Feed