The Marshallese, one of the Pacific Islander groups, are the latest wave of migrants sourced as processing workers in Northwest Arkansas in the United States, a global center of the poultry industry. Despite the current hostile immigration policies, their unique legal status (work/live in the US without VISA) makes them preferred workers for the poultry industry. Poultry processing work has historically been carried out by marginalized workers, such as women, minorities, and immigrants. The US Department of Labor classifies poultry as a “hazardous” industry, with occupational injury rates five times the national average. Safety in the workplace has been emphasized for many years due to numerous occupational hazards and a very high turn-over rate. This study employs a mixed method approach to conduct a discourse analysis of how safety and safety training are framed by the three levels of actors in the poultry processing industry: poultry corporations, processing plants, and processing workers. The findings reveal that while all three levels are concerned about safety in the workplace and emphasize the importance of safety training, the underlying meanings of safety are very different in the actors’ discourses: “food safety/safety of the product” and “productivity/profit” dominate the corporate and plant-levels discourses and “workers’ safety” and “workers’ injury, health and life” dominate the worker-level discourse. With respect to safety training, a major concern at the plant level is to meet the government guidelines regarding whether the corporation followed the government regulations. Safety provisions are used to protect the company/plant from the responsibilities for injury/illness of, compensation for, and lawsuits from workers. In contrast, workers are concerned about the actual knowledge and application of the safety training to their work, and how the trainings could be used to protect them from work-place injury and illness. Implications for policies and future studies are discussed.
The Marshallese, one of the Pacific Islander groups, are the latest wave of migrants sourced as processing workers in Northwest Arkansas in the United States, a global center of the poultry industry. Despite the current hostile immigration policies, their unique legal status (work/live in the US without VISA) makes them preferred workers for the poultry industry. Poultry processing work has historically been carried out by marginalized workers, such as women, minorities, and immigrants. The US Department of Labor classifies poultry as a “hazardous” industry, with occupational injury rates five times the national average. Safety in the workplace has been emphasized for many years due to numerous occupational hazards and a very high turn-over rate. This study employs a mixed method approach to conduct a discourse analysis of how safety and safety training are framed by the three levels of actors in the poultry processing industry: poultry corporations, processing plants, and processing workers. The findings reveal that while all three levels are concerned about safety in the workplace and emphasize the importance of safety training, the underlying meanings of safety are very different in the actors’ discourses: “food safety/safety of the product” and “productivity/profit” dominate the corporate and plant-levels discourses and “workers’ safety” and “workers’ injury, health and life” dominate the worker-level discourse. With respect to safety training, a major concern at the plant level is to meet the government guidelines regarding whether the corporation followed the government regulations. Safety provisions are used to protect the company/plant from the responsibilities for injury/illness of, compensation for, and lawsuits from workers. In contrast, workers are concerned about the actual knowledge and application of the safety training to their work, and how the trainings could be used to protect them from work-place injury and illness. Implications for policies and future studies are discussed.
The Marshallese, one of the Pacific Islander groups, are the latest wave of migrants sourced as processing workers in Northwest Arkansas in the United States, a global center of the poultry industry. Despite the current hostile immigration policies, their unique legal status (work/live in the US without VISA) makes them preferred workers for the poultry industry. Poultry processing work has historically been carried out by marginalized workers, such as women, minorities, and immigrants. The US Department of Labor classifies poultry as a “hazardous” industry, with occupational injury rates five times the national average. Safety in the workplace has been emphasized for many years due to numerous occupational hazards and a very high turn-over rate. This study employs a mixed method approach to conduct a discourse analysis of how safety and safety training are framed by the three levels of actors in the poultry processing industry: poultry corporations, processing plants, and processing workers. The findings reveal that while all three levels are concerned about safety in the workplace and emphasize the importance of safety training, the underlying meanings of safety are very different in the actors’ discourses: “food safety/safety of the product” and “productivity/profit” dominate the corporate and plant-levels discourses and “workers’ safety” and “workers’ injury, health and life” dominate the worker-level discourse. With respect to safety training, a major concern at the plant level is to meet the government guidelines regarding whether the corporation followed the government regulations. Safety provisions are used to protect the company/plant from the responsibilities for injury/illness of, compensation for, and lawsuits from workers. In contrast, workers are concerned about the actual knowledge and application of the safety training to their work, and how the trainings could be used to protect them from work-place injury and illness. Implications for policies and future studies are discussed.
Keywords
Labor
Migrants
Poultry Processing
Safety
