Biden takes on Big Chicken
Oligopolies control the slaughter of meat, pork, and poultry, and it's time to carve them up.
In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said, “You’ve got four basic meatpacking facilities. That’s it. You play with them, or you don’t get to play at all.” He was talking not about facilities per se but companies. Four meatpackers process fully 85 percent of all U.S. cattle that are raised to be eaten (as opposed to cows that are raised to be milked). As recently as 1977 these four processed only 25 percent. Biden didn’t identify the four companies. They are JBS, Tyson, the privately-held Cargill, and Marfrig. Concentration in meatpacking almost certainly explains why the price of meat is up 14 percent since December 2020.
In my latest New Republic piece, I expressed disappointment that the Biden administration has walked up to saying the meatpacking oligopoly needs to be busted up without actually saying so. But I took some encouragement today from a report by Patrick Thomas and Brent Kendall in today’s Wall Street Journal that the Justice Department is investigating whether poultry companies have illegally shared information about employment practices to hold down workers’ wages. Pilgrim’s Pride and Perdue Farms have acknowledged that they have been notified that they’re under investigation. Tyson’s Foods and Sanderson’s Farms declined comment, which probably means they’ve been notified, too.
The poultry industry is cartoonishly abusive of its workers. Since 1986, market share for the four biggest poultry producers has risen from 35 percent to 51 percent. One consequence is that assembly-line speeds have accelerated to dangerous and inhuman levels. In testimony before Congress, Debbie Berkowitz, then worker safety and health program director for the National Employment Law Project, said that a typical poultry worker handles dozens of birds per minute. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the Agriculture Department approved waivers left and right to the existing limit on line speeds and then proposed increasing it to 175 birds per minute. Biden withdrew the regulation, but line speeds at chicken processing plants still mimic the assembly-line scene from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times.
The Washington Monthly has been all over Big Chicken (yes, I know the phrase inspires giggles, but it’s serious) for more than a decade, and lately we’ve also seen exposés in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Here’s a handy Monthly roundup from last summer.
But don’t read that to the exclusion of my New Republic piece, which you’ll find here.
Note what the Biden administration did to the proposed merger of the #2 and 3 insurance brokers in the world last year. Both Irish/Brit companies, btw. (Aon and Willis)
Merger was stopped, to the benefit of commercial insurance customers around the world.
Also benefiting were the roughly 80,000 employees of these two entities.