The deal brings farmers about four cents per lb. of chicken, which, after adjustment for inflation, is less than they received 30 years ago. Virtually all commercial poultry feed now contains some type of medication. Broilers begin eating medicated feed as newly hatched chicks, and some drugs have FDA clearance for use right up to the day the chickens go to slaughter. 27 Chicken manure, no matter how enormous the quantity, has generally been considered polluted runoff and as such is unregulated under the Clean Water Act. An individual employee handles every other bird on the processing line, performing a repetitive motion at a rate of one every two seconds.
Many employees become permanently disabled.
The poultry slaughtering and processing industry's average illness and injury rate is more than twice the national average for all companies. Poultry producers admit that consumers should expect poultry to contain disease-causing bacteria. Each inspector examines the outside, inside and viscera of the birds presented for inspection. In a typical plan each inspector examines one bird about every two seconds. In early February, the Clinton administration issued a final food-safety rule allowing poultry inspectors to check as few as 20 birds every shift for fecal contamination 36 in plants processing as many as 67,000 birds per shift.