Tyson Foods was founded in Springdale, Arkansas, in 1935 and is still headquartered there. It is the second largest global meatpacking company; it employs 141,000 people and operates 241 plants in the US, including facilities in twenty Arkansas communities. Tyson supplies grocery and restaurant chains like Arkansas-based Walmart, McDonald’s, and Burger King,in addition to countless schools and prisons. In 2022, the company reported $53 billion in sales and produced one out of every five pounds of chicken, beef, and pork sold in America. And Tyson has been innovative and aggressive in creating programs to employ vulnerable populations.
In March of 2020, when Covid hit, journalist Alice Driver, an Arkansas native, had the pretty amazing foresight to apply for funding from the National Geographic Society to write an article about the impact of the virus on the meatpacking industry. Hard to imagine that story being just an article, and so it rightfully became a book: Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking On American’s Largest Meatpacking Company, which was released last month. An explosive exposé of Tyson’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce, Alice’s book is a pretty astonishing read, and we’re so glad she wrote it – and that we got to talk with her about it.
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