Thank the turkey handler

Opinion: November 23, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By David L. OSTENDORF

McClatchy-Tribune

Before you carve into your Thanksgiving turkey, please pause to reflect on the workers who brought the holiday feast to your table.

After 21 years of grueling, hard labor at the same Midwest turkey processing plant, one worker is today earning $12.45 an hour.

He handles as many as 30 turkeys a minute as they speed along the processing line. Every shift, he makes 20,000 cutting motions.

He and thousands of other poultry workers — mostly immigrants, refugees and workers of color — feed the nation this Thanksgiving — and every day of the year.

Latino and black

Two-thirds of the meatpacking and poultry-processing workforce in the United States is Latino and black.

Thousands of Somalis who fled their war-torn African homeland help put 45 million turkeys on Thanksgiving tables.

In the fields and orchards, Latinos comprise 77 percent of the labor force that adds vegetables and fruits to the holiday spread.

Got milk? Mostly immigrant workers tend the dairy farms.

Workers up and down the food chain deserve better pay and benefits — and safer conditions.

Fortunately, there is a new effort under way to secure these gains. It’s called the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and it is finding common ground despite differences of race, culture, language and religion. Other union and community-based initiatives across the country are also focusing on this issue. The aim is to build a just food system that benefits workers and consumers alike.

Such a food system would make the Thanksgiving meal easier to digest.

David L. Ostendorf is executive director of the Chicago-based Center for New Community. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.