In 2003, Guerrero—who, like many women in the area, never finished elementary school—was home when she answered a knock on the door. She opened it to find the sacabuzos, a woman in the community who recruited divers, standing before her. The sacabuzos said, “I came to see how you were doing. All the men are fine, but your husband is slightly sick.” The sacabuzos said nothing more. Panicked, Guerrero decided to search for her husband by the dock and found eight men putting his body into a car. “That is when I fainted. My husband was already decomposing. I felt half dead, half alive,” Guerrero said. In recent years, roughly 4,000 Miskito divers have been disabled; many are paraplegic or quadriplegic. At least 400 have died.

As divers and their families do, I had traveled to Puerto Lempira by motorboat to meet her. Although the city can be reached by tiny plane, the cost is out of reach for divers. To get there, photographer Jacky Muniello and I boarded a motorboat in Brus Laguna, on the same route as the divers take, to Puerto Lempira. The motorboat was small, a piece of tinfoil compared to the ocean we needed to cross. We sat with a dozen people spread across wooden planks. Several large tires weighed down the bow.

When we reached the open ocean, the waves were higher than the boat. The captain, his boyish face looking out to the horizon, sped into the waves. The boat went almost vertical as passengers gripped the sides. And then there was a moment at the top of the wave when we all felt a pause. We fell, and the boat smacked the water. The next wave loomed over the boat, covering us in water. Someone, probably the captain, threw a black plastic tarp over us to protect passengers and their goods from getting soaked, surrounding us in darkness as gasoline fumes became our air.

Over seven hours, passengers screamed, cried, and prayed. Muniello passed out and vomited, and I held onto her limp body. I don’t know how much time passed before she opened her eyes and squeezed my hand. The captain removed the tarp, and we found ourselves in a tangled mangrove forest. We made our way slowly through the narrow waterway to the Caratasca Lagoon. Arriving in Puerto Lempira, originally called Ahuya Yari in Miskito, near the dock, we saw men hobbling on crutches, paralyzed from the waist down, their eyes vacant. To travel in the region to access the hospital or clinic, injured divers had to take these same boats, limiting their access to medical care.

There are other limits to surviving here, mostly economic ones. There is no road to Puerto Lempira, which feels abandoned. The region is vast and wild, the territory of drug traffickers like Juan Mata-Ballesteros, an infamous Honduran trafficker who moved cocaine in this region, and who appeared in the Netflix series Narcos.

The Miskito inhabit the area from Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast to Honduras. Christopher Columbus encountered them in Honduras in 1502, and the myth is that he was so thankful to reach the land he said, “Gracias a Dios.” Gracias a Dios, known by locals as la Mosquitia, has 94,450 inhabitants, mostly Miskitos, who speak their Indigenous language, and often Spanish, English, and Garifuna.

Of those, 22 percent, like Marcelino and his wife, live in extreme poverty and cannot read or write. Honduras has invested little in the region, leaving the Miskito with poor schools, no universities, and few options for work aside from diving for lobster, sea snails, and sea cucumbers. Puerto Lempira, the site of the region’s only hospital and a hyperbaric chamber that helps divers recover from decompression sickness, has 6.5 inhabitants per square kilometer. Of the deaths in the area, 37 percent are due to diving accidents.

Guerrero, whose house was bare except for a bed and a couch, held up her phone to display a photo of Marcelino, inscribed with the message: “We can’t see you or touch you, but we miss you.” After his death, she spoke to divers who worked with her husband. They said that when he surfaced from a dive, he felt the sickness, and “he told other divers that he felt almost dead. He said that when he died, he didn’t want the boat owner to abandon his children.”

Eighty-six percent of Honduran spiny lobster still lands in the U.S. market, according to trade data from the United Nations, capturing imports between 2018 to 2022. The lobster is imported by a handful of customs brokerage firms in America. Among the largest are Concept Brokerage, Inc. of Miami, which did not respond to inquiries about which restaurants and grocers buy the lobster, and All Ports Air & Ocean Consolidators, also of Miami, whose spokesman said they did not know who buys the lobster. A man who answered the phone at a third brokerage firm that also imports the lobster, New York Customs Brokers, Inc., said their work is akin to filing taxes, and that by law they could not discuss the imports unless authorized.

Despite the continued risk of injury to lobster divers—the pursuit for Honduran lobster maimed more than 100 divers last season—early efforts at improving the fishery did not address the safety of divers. Jeffers, the senior communications director at Darden Restaurants, said in an email that a year after the company donated $125,000 in 2013 to help create the fund for Honduran spiny lobster, Darden sold Red Lobster and ceased involvement in the lobster work. Jeffers said the company had never been involved in implementing projects, but confirmed the fund had been intended to improve management of trap lobster and did not address dive-caught lobster.

In a request for proposals, NFWF instead sought to work with local buyers and other supply chain participants “to implement a traceability system that distinguishes trap-caught from dive-caught lobsters.” Potential grantees for the $220,000 in projects were asked to acquire traps best suited to protect the area’s habitat and “provide incentives to fishermen for their use.”

The Walton Family Foundation is a long-time supporter of such FIPs, arguing that they shift government’s management of fisheries “to ultimately ensure a sustainable global seafood supply for future generations.” In 2013, when it announced the Honduran fund, the organization estimated that more than 400 FIPs were needed to meet buyer demand for seafood worldwide.

“To protect fisheries and the communities who rely on them, there needs to be long-term, large-scale support. This grant was an attempt to attract other funders and corporate partners to the table,” said Teresa Ish, the senior program officer and oceans initiative lead at the Walton Family Foundation. She later told Civil Eats that the fund never attracted other corporate partners, however, and that it fizzled after Darden sold Red Lobster and no other corporations showed interest.

The Walton Family Foundation has since become involved in dozens more FIPs, which foundation spokesperson Shields said account for millions in spending. “We have found fishery improvement projects to be most effective when communities, governments, and supply chain partners all work together over time,” he said. He added that it takes years to be effective.

Katrina Nakamura, a responsible seafood advocate who runs the Sustainability Incubator and is a planner at the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, however, characterized FIPs as a market tool that allows retailers and grocers to call seafood products “sustainable” to satisfy corporate sourcing policies. “A FIP is just something the retailer needs, the supermarket needs, to sell fish,” she said.

‘Wretched, As If They Were Dead’

“The captain was evil, and he would withhold food, scold them, and insult them,” Guerrero said of her husband’s boat captain. Some captains put injured men in row boats, saving gas money but ensuring the divers would be paralyzed, dead, or their bodies decomposed by the time they reached the shore. Stories abounded of boat captains who abandoned divers in the ocean to punish them or gave them drugs to make them more apt to endure abusive conditions.

Guerrero remembered one captain who, upon seeing a paralyzed diver who had worked for him, yelled, “I wish you had died!” Boat captains often resisted pressure from families to provide money to injured divers, but had to live with the constant reminder of their actions when they saw the paralyzed divers.

Guerrero recommended we visit the Puerto Lempira hospital to understand the situation better. It was painted bright yellow, and a concrete entry walkway led to a small blue and white rehabilitation room littered with used exercise equipment. A dozen partially paralyzed divers worked on different exercises in the afternoon heat.

A diver paralyzed from the waist down gripped two rails, moving forward as his legs hung limp. Porfirio Valeriano Carrington, 32, had experienced partial paralysis in his legs after a diving accident. During lobster season, he spent six to seven hours per day below the water, saying, “I had no watch, nothing to mark the air levels in the tank, no wetsuit.” He lived on a boat with 47 other divers.

When diving, he said, “You don’t know where you are going or where you are,” adding, “That is how I got sick. I thought I was at 115 feet, but I was at 137. The pressure got to me. The company doesn’t provide food for me or anything. The day after I got sick, another guy died. He was very young. And the next day, another died.” The doctor told Carrington that if he dove again, he would die. But he had no other way to support himself, so like many other injured divers, he would return to the sea.

Dr. Henzel Roberto Pérez, the deputy director of information management at the hospital, sat at a large desk, sweating. He said, “Sadly, we don’t have a diving school here. There is no training.” The hyperbaric chamber at the hospital, which fits up to four divers simultaneously, costs $100-$300 per session. Each session lasted 20 minutes to four hours, allowing the diver’s tissue to degas the nitrogen slowly by simulating a very slow ascent. Divers often needed multiple sessions to recover. Although boat captains were supposed to cover those costs, they often didn’t.

Pérez explained that when a diver was injured, “The person who delivers the injured divers is the sacabuzos. Sometimes, they tell us the captain’s name; sometimes, they don’t.” Many divers knew their captains by their first names only and were afraid to talk about them for fear of retaliation. Pérez noted that many young divers became paralyzed and lost sexual function, and their wives left them. The hospital couldn’t afford to provide follow-up care to paralyzed divers, many of whom lived in communities that were hours away by boat. For those divers who recovered, “Even though you tell them that they can’t dive again, they always do,” said Pérez.

Today, Chris Williams, a fisheries expert at the International Transport Workers Federation, said that dive-caught lobster is still sold as trap lobster in Honduras to avoid those labor concerns. Williams spent a year and a half working on a project about lobster divers in Honduras. He said dive and trap-caught lobster is still commingled at processing facilities, and captains continue to pressure divers to avoid hooking the lobster, which marks it as dive caught.

Following the FIP effort, a 2016 report to NFWF co-authored by Smithsonian and World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) said grantees had nevertheless been optimistic about what they’d achieved. “Our science-based approach combined with sustained commitment to problem solving has catalyzed a sea change in the lobster fishery in Honduras, which has dominoed into other sectors. Honduras is now positioned to be the first country globally to have all its marine fisheries fully traceable from boat to consumer,” reads the report.

According to the report, 80 boats from eight plants had been brought into the traceability system and numerous vessels had been licensed. Grantees had also outlined a reserve network of cays around the Miskito area, where fishing would not occur to help support lobster habitat, and pushed for a rights-based fishery management system that would privatize the fisheries.

The privatization policy is controversial for its potential to deepen social inequities and empower the wealthiest actors on oceans, no matter their treatment of resources and workers. Many philanthropies and supply chain entities support it, however, in part for its ability to make it easier to predict the catch of wild fish and stabilize prices. The policy had passed Congress and was awaiting ratification by the executive office of Honduras at the time of the report. The work stalled, however, for lack of support from the Honduran government.

Grantees in the Walton/Darden-funded FIP had had other hopes. At the close of their round of projects in 2016, the NFWF report said that the project had a “strong partnership with the government of Honduras” on lobster, and that the FIP had led to sustained engagement and “truly important outcomes for the sustainability of Honduran lobster and the fisheries sector as a whole.” The Honduran government was drafting legislation to make the traceability system mandatory at the time, the report said, and a committee for the control and monitoring of fisheries had been established with better coordination between the fisheries department, navy, and port authority in Honduras.

Lobster importers in America were optimistic enough that 10 businesses signed a pledge to adopt the tracing system for Honduran lobster in the seafood supply chain as a result of the FIP, including Red Lobster and Chicken of the Sea. At LobsterPledge.com, all said they supported efforts to transition the fishery toward fishing techniques other than diving and were using their buying power to “provide an incentive to establish and maintain high standards for environmental and social welfare.”

Despite those words, dive-caught lobster remained in the supply chain, and practices to exploit divers continued. “The vast majority of the landings do still come from diving,” said Williams, with divers delivering lobster to those larger, 40-foot boats whose captains can claim to have caught it in traps. He emphasized that Honduran factories are aware of the practice.

While the supply chain continued to obscure dive catch, and divers continued dying, Guerrero had more success than many widows of divers. A widow at 46, she had limited education, no job, and six children to support. She requested financial support from her husband’s boat captain, who gave her 40,000 lempira ($2,365). She survived her husband’s death and educated her children so they would not follow in their father’s footsteps and become divers. Now, she runs into injured divers daily when she leaves her house. “How many men are walking with crutches in the street, wretched as if they were dead because they can’t do anything?” she lamented.

One Village, 60 Paralyzed Divers

Landing in Cauquira, we walked down sandy lanes through a village of tiny wooden homes, past porches with one or more wheelchairs visible. Rosendo Teodoro Calderón, 60, wearing jeans and a striped shirt, sat in a wheelchair outside his one-room house. As he spoke, an injured diver in a wheelchair could be seen in the distance. Arias, who had treated Rosendo, greeted him and began translating from Miskito to Spanish.

“I spent my entire youth in a wheelchair,” said Calderón. When he was 25 and working on a lobster boat, he experienced decompression illness. He was over 100 feet down, and something blocked his air supply. Calderón had to reach the surface quickly, and although he could have done that by dropping the lobsters in his hand, he didn’t. He said, “There was no hyperbaric chamber at that time. The captain threw me away like a piece of trash. The owner was named Kenny. The company did nothing.” Calderón’s twin brother sent him money to build a house and help him survive.

Calderón wheeled inside his home, his face half in the shadows, and said, “I don’t have hope of walking again. I’m completely paralyzed. We never receive money; we never receive help. The government should do its part to aid the injured, poor, and suffering.” His house was spare with concrete floors, a bare mattress in one corner, and a bathroom in another. As we left, Calderón said, “I felt good being a diver because it was how I supported my family.”

From his father’s experience, Arias knew the difficulties of lobster diving. He said, “The physical force required to hook the lobster, kill it, and return to the surface with damaged fins and masks and without a wetsuit is incredible. I don’t know how those men survive. They work like mules and have to go deeper and deeper to find lobsters.” Arias said, “The death of a diver here is nothing; it is normal. The state has to prevent this from happening.”

Years before, others had tried. In 2004, Guerrero, wanting to convert her pain into justice, joined the families of 41 divers who had been injured or died and filed a case against Honduras at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. They argued that the Honduran state had shown indifference to dangerous working conditions for divers and permitted labor exploitation by national and international fishing enterprises. In 2007, CEJIL, a nonprofit human-rights organization, began working with the divers and their families to present the case before the court.

Though the lawsuit was headed to court as the Walton/Darden-funded FIP got underway in Honduras, the work wasn’t structured to benefit the health and safety of the divers in the lobster industry, only the health of the lobster and buyers’ ability to avoid the divers’ labor issues.

“FIPs were first created to address environmental issues, but that has changed significantly in the last five years,” Walton Family Foundation’s Shields said in a statement to Civil Eats. “There is no evidence that [FIPs] worsen labor issues in supply chains. However, it is clear that programs designed to address environmental issues often fail to address, or even catch, labor issues.”

He said the Walton Family Foundation is now working to remove forced labor from seafood supply chains, supporting fishing communities and Indigenous fishing groups building co-management programs, and supporting research “to understand the value that small-scale fishers retain (or don’t) in global supply chains” in other regions. He added that vessel monitoring, enforcement, and a credible traceability system would address the comingling of dive-caught and trap-caught lobster in Honduras. “Companies sourcing from Honduras should be insisting on this level of transparency to ensure that they’re not buying fish that harms workers,” he said.

No such insistence continued, however. Chicken of the Sea and Red Lobster did not respond to requests for comment. The effort they joined to improve conditions in Honduras, LobsterPledge.com, became a defunct URL. Circumstances for the divers have since been left to the litigation.

“They’re doing a dangerous job without the right training, the right kit, out of desperation, basically. And their misery is used to produce a luxury product for American diners, and that is wrong,” said Williams, the fisheries expert. “The supply chain and the government should be investing in those regions and making sure that people are trained properly and that the law is followed and that they have rights at work and that they are not dying and paralyzed and then just left to rot.”

The lawsuit wound its way through the court for years. As it did, the most severely injured divers, who had paraplegia and lived in remote fishing villages like Cauquira, didn’t have the financial means to participate in the case.

Nixon González Flores, 55, a diver paralyzed from the waist down, lived in a wooden house on stilts surrounded by trees upriver from Calderón. He lay on a hammock below the house when I visited, and his youngest son sat in Flores’ wheelchair. Flores became a diver because “there is no work here in La Mosquitia. The only thing is to work in the fishing industry. Diving is dangerous and terrible work.” He was paralyzed at 37 after a 150-foot dive in which the pressure got to him. After the injury, the fishing company didn’t provide financial support. He said, “I have many problems. My body needs a lot of care. I need food, soap, and Pampers. I urinate on myself day and night.”

On the muddy banks nearby sits the house of Nixon’s brother Martín González Flores, 61. Walking up the steps to the porch of his house, I saw Martín lying in a hammock, his body stiff, his hands gnarled but shaking. His wife exited the house, reached down, and smoothed his clenched fingers. It was a gentle, practiced gesture. He spoke in a whisper, his lips barely moving, his eyes on the ceiling. At 45, after a deep dive, he experienced a brain hemorrhage. “He took me to the shore and left me,” said Martín of the boat captain. His wife had become his full-time caregiver since the accident. The couple had two children, but one had died in a diving accident.

Martín’s son-in-law, Jony Anisal, 36, sat quietly nearby, his feet dangling off the porch. He looked into the distance as he talked about working as a lobster diver. He said of the Miskito community, “We don’t have work. We have to feed our children, our wives.” He got up, went inside the house, and returned with a small, rusted hammer and a rod with a hook—the tools for catching lobster and nearby snails. In addition to his father-in-law, he knew many divers who had been disabled or died, including his own father. Anisal’s brother was a diver, and they often worked together. Their boat captain called them cowards if they got sick and offered them injections, pills, and drugs to keep them diving. “Why did you come if you don’t want to work?” Anisal remembered the captain shouting at him.

In the village where Martín and Nixon lived, Arias said there were 60 paralyzed divers “without counting the dead, the many dead.” Martín wanted to tell the lobster companies they shouldn’t have abandoned him after so many years of work. He wished he could have formed a part of the legal case with the other injured divers, but his level of paralysis and lack of resources prevented him from doing so. Arias said, “As a person, human, and Miskito, I think this lawsuit must change things.”

Men in Crisp Suits

In 2022, the Miskito divers won their case against the Honduran government. The Inter-American Court on Human Rights declared that Honduras was responsible for the lack of prevention, supervision, and oversight of working conditions for the Miskito divers, which had resulted in injury, disappearance, and death for many. It was the first case before the court in which a country was held responsible for the labor conditions of companies working in its territory. The court held Honduras accountable for providing monetary compensation to the families of the 42 divers and for creating training and regulations for diving conditions.

On the afternoon of March 30, 2023, in the heat of the day, Guerrero walked 10 minutes from her house to Pawaka Auditorium, a series of circular concrete benches around a dusty, red patch of ground. I accompanied her to the ceremony in which Honduran authorities apologized for their role in the divers’ injuries, deaths, and disappearances. Walking down the dirt road, we saw a man in a wooden wheelchair, his hands gripping a gear to move it forward. I asked him his name, looking over his wheelchair, built from wood scraps. He introduced himself as Filemón Cesión Gómez, a former lobster diver. “I was injured in 1980 at 25. Many men are dead or disappeared at sea,” he said. As we spoke, another injured diver limped by on crutches.

Government officials who flew to Puerto Lempira that morning stepped out of an air-conditioned building, the men in crisp suits and the women in thick layers of makeup and heels. Officials from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Human Rights took their place on a raised podium.

In compliance with the 2021 Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgment, Honduran officials vowed to adopt legislative measures to prevent further human rights violations, strengthen regional public health programs, create a program to inspect and supervise diving and fishing, and identify victims and prosecute those responsible. Among the officials was Ítalo Bonilla Mejía, a biologist at the General Directorate of the Merchant Marine of Honduras. I wanted him to tell me what none of the divers or their widows could: Who was still buying all the lobster?

“Darden,” he said. After selling Red Lobster, Darden still supplies 1,900 restaurants in the U.S., including Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, generating over $9.63 billion in annual sales.

Darden’s Jeffers disputed it was the buyer. “It is entirely possible that Red Lobster is the buyer and the person said Darden since Darden and Red Lobster were synonymous for so long. There are still people today who believe Darden owns Red Lobster, even though we sold the brand nearly 10 years ago.” Red Lobster, which was bought by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital in 2014, did not respond to requests for comment.

Guerrero, who had never heard of the Walton Family Foundation or Darden Restaurants, sat among rows of disabled divers, many resting quietly in their wooden wheelchairs. One of them held a sign that read, “There are more than 1,982 injured divers, not just 42,” referencing that only 42 divers formed a part of the lawsuit but many more deserved justice. Guerrero sat for hours as the sun beat down, listening to the government officials, remembering the day she married her husband when he was lean and strong, untouched by the pursuit of red gold.

The post Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster appeared first on Civil Eats.

She asked to be called María, not her real name. In Green Forest in July 2022, a billboard for Tyson advertised a “4-day workweek” and a “$2,000 signing bonus.” Tyson is the only large employer in the town of less than 3,000. As the largest meatpacking company in the U.S. and the second largest in the world, the company processes about 20 percent of all beef, pork, and chicken in the nation. It is headquartered in Arkansas, where 20 plants are the primary employer in small, rural towns like this one.

At her home, María stood facing a large portrait of her daughter in a fuchsia quinceañera dress. She thinks the pain began in 2017, but the Tyson on-site nurses involved did not provide her with paperwork to document her medical condition, she said, so she isn’t sure of the exact timeframe of events. Feet on worn carpet, the late afternoon light filtering through the curtains, María demonstrated her job at the time. She moved her hands precisely to cut an imaginary chicken wing, making an incision where the wing joins the shoulder and then cutting downwards. If the incision didn’t slice through the tendon completely, she could get hurt.

Although line speed varied, María used to cut 34 wings per minute—around 20,000 per day, and sharpening her knife after roughly every five wings. “That is what injured my hand,” she said. Her injury is not unusual. According to worker interviews and expert research, the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome is high in poultry workers. One study found it to be 2.5 times higher than in other manual labor jobs, owing to worker tasks that require repetitive hand manipulation like these: cutting, eviscerating, washing, trimming, and deboning.

Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines advise companies like Tyson to rotate employees through such jobs to avoid musculoskeletal disorders. They also urge employers to provide early medical treatment to prevent permanent physical damage. Those things didn’t happen for María. Instead, when the pain got so bad that she couldn’t function, María asked her supervisor—the same one who could grant or deny her permission to use the bathroom—if she could visit the on-site nurse.

Tyson offers on-site occupational health nurses to address worker injuries like these. The model is emblematic of others in the meatpacking and poultry industries, designed to streamline efficiency, cut costs, and reduce liability, practices that are being emulated by animal feeding operations farther down the supply chain. Crucially, the on-site nursing model also reduces hospital trips and doctor visits that would otherwise trigger mandatory reporting to OSHA.

It thus obscures federal oversight of injuries and opportunities for workers to receive paid time off, workers’ compensation, and damages when they are hurt. Media investigations have shown that Tyson has a history of retooling workers’ compensation law to benefit the company’s bottom line. Critics say the on-site nursing model does the same.

Explaining the role of nurses inside the poultry plant, María said, “They have you sit there for a bit and put a bag of ice on you for 15-20 minutes and then they tell you to go back to work.”

OSHA does not require employers to report minor injuries that receive such first aid treatment. Workplaces are required to report severe injuries, including amputations, the loss of an eye, and others that require at least a one-night stay in a hospital, directly to OSHA within 24 hours. Injuries that require a simple doctor’s visit, however, are recorded in company logs that feed into reports to OSHA annually. The agency uses those reports to plan inspections of high-hazard workplaces and direct its enforcement. The system is designed to make efficient use of the limited number of OSHA inspectors. Companies can deflect OSHA’s attention, however, if the nurses they employ give injured workers first aid treatments instead of recommending medical care.

This is one of several reasons workers in the Tyson system are not allowed to consult with doctors about an injury unless the on-site nurse recommends it, according to a nurse and several plant workers employed by Tyson. If a worker wants to consult with an outside doctor, they are required to pay for their own care.

María said she was denied requests to see a doctor despite months of visits to the nurse at the plant in Green Forest. The company, she adds, delayed her access to medical care, proper treatment, and time to heal. Other workers, a former nurse, and federal investigations of the industry say her experience is typical.

Deborah Berkowitz, now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, served as chief of staff and then senior policy advisor for OSHA from 2009-2015. She said the on-site first aid model at Tyson is common across the meatpacking and poultry industry.

“Workers in these meat plants have incredibly high rates of carpal tunnel syndrome, but the meat industry has figured out a way to hide these rates from the public,” she said. “OSHA regulations require that only work-related injuries that are serious enough to require medical treatment have to be recorded on official company injury and illness logs. What the industry perfected is a way to avoid having to record these injuries—like carpal tunnel syndrome—by essentially delaying or refusing to send workers or refer workers to see a doctor to get treatment when they are injured or ill from work.”

Tyson officials deny that the company refuses medical care to its employees. In a statement to Civil Eats, company spokesman Derek Burleson said, “The health and safety of our team members is our top priority,” and that the company is committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace. He provided a link detailing its goals.

Burleson added that Tyson requires employees to report their injuries internally, no matter how minor. “We do this because we believe in early intervention. We want workplace injuries and illnesses detected early so they can be immediately addressed,” he said.

Tyson follows a systematic approach for early reporting, intervention, evaluation and treatment of injuries and illnesses, Burleson said, a process that begins with evaluations by on-site nurses and progresses through a series of steps that includes referrals to doctors. He did not respond to María’s charge that on-site nurses did not provide her with paperwork documenting her medical condition or comment on the media investigation of Tyson’s approach to workers’ compensation.

A former nurse who was employed at several Tyson plants said that despite Tyson’s systematic protocol for worker injuries, in practice, the company’s plant managers pressured nurses to provide first aid to workers to avoid having to document them. The nurse, who Civil Eats is identifying as Nurse J, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Nurse J provided copies of an employee manual that detail steps for addressing musculoskeletal injuries at Tyson through the process described by Burleson. That nurse said that each Tyson plant has a nurse manager who is responsible for making decisions about how an injured worker is treated, including when to approve a visit to a doctor. In practice, however, Nurse J said that in some Tyson plants, managers, who have no medical background, pressure nurses to halt the progression of medical care, often entering the room where the injured worker is being treated and providing their assessment of the injury and whether the worker should be approved to see a doctor.

Nurse J said that when a worker appears to be seriously injured, “the plant management team is like, ‘Well, then y’all need to like treat her and keep this from becoming OSHA recordable.’” If the nurse manager makes a decision that is not what the plant managers have recommended, the nurse manager is “given the fourth degree” and asked to try alternative treatments like offering more ice or a soft tissue massage that Tyson calls “art therapy.”

“If you were to take 20 nurse managers and ask them if they ever had pressure from their management, the answer would almost always be ‘yes,’” said Nurse J. Each year, Tyson sets goals for decreasing OSHA recordable injuries at a plant, usually aiming for about a 20 percent decrease, she added. If the plant doesn’t meet its goal, plant managers don’t receive raises or bonuses, she said.

Nurse J’s claims about delayed care at Tyson also appear in documentation from several OSHA inspections at meat and poultry plants and an investigation of the industry by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that all found similar patterns.

Rebecca Reindel, the director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO, explained that the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) at poultry and meatpacking companies “are focused on, one, getting people back to work and, two, not having it be reported.” Berkowitz said during a series of investigations, “OSHA also found that in meat and poultry plants there are unsupervised first aid staff who often work outside their legal scope of practice.”

In investigations, OSHA found that plants delayed medical care for injured workers, issuing a citation in one case and hazard alert letters in four others in 2015 and 2016. In the letters, OSHA noted that one plant appeared to use its nursing station to prevent injuries from appearing on the plant’s log and another had prolonged treatment for workers without referring them to a doctor, including a worker who had made more than 90 visits to the nurse. OSHA also found that a number of workers were fired after reporting musculoskeletal disorders at the former plant, some on the same day that they reported injuries.

A subsequent investigation of meat and poultry plants by the GAO in 2017 noted that workers in five states similarly reported problems with on-site medical care, including the failure of nurses to make referrals to doctors and delaying medical care, once for a worker with a fractured wrist.

Burleson did not respond to allegations of manager interference in workers’ medical care at Tyson, or the charge that the company was using its nursing stations to prevent injuries from appearing on plants’ injury logs. He said, however, that Tyson employs “more than 1,100 health and safety experts in occupational safety, industrial hygiene, health care, ergonomics, process safety, loss prevention, transportation safety, and other specialists who serve in key health and safety roles at our corporate and plant levels” in support of the company’s commitment to providing a safe and healthy workplace.

Delayed Care, Rushed Return to Work

Nurse J confirmed that these experiences were usual. Tyson protocol for musculoskeletal injuries allows nurses to provide ice and pain-relieving medication for up to 28 days, according to the employee manual, and the process can repeat if a nurse deems an injury resolved along the way.

Alexia Kulwiec, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaches labor and employment law and is an expert in national labor policy and workers’ compensation. She said of the on-site health clinics at Tyson, “Their whole goal is not to find serious health problems and to keep costs down. . . .  It is really circumventing the whole purpose of worker’s compensation to start with.”

María did not remember the names of the nurses that treated her, noting that they changed frequently. She shared one experience in which a nurse told her that nothing was wrong and she was fine. Returning to the chicken wing line, María was in so much pain she couldn’t work. Another time when she asked to see a nurse, her supervisor sent her to fill out paperwork. She said, “They send it to I don’t know who and they decide if you qualify to see the doctor.” María said she faced many challenges during the eight months she requested to see a doctor, adding, “I have to be dying.”

Berkowitz confirmed the practice is common. “Workers are sort of captive in these first aid stations because companies have policies that state that workers could be fired or disciplined if they seek medical treatment outside the company. Further, the companies make clear that they won’t pay for any medical treatment unless the company sends workers to a doctor. OSHA found repeatedly that meat and poultry companies delay sending workers to a doctor for care, and OSHA found this led to worker injuries worsening over time. Most of these workers have no health insurance.”

Burleson, however, said that Tyson offers its workers a variety of avenues to address concerns about its processes, and that the company’s employment policies encourage workers to bring such concerns to the attention to management, human resources, Tyson’s Employment Compliance Department, or a confidential Tell Tyson First Helpline. “Complaints received through these avenues are investigated and worked to resolution,” he said, adding that workers are trained on these policies.

He did not respond to questions about whether Tyson workers can go to company clinics, called Bright Blue Health Clinics, for injuries without a referral from a plant nurse. The clinics are operated by Marathon Health and “provide primary and preventative care, including health screenings, lifestyle coaching and health education, as well as behavioral health counseling at no cost” to most workers, Burleson said.

María was among those without health insurance who could not otherwise afford to see a doctor on her own. One day as her injury worsened, she tried to grab a bag of groceries but her hands failed her and everything fell on the ground. “I said, “Oh, Lord, help me, help me pick it up.’”

After months, María was finally granted permission to visit a doctor by a plant nurse. “It has to be a Tyson doctor,” she added. Kulwiec said that Arkansas law permits the employer to choose the physician, and instructs employees to go to the employer-chosen physician.

Magaly Licolli, the executive director of the worker-based organization Venceremos, which advocates for the human rights of poultry workers in Arkansas, confirms the industry practice: “The workers have access to health insurance. But . . . the primary doctor has to be related to the company. . . . They control when or when is the time the workers have to seek primary health outside of the company.”

Licolli, who is also a member of the Civil Eats Advisory Board, founded Venceremos in 2019 with a group of women poultry workers. During the pandemic, she organized workers to fight for access to PPE, social distancing, the right to quarantine and take basic leave, transparency about increasing line speeds, and a living wage. She said that on-site healthcare at Tyson is a way to “control the health of the workers because they are seen as machines.”

She also flagged concerns about Tyson chaplains. Tyson has one of the largest private sector corporate chaplaincy programs in the U.S. which includes more than 100 chaplains across 22 states. Licolli said the chaplains are loyal to the company and play on the religious beliefs of workers who come to them with problems to manage dissent. She said the chaplains monitored worker protests, had followed her at events over two years, and that one chaplain came to her home to discourage her from organizing workers.

Nurse J said that workers sometimes talked to Tyson chaplains about their illnesses and injuries. Because the chaplains report to the human resource manager, some workers interviewed said they worried about the personal information shared in confidence being reported to management.

In María’s case, the doctor to whom she was referred, Dr. Tarik Sidani, told her she needed carpal tunnel surgery. However, without Tyson approval, he added that he couldn’t perform it. More months passed, and Tyson nurses sent María to see two additional doctors, both of whom said she needed carpal tunnel surgery. Even then, the surgery wasn’t approved, and María was advised by one of the Tyson doctors to take steroids and get cortisone injections in her hand. She was scared because the doctor told her that while the stopgap measures could reduce her pain, they might also cause diabetes. But she accepted this risk, the pain too overwhelming to bear. The injection also allowed her to continue working—if she missed too many days she would be fired.

Roughly eight months after she made the initial complaint, Tyson approved María’s surgery. “They operated on me on a Friday and by Monday I was working again because if I didn’t return they were going to put me on unemployment and give me half of my check,” she recalled.

Nurse J said, “That’s very common to have someone have surgery and come back the very next day,” adding that Tyson would lose “safe man hours” otherwise, which is the time a plant’s workers have clocked without injury, also reported to OSHA. Medical experts typically recommend four to six weeks of recovery from carpal tunnel surgery, sometimes more. Dr. Sidani recommended one week of recovery, but María’s supervisor at Tyson told her that it was “not necessary to rest.”

Berkowitz explained that in addition to documenting injuries, “OSHA regulations require companies to record how many days of work somebody misses due to a work-related injury. And so, this way Tyson can say, ‘I don’t have any lost workday injuries.’ This is all about public relations for Tyson—to attempt to hide the number and seriousness of injuries due to unsafe conditions.”

Tyson paid for physical therapy, but when María finished it, she was sent back to the chicken wing line to do the same repetitive movements.

Burleson did not respond to allegations that Tyson delays care for injured workers and does not did not provide proper time off to heal from surgery. He said, however, that Tyson’s poultry operations “have had safety committees and programs for many years that are continually exploring new ways to make production jobs easier. Their efforts include developing improvements in equipment, tools and processes to make jobs less physically demanding.”

Questionable Care, Worsening Injuries

With the arrival of the pandemic, Tyson Foods increased line speeds, and that exposed workers like Rosa to a greater risk for repetitive motion injuries. “When the pandemic began, many people left because they didn’t want to become sick,” she said, and described being asked to do the job of several people. For the last few years, she has worked 10 hours a day, four to five days a week, deboning white meat.

In October 2021, after decades of work at Tyson, Rosa requested permission from her supervisor to visit an on-site nurse. She had been experiencing increasing pain in her hands for months and felt unable to continue working. But when she arrived at the nurse’s office, there was no Spanish interpreter available, and, as Rosa explained, the nurse “only put bags of ice on my hands, on my shoulders,” then told her, “Back to work.”

Inside the Green Forest facility, workers speak many languages—including Marshallese, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese—but nurses often speak only English. Nurse J said that when interpretation was available, it was often a member of Human Resources that served as a medical interpreter. The situation creates an unequal power dynamic in which an injured worker is expected to speak openly about their injury in front of their superior. Nurse J said, “I think they’re afraid to report that they hurt.”

When Tyson hires workers, the company provides interpretation and documents in the language of the worker. However, several workers interviewed said that after being hired, most interactions and documents were provided to them in English alone. “The health office doesn’t have staff that speaks those languages,” said Berkowitz.

In a 2000 interview intended for internal company use, Tyson’s then-president Donald “Buddy” Wray noted that language barriers were partly to blame for employee injuries and deaths. “This has been the worst year in the history of our company and all of us should be hit upside the head for it. In a lot of instances, the loss of life has come from lack of training, lack of communication, and lack of understanding  . . . We have got to do a better job of communicating in their language,” he said. Burleson did not comment on the translation problems acknowledged by Wray.

Despite communication gaps, Rosa requested to visit an on-site nurse daily as she continued experiencing debilitating pain in her hands. Over the year that she spent talking to a reporter, she described the pain in her hands, and even called crying, asking how she could continue to work while in so much pain. “Sometimes when I wake up to go to the bathroom, my hands are asleep. I have to hit them because they feel dead,” she said.

When she described her pain, she said one nurse told her, “We aren’t going to pay for anything.”

Desperate, Rosa sought advice from her husband’s doctor outside of the Tyson system and paid for the visit herself. When Rosa informed an on-site nurse that an outside doctor confirmed she needed carpal tunnel surgery, she was again told that she would have to pay for her own surgery. She felt like it was retaliation.

Burleson, the Tyson spokesman, did not respond to that allegation. Licolli, however, described how distrust can erode worker confidence. “The workers themselves don’t know if the [Tyson] doctors or nurses are capable of doing that job. They don’t trust them,” said Licolli. “They don’t seem like reliable doctors or nurses. They see them more as they just get to be paid by the company and have to say whatever is beneficial to the company.”

The 2017 GAO investigation found that fear of retaliation for medical care was common among workers. In one state, workers told the inspectors they were penalized when they sought care at work. “Meat and poultry workers in three states also said that fear of being reprimanded or losing their jobs sometimes compels them to refrain from accessing care . . . or from complaining about inadequate medical care,” the report noted.

Reindel said that in an on-site health clinic system like Tyson’s, “If they go on their own, it’s not paid for and then it’s often accompanied by punitive or retaliatory measures.”

Back at Tyson, Rosa asked to see a nurse regularly, saw doctors, visited a hospital, and spent several months on disability. When a Tyson doctor notified her that she had to return to work, Rosa was moved to a line that required less repetitive movement. Yet she experienced so much pain that she had to request an easier job that paid $3 an hour less. Shortly thereafter, she complained of losing all feeling in her hands and had an accident. When she was finally approved to have an appointment with Dr. Sedani, he confirmed that she needed carpal tunnel surgery but said that he couldn’t operate on her if Tyson had not approved it.

Burleson did not respond to the allegation that Tyson had the authority to authorize surgeries for workers through doctors. He noted, however, that the company does not employ surgeons and that the doctors the company may make referrals to are not, in effect, “Tyson doctors.” “That is a mischaracterization,” he said.

Rosa is dismayed by what has felt like an endless cycle. “I need a lawyer,” she said, her eyes red and tearful, her hands moving to cover her face. “I am fighting for an operation.”

Kulwiec explained that in Arkansas, the legal burden is on employees like Rosa to prove that their injury was caused by an on the job injury or illness, and that can be tough to do.

It is similarly challenging for OSHA to identify when a company is using its first aid clinics to keep worker injuries from becoming reportable, Reindel explained. “Basically, these practices go unchecked,” she said. “It’s dangerous. It’s inhumane. And it doesn’t lend to people receiving the care that they need.”

Indeed, it is rare that OSHA takes action to address such situations of medical mismanagement, chiefly because of scant resources. But in 2016 the agency did ultimately levy $78,000 in fines against Pilgrim’s Pride, another large poultry producer, in part because of the company’s practice of delaying medical care. Berkowitz said of Tyson, “They could set the standard for what every other meat and poultry plant needs to do in terms of protecting workers on the job. And instead, they drive the standard into the ground.”

In July, Rosa said she was afraid because her supervisors and co-workers had stopped speaking to her and gave her dirty looks. “Two months ago, somebody left dead animals under my house,” she said, “armadillos and raccoons.” The smell was so strong it made her and her niece sick. After that, she sent her niece to live with family members. When last interviewed on July 15 as she lay on her couch, clutching two bottles of prescribed pain medication, she said, “If one day you find out that I’m dead, you know my whole story.”

Photographs by Jacky Muniello.

Note: Civil Eats reached out to Tyson multiple times prior to publication for comment regarding how care for workplace injuries is paid for. Tyson did not respond to that question or to statements from workers who said they had been told they would have to pay for care sought from doctors outside the Tyson referral system. After this article was published, Tyson sent Civil Eats the following statement: “If a team member is injured at work and asks to see a doctor, our nurses are instructed to set up a worker’s compensation claim. We pay for worker’s compensation approved medical treatment, including consulting with outside doctors, and team members are not required to pay for their own care.”

Previously: The lack of OSHA oversight on smaller animal agriculture operations puts workers at risk of injury and death. Workers face long-term respiratory disease inside CAFOs, but protective equipment is scarce and accountability for employers is scarcer. Despite harms to workers, the federal government is incentivizing biogas.

Next: Innovative programming and states are patching holes in worker protections. Some solutions, supported by major companies, are proving better working are conditions possible. But there’s no easy substitute for federal oversight, something advocates hope can still improve. Read the full series here.

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