Human Rights, American Style

The report, released Tuesday after a year of research, is based on interviews with employees and managers at a Nebraska Beef factory, a Tyson Foods chicken plant in Arkansas and the Smithfield Packing Co. pork plant in Tar Heel, about 100 miles south of Raleigh. It says workers at all three plants are frequently injured, then refused medical care or fired.
The report found that repetitive motion injuries are universal in the industry; unsanitary conditions sometimes leave workers covered in animal urine and feces; and attempts to unionize are sometimes violently quashed.

Smithfield Foods has violated workers' rights for years, said Tom Clarke, leader of an 11-year effort to unionize the pork plant, which employs about 5,000 and is the country's largest hog-killing factory.

"It's been an attitude of, 'Look, this is rural North Carolina. Who's going to know, and who's going to care?'" said Clarke, part of the Washington-based United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "This is going to shine a brighter light on the activity of the company." -more

No one in the Bush mal-Administration is going to care. At a time when the warmongering Commander-in-Chief holds America up to the rest of the world as some kind of free-for-all utopia, one might think the phantom-like Labor Secretary Elaine Chao just might feel compelled to respond to allegations of human rights violations. But one would be wrong.