The Return of Child Labor

For years I have been haunted by a grainy video I saw in 2023, when I was interviewing poultry processing workers in Green Forest, Arkansas. In those months I spoke often with the organizer Magaly Licolli, who directs Venceremos, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the rights of poultry workers. One day we were sitting in her office in Springdale a few miles from the headquarters of Tyson Foods, the largest meat processing company in the US and, after the Brazilian firm JBS, the second largest in the world. After the subject turned to child labor, she pulled out her phone and showed me footage that another laborer had recorded of two migrant children, fourteen and fifteen years old, working as chicken catchers in a cavernous rural poultry house. The video was dark, but it was clear that they were using their bare hands to grab each chicken by the feet and hurl it into a nearby crate. Their bodies showed up only in outline, like ghostly shadows.Earlier that year, Licolli told me, six chicken catchers—four adults and two children—had come to Venceremos’s office to seek help. The two minors were asleep when they arrived, she said, “because they hadn’t slept for so many h...