Lawsuit: Poultry Plant Workers Illegally Underpaid?

A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed alleging that Perdue, Tyson and a handful of other leading poultry processors have worked together to fix and suppress plant workers’ wages, and attorneys now need more people to come forward to help strengthen the case.

Specifically, it’s been alleged that people who worked “on the line,” i.e., the evisceration or deboning lines, at certain chicken and turkey processing plants between January 2011 and December 2017 were underpaid due to the companies’ secret agreements to set wages at artificially low rates instead of competing for employees.

How Could I Have Been Underpaid?

According to the lawsuit, the poultry processors mentioned above conspired to lower plant workers’ wages—and maximize their own profits—in several ways.

First, the lawsuit claims the companies conducted “secret compensation surveys” to compare the hourly wages, salaries and benefits provided to their workers. According to the suit, one annual survey administered by a third party was designed in such a way that the companies could easily determine “exactly how much each processor paid each worker at each of its plants.” In addition to the annual survey, the processors sent supplemental surveys “directly to one another” and exchanged “even more granular compensation information on a non-anonymous basis,” the lawsuit says.

Per the case, the poultry processors also participated in annual “off the books” meetings wherein company executives would fix the wages of plant employees. These meetings typically began with the exchange of company data regarding hourly wages, salaries and benefits, the suit says, and concluded with “roundtable” discussions to agree on “optimal and future compensation rates and practices.” According to the lawsuit, company executives also communicated directly through email and phone conversations and “extensively discussed, compared, and further suppressed compensation.”

The suit further alleges that the poultry processors illegally exchanged compensation data through Agri Stats, a company that has since been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for facilitating the exchange of sensitive, non-public information among meat processing companies. The lawsuit explains that although the monthly reports provided by Agri Stats were anonymized, the data was “sufficiently granular and disaggregated” such that the poultry processors were able to match compensation data to specific processing facilities operated by their competitors.

Finally, the lawsuit claims the companies’ plant managers regularly exchanged information about wages, salaries and benefits that was used by executives to “facilitate the fixing of compensation and monitoring of the conspiracy.”

Attorneys believe that had the alleged wage-fixing conspiracy not been in place, plant workers would have been afforded the opportunity to find better pay and benefits at rival poultry processors. This is particularly true, the suit says, as many of the defendants’ poultry plants operate relatively close to one another, meaning workers could have easily switched jobs had they been incentivized to do so.

How Could a Class Action Lawsuit Help?

A class action lawsuit could help put an end to any illegal pay practices and help plant workers achieve fair wages for their work. Further, a successful case could help employees recover money that they lost out on over the years due to this alleged wage-fixing conspiracy.

What You Can Do

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