"Ain't No Life for a Mother!": Racial Capitalism and the Making of Poultry Processing Workers in Northeast Georgia

Abstract

This dissertation exposes racial capitalism through an on-the-ground study of poultry processing work in the American South. It is an ethnography of the South’s largest agricultural industry, of the production and consumption of cheap food through a cheapening of labor, but fundamentally, of people, places, and daily life. It is also a reflection or mirror on what we, as a society, have become, one that quite literally disregards, dismembers, and disables life for the comfort and wealth of a very few. Finally, it is a critique of the world as it stands from the perspective of workers moving in and out of "the poultry," and an exploration of how change might emerge from this way of seeing, "from way, way below." To understand poultry work and workers, we must understand how workers are made and re-made, but also how they shape production and consumption, as well as the broader communities in which they live, work, eat, move, celebrate, and resist.