When They're Done with You: Legal Violence and Structural Vulnerability among Injured Immigrant Poultry Workers

When they're done with you, an impassioned union representative once cautioned me, "they'll crumple you up like a piece of paper, throw you out, and reach back for your kids." Industrial poultry production is horrific work, reliant upon the expendable bodies of Black and Brown workers, many of whom are immigrants. While anthropologists have increasingly employed the concepts of structural violence and vulnerability to understand the experiences of migrant health, few have focused on the workplace. Over several years, as the coordinator of the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Center's Workplace Injury Project, I documented the lengths to which this industry will go to avoid reporting and treating injuries via the workers' compensation system. From obstructionist plant nurses and company doctors to surveillance, retaliation, and termination, injured undocumented workers' experiences underscore the failings of workers' compensation as a medico-legal project. Drawing on scholarship from legal and medical anthropology, public health, critical legal studies, and healthcare economics and policy, this article employs the framework of legal violence to scrutinize the ways in which immigration and workers' compensation laws work together to produce layered precarities among injured immigrant poultry workers, considering the role of occupational injury and the repression of injured immigrant workers in reproducing a docile and exploitable labor force for a capitalist economy that places profit over people.