Starting in the 1960s, US consumers began a love affair with chicken. America’s proteins of choice once were beef and pork, until the poultry industry found a way to produce a lot of chicken, making it cheap and plentiful. Human workers paid the cost of that productivity as, over the past few decades, poultry processing line speeds have increased to meet this demand. But that’s happened in tandem with the decline of unions and deregulation of the industry. The result is a high rate of workplace injuries and repetitive motion disorders, with gaps in workplace safety oversight.

For this video, we contacted Tyson Foods Inc. and the National Chicken Council for comment. The National Chicken Council (NCC), the poultry industry lobby that has repeatedly requested line speed increases, wrote that faster line speeds do not affect the pace of work because plants will add additional staff and lines to accommodate the increase in speeds. Through our reporting and our sources, we weren’t able to substantiate this claim, and the NCC did not respond when we asked for an example of when this has happened or for any other evidence that this is the industry standard.

The NCC also mentioned that other countries also run poultry line speeds as fast as, if not faster than, the US. It’s difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison with other countries because of the regulatory framework and union issues we cover in the video. Claire Kelloway, reporter and researcher for OpenMarkets, noted that in Europe, for example, factories are typically smaller than US plants, and there are higher rates of unionization and more industry safety regulation. The regulating agencies enforce longer breaks and switching up job roles to avoid repetition, for example. Even so, working conditions in poultry plants are still criticized there.

Read the full article about the poultry industry by Laura Bult at Vox.