Volume 31.2

At different moments in U.S. history, workers have joined together to fight for a better future. Now more than ever, as industries become increasingly consolidated and powerful, workers’ ability to band together and advocate for their rights is integral. Recent victories in labor rights have not yet made their way to the industrial animal agricultural sphere. This is unfortunate, as the conditions at slaughterhouses and concentrated animal feeding operations are extractive and abusive towards workers and animals alike. In the past, strong union presence in slaughterhouses aided workers in achieving wage increases and job stability. However, this resulted in extreme industry pushback, from which these unions have yet to recover. While labor conditions at slaughterhouses are bad, conditions experienced by other animal agricultural workers are worse due to a lack of federal labor rights protections. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the legislation providing the federally protected right to collectively bargain to American employees, has exemptions that capture entire swaths of the animal agricultural workforce. This exclusion has powerful consequences: workers can be fired for simply discussing their working conditions with colleagues. This Article argues that the agricultural exemption should be removed from the NLRA to give workers in industrial animal agriculture a long-overdue seat at the bargaining table. Due to the unlikelihood of achieving a revision of the NLRA, this Article explores other approaches for ameliorating the harm wrought by the agricultural exemption, such as instituting protections for exempted workers at the state level. It concludes with a number of suggestions for how legal advocates can empower industrial animal agricultural workers.

Conley Wouters, Social Justice, Practical Lawyering, and the Elephant in Solitary Confinement: Why Animal Law Belongs in the Legal Writing Classroom