Americans are struggling with soaring egg prices, which are up a whopping 589% since June 2020. Despite many people cutting back, consumers spent an extra $1.4 billion on eggs last year. What’s worse, USDA officials predict the price will rise another 41% in 2025.

Since 2022, 166 million birds have died or been killed due to a pandemic of bird flu, 80% of these were chickens raised for laying eggs. The outbreak is responsible for some of the price increase, but the capitalists have also used it as an excuse to keep gouging workers at the grocery checkout.

Deprivation for the working class is a massive profit-making opportunity for the class enemy. Revenues for Cal-Maine Foods, the largest US egg producer, soared 82% in the last quarter.  The egg monopoly was found guilty of price fixing in 2023 and “punished” with a $50 million fine—a puny amount when compared to its $3.15 billion in revenue that year. Needless to say, the fine wasn’t much of a deterrent, and the Department of Justice is launching yet another investigation into price fixing at Cal-Maine.

Sickening conditions in the poultry industry

Outrage over egg prices has brought attention to the poultry industry as a whole. What this spotlight has uncovered is unsettling. Four corporations dominate 60% of the poultry market, and their factories are plagued with inhuman exploitation.

There are reports of factory workers wearing adult diapers to work because they don’t have time for bathroom breaks. Poultry workers have injury rates higher than most other industries due to an ultra-fast-paced work environment, high-speed cutting procedures, and slippery blood-soaked surfaces.

Workers in these factories are expected to process 35–45 chickens per minute, or roughly 14,000 per day! Due to repetitive motions, 86% report chronic hand or wrist pain, swelling, and numbness. They suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome at seven times the rate of other workers.

In exchange for these torments, the average annual salary for poultry workers is less than $24,000. Their real wages have declined 40% over the past 30 years, while CEO salaries at the four poultry monopolies have all risen over 200%–300%. Every three hours, Tyson’s CEO earns the equivalent of a Tyson factory worker’s annual pay.

This is the reality of for-profit food production. Fierce competition between the monopolies compels them to squeeze out ever more productivity from their workers. If they don’t, they risk being undercut and driven out of the market entirely. It’s not individual shareholders or CEOs who make the factories this way. It’s the inevitable result of capitalist production.

Outrage over egg prices has brought attention to the poultry industry as a whole. / Image: USDA, Flickr

Bird flu fears

Issues in the food industry mean problems for public health. Public health has been systematically bled dry over the last decades. And the bird flu has sparked understandable concern on the heels of the devastating COVID pandemic just five years ago.

Healthcare is one of the largest industries in the US economy. More proactive health services would undercut the profits extracted by medical and health insurance companies. For example, from the standpoint of a system driven by maximizing profit, why provide a patient with free or cheap hypertension medication when you can profit from a $120,000 brain surgery after they suffer a stroke?

So far, bird flu has only infected 70 humans in the US, and there have been no recorded instances of person-to-person transmission. But as long as we live under a system that puts profits over health, the threat of a new and devastating pandemic remains. If it’s not bird flu, it will be some other disease.

No individual solutions 

Many are terrified and outraged by the realities of the food and healthcare industries. They instinctively want to do something to fight back against these horrors.

In the absence of a working-class party to organize this struggle, we’ve seen a torrent of consumerist and individualist “solutions,” like politically motivated veganism, mask wearing, etc. But such tactics are incapable of solving the fundamental problem. The profit motive will not be abolished by more humane consumerism or individual precautions.

While the capitalists can’t provide humane conditions for workers or livestock because it’s unprofitable, a workers’ government would liberate these sectors from their current sick conditions by producing food for the sake of human need, not profit. Timely intervention under a planned economy will stop outbreaks before they become pandemics. The solutions to these problems don’t rest with us as individuals, but as a class—and can only be realized through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.