Immigrant rights groups in Georgia are calling for stronger worker protections after a nitrogen leak at a poultry plant in North Georgia killed six people and injured about a dozen others.
The plant has had several workplace violations over the past several years, according to records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The latest includes two amputations in 2017.
“At the same facility, there was a lack of goggles,” says Shelly Anand, executive director of Sur Legal Collaborative. The organization advocates for immigrant workers’ rights in Georgia.
Maria del Rosario Palacios heads the advocacy organization GA Familias Unidas. She worked in meat-processing plants right after high school. She says there’s intimidation around reporting violations at these facilities and recalls a time she slipped in a plant.
A Georgia Chicken Town Reels After a Plant Disaster
A nitrogen leak killed six workers and injured 11, but many in the heavily undocumented work force, advocates said, are too fearful to go in for medical checks.
A nitrogen leak at the Foundation Food Group poultry plant killed six people in Gainesville, Ga., this week. Nearly 12 percent of the city’s residents are in the country illegally.Credit.Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Jan. 29, 2021
GAINESVILLE, Ga. The morning after a nitrogen leak in a chicken plant killed six people in the self-proclaimed poultry capital of the world, nearly everyone in its big Latino community choked down their grief and fear and did what they had come to Gainesville to do.