A U.S. federal judge has granted final approval of a landmark settlement worth more than $398 million against 18 of America’s leading poultry producers, ending a class action lawsuit that alleged the companies conspired for decades to suppress the wages of hundreds of thousands of processing plant workers.
The settlement is the largest financial recovery ever in an antitrust class action involving low-wage workers in the United States, according to plaintiffs’ counsel. It is also the second-largest recovery in a wage-fixing class action in U.S. history.
The case has direct relevance to HR and compensation professionals, as it centres on how companies used third-party data vendors and off-the-record meetings to coordinate pay levels — practices that regulators are increasingly scrutinizing across industries.
How the scheme worked
Workers at poultry processing plants alleged that their employers carried out a wage suppression conspiracy in three ways. Senior executives held recurring in-person meetings — described in court documents as “off the books” — where worker compensation was discussed and set. Companies also exchanged detailed, non-public wage and benefits data through industry data vendors on a frequent basis. Plant managers engaged in bilateral and regional exchanges of wage and benefits information, including future pay plans.
The lawsuit named Agri Stats, Inc., a data vendor that collected and distributed compensation data among poultry industry subscribers, as a central participant in the scheme. As part of a separate injunctive relief settlement approved March 10, Agri Stats agreed to eliminate plant-level data fields related to labour costs from its broiler chicken reports.
The plaintiffs alleged the conspiracy ran from 2000 onward and involved more than 200 processing plants, hatcheries, and feed mills across the United States.
Workers near poverty line
The global anti-poverty organization Oxfam has reported that poultry plant workers in the United States earn wages that place them near or below the poverty line. The lawsuit, filed in 2019, sought to recover compensation the workers allegedly lost due to artificially suppressed pay and benefits.
“For decades, tens of thousands of hard-working poultry plant workers have been exploited by their employers who schemed with competitors to depress their wages below fair market levels,” said Brent Johnson, co-chair of the antitrust practice group at Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll, which led the litigation team.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit in 2022 against many of the same poultry producers, alleging the same wage suppression conspiracy that private counsel had uncovered through independent investigation.
The case is Jien et al. v. Perdue Farms Inc. et al. Co-lead counsel included Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll, Handley Farah and Anderson, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, Berger Montague, and Lockridge Grindal Nauen.
