Austin DeCoster testifying before the House oversight and investigations subcommittee.
Egg king Austin “Jack” DeCoster is back in the news — this time after a positive salmonella test triggered a recall of eggs from an Ohio producer he partly owns.
His name has been reviled since an outbreak of salmonella that sickened at least 1,600 people was traced to his Iowa farms, leading to the recall of about 550 million eggs.
This brings back memories.
The Oregonian
DeCoster Egg Farms of Turner, Maine, was the focus of one of my first investigative stories when I was a green young reporter in the 1970s. For all I knew salmonella might have been a fish. My attention was drawn instead to the company’s spiteful and kleptocratic management style, which included clawing back from workers a share of their poverty wages.
Jack DeCoster, I learned, was a truly self-made man. His father died in 1949 when Jack was in his teens, and he inherited about 100 hens. By 1977, when my stories appeared in the now-defunct Maine Times, he had 2.8 million laying hens, was the undisputed egg king of New England and one of the top suppliers in the U.S.
Religion was his one passion to rival eggs. He was a dedicated fundamentalist Christian who taught Sunday school and attended evening prayer meetings with his managers. He hired a band of evangelical Christian students as summer employees. When not busy in the egg barns, they ministered to workers under the acronym EGG(Experiencing God’s Glory).
When it came to the company’s treatment of workers, however, “What would Jesus do?” was not the central theme.
The starting pay of $1.90 to $2.00 an hour was low even by poultry industry standards. Turnover was enormous. Employees had their paychecks dunned for breaking eggs and for other expenses and penalties, without prior consent or a protest mechanism.
At one point, DeCoster’s generously arranged with a private foundation to provide jobs and housing to 19 Vietnamese refugees. The men were stuffed into three of the company-owned trailers that housed many DeCoster workers. In one instance, a Vietnamese worker who’d put in a 66.5 hour week had his paycheck slashed from $169.58 to $26.27 by miscellaneous deductions.
DeCoster drivers who hauled eggs throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic states were given plenty of time to polish their driving skills.
After a driver complained about being forced to falsify his driving logs, a federal investigation found that the company routinely violated limits on the hours truckers can drive without rest. Prosecutors cited records showing that DeCoster trucks had been involved in eight major crashes resulting in two deaths and three serious injuries in less than two years.
In 1975, the company pleaded guilty to federal charges of failing to keep accurate logs, and paid a $2,500 fine.
The company’s response was to work harder to avoid getting caught. It got the Department of Transportation to issue an agricultural exemption that allowed it to avoid reporting major accidents. It also stopped using the type of payroll cards that, by comparing against the falsified logs, led to it being caught.
Even so, federal authorities soon uncovered scores of new hours-of-service violations leading to new criminal charges in 1976. This time, the company was fined $14,000.
When it came to run-ins with authorities and Dickensian scandals, however, DeCoster was just getting started.
Branching out from Maine, he established major operations in Maryland and Iowa. In 1987, nine people died and hundreds more were sickened by salmonella-tainted eggs linked to DeCoster’s Maryland business. For a time, health authorities in Maryland and New York banned sales of DeCoster eggs.
Back in Maine, DeCoster Egg Farms paid $2 million in 1997 to settle federal charges involving working and living conditions that Labor Secretary Robert Reich called “ as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen.”
In 2002, the company paid $3.2 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against Mexican workers in working and living conditions.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, where DeCoster was producing eggs and hogs, he earned the distinction of becoming the first person deemed an “habitual violator” of the state’s environmental laws.
His Iowa business, DeCoster Farms, settled a lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging supervisors with rape and other sexual violence against female employees, especially those of Mexican origin. Without admitting liability, the company agreed in 2002 to pay nearly $1.53 million.
But DeCoster topped himself in August when more than a half-billion eggs were recalled. In place of the scattershot coverage of past misdeeds, the news media turned on him with a vengeance and made the man, and his egg empire, national news.
DeCoster, now in his 70s, seemed chastened when he testified before Congress in September.
“We apologize to everyone who may have been sickened by eating our eggs,” he told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations. Speaking softly in his Maine twang, he added: “I have prayed several times each day for all of these people for improved health.”
Lawmakers pointed to photos of rodents and manure oozing from a building at his Iowa farm. They quizzed DeCoster on what went wrong.
“We got big quite a while before we stopped acting like we were small,” he said. “While we were big but still acting like we were small, we got into trouble with government requirements several times.”
Back in the 1970s, when I reported on DeCoster Egg Farms, they were already big. Seeing them lurch from scandal to scandal, bouncing back each time, I’ve wondered how they get away with it. No doubt regulators, prosecutors and lawmakers have wondered the same thing.
What a ghastly history you laid out here of one man’s ability to escape and evade responsibility for some of the most vile actions imaginable. Is it his professed Christianity, real or faked, that shields him from a long lease on a prison cell he so richly deserves?
You write “No doubt regulators, prosecutors and lawmakers have wondered the same thing.”
No, they don’t wonder, they enable. The regulatory mechanisms have all been corrupted by the power of the plutocracy. The wealthy have their filthy, death-covered hands wrapped around the throat of democracy, the neck of freedom, and they are wringing out every dollar they can before the entire system collapses like a rotting corpse. DeCoster is not the anti-Christ, but he’s not far from it. If I could believe in a God it give me relief to know people like that would burn in hell.
In the 80′s my dad worked for DeCoster to raise chickens and maintain the two barns on the property. He was givin’ a rundown trailer to live in. The starting pay for him was of course minimum wage. The rent was free and there were certainly many perks to having this particular job. However, in the years to come it would seem hardly generous. From mid to late 80s my father kept up with maintaince on the farm and made sure everything ran correctly. Up until the early to mid 90′s he constantly was a dedicated worker, putting in many extra hours of labor. In 94 situations worsened. The wife who gave him four children followed a dark path into drugs and left him for another life, free of children and resonciblities. In the year to come my father was hired back by the company after having taken a year or so off. When he returned he was put back into the trailer from Turner. From there he began moving on and eagerly working to support his children. He did this for many years despite much turmoil. After over two decades of hard labor the fuits of his labor were beginning to blossom. With much of his own money he made from working he turned to rundown trailer into a house suitable for four children. With all the fixings necessary. Propor plumbing, wiring, sanitation. Also he purchased equiptment with all of his own earnings for the company to help productivity, this being tools and also a skid-stear to help during clean out when the chickens were removed from the barns. Things were looking up. In the spring of 2010 it all plumited. It started to decay with rumors around the farms that Jack would be discontinuing some of the jobs on the farm. One of which became my fathers job. A hard working employee for over two decades, without warning was told there was no more job for him to do and that he would have to leave the proporty. The proporty he kept up, ran, maintained, the house he built would have to be handed over to Jack DeCoster. My father imediatly made phone calls for meetings that were never recieved or responded to. Eventually, after months of attempt, nothing came of it. Upset and angry with how things were currently being handled, my father left the state to get away. Sense there had been no eviction notice presented he asked me to stay with my little sister who was a single mom of a toddler, in the house until an eviction notice was served. I helped take care of my sister for about a month or so until two gentlemen, Kevin Lilly and Robbert Sincler arrived with the inevidible. It was a poorly typed scrap of paper that didn’t even have my fathers last name spelled correctly warning us that the house was to be emptied within two weeks from recieving the notice. An arogant stare from Sincler pierced me from across the kitchen table has he began to smile steering his attention to my nephew. Looking back at me he replied, “You know I really hate kids” To that, I retored that it would be in his best interest to leave imediatly. They left, my father was called, then flew back to the state. Where he began contact with the company again. For another month of answering machines, my dad pushed on until eventually he got ahold of DeCosters son Jay. At this point, legal rights were also being contacted from Pine Tree legal on some guidance on what further action to take. My dad landed on having a meeting with the boss who still to date has been stringing him along giving times of meetings but never following through. I simply have trouble understanding how a man of god can have such a lack of morality as to evict a child with a child from the only house shes ever known. Along with a father who built the house and had been a dedicated employee for so long. Jack DeCoster is a thief in christians clothing.
I guess I was under the assumption that when plantations and sharecropping went their way, so would the practice of dunning employees and eating away at their paycheck for the boss disappear. Sadly, I was wrong. Good story.