It’s Time for Public Pharma By Alexander Sammon

PROSPECTS It’s Time for Public Pharma

Medicare for All would take the profit motive out of insurance; public manufacturing of prescription drugs would take it out of providing care.

By Alexander Sammon

Medicare for All was perhaps the best pol-

icy litmus test for progressive politicians in the second half of the 2010s. Today, it has rarely looked less likely to become law. Insurance industry lobbying groups, in tandem with the Chamber of Commerce, have figured out how to beat back the popular policy’s advance, even in one-party blue states like California. And yet the necessity of excising the profit motive from the American health care system, which continues on its ignominious pace to produce bottom-barrel results at maximal prices, has never been clearer.

The COVID-19 pandemic showcased the profound inadequacy of the uniquely privatized and financialized American system, where for-profit (and “nonprofit”) hospitals and for-profit insurance companies teamed up to help the United States secure its worst-in-the-world national death toll while notching one best-ever earnings call after another. Perhaps most egregious of all, pharmaceutical companies like Moderna took public funding for vaccine development, tied up the patents, and converted the greatest public-health crisis and mass death event in 100 years into a 100-year flood of profits. Moderna, which in 2019 posted just $60 million in revenue and didn’t have a product to its name, banked $12.2 billion in profit on $18.5 billion in revenue in 2021; its CEO simultaneously cashed out $400 million in stock during the course of the pandemic.

The vaccine payday was just another manifestation of pharma’s sweet deal in the U.S. Much of the research and development for new discoveries is publicly funded, and yet drugmakers charge whatever they want, with exclusive monopoly patent grants. Not content to just enjoy that bounty, those companies work to extend that monopoly period, through slight changes to the treatment (known as “patent evergreening”) or even bribing generic companies to not compete (“pay for delay”). As a result, the median net profit margin for large pharmaceutical companies is almost twice as high as other companies in the S&P 500.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. The federal government can establish its own drug manufacturing apparatus. The path to redeeming our failing public-health sector, and to extricating the profit motive from health care in the decade to come should go through the establishment of public pharma.

It’s by now commonly known that American drug prices are by far the highest in the world. In 2019, the U.S. spent $1,126 per capita on prescribed medicines; comparable countries spent $552. This is not solely due to exorbitantly priced name-brand pharmaceuticals, which make up just 10 percent of all prescriptions filled. Getting a

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generic drug through the patent thicket is so costly that those companies have to bulk up: 40 percent of all generics in 2016 were made by a single manufacturer. That can lead to abuse; a 2019 lawsuit from 44 states alleged a mass generic drug price-fixing ring that increased prices by as much as 1,000 percent.

Insulin, the poster child for the failure of the American pharmaceutical system, which has existed for over 100 years, cost $21 a vial in 1999 and $332 in 2019, a price increase of more than 1,000 percent for a basically unchanged product. That’s to say nothing of the widespread mislabeling and misbranding practices, all of which contribute to a wave of excess deaths. It’s not only the American people being robbed blind. States are similarly price-gouged on everything from naloxone to EpiPens for Medicaid to public schools to police departments, to say nothing of federal programs like Medicare, which have been barred from negotiating any drug prices for nearly 20 years. (A potential reconciliation deal would change that, but only for a handful of treatments.)

Many large drug companies “routinely distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders, generating the extra cash by reducing reserves, selling off assets, taking on debt, or laying off employees,” according to a 2017 paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Fifteen of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies have effectively vacated research and development entirely, spending far more money on advertising than innovation. In fact, major pharma firms spend roughly twice as much on marketing as R&D on average.

What those companies do for Wall Street pales in comparison to what they do for drug discovery, which has been left almost entirely to the public sector already. Federally funded studies contributed to every single one of the 356 drugs approved in the previous decade. The obvious solution, if the public sector is already paying to invent new drugs, is to also manufacture and sell them, providing a powerful springboard for tackling the profit-sickness that ails American health care.

“Public pharmaceutical manufacturing in

the U.S. could be a game-changer because it would break the monopoly that pharma has on our medicine supply, and start to shift the balance of power,” said Dana Brown, director of health and economy at the Democracy Collaborative.

An all-in public pharma program could operate on multiple levels, fabricating pharmaceutical products (everything from insulin to IV bags) where private companies currently hold monopoly positions and charge exceptional rates, while also working as a purchaser, importing cheaper drugs from elsewhere and selling them at cost. The government could also contract with generic producers to run factories, while setting the cost and other parameters. And a federally run program could work in close conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, which is already responsible for the overwhelming majority of the research that goes into creating new drugs and helping to bring them to market, such as with Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

A national manufacturer, too, could plug holes in the supply chain where shortages have become commonplace, or with therapeutics that pharmaceutical companies are disinterested in producing themselves. This is a not-insignificant part of the sector, including low-margin products like antibiotics, preventive medicine, and vaccines, which are not as remunerative as medicines for treatment of chronic issues.

There’s reason to believe that public pharma might appeal as much to conservatives looking to minimize public spending on social services, like prescription drugs in Medicare, as it does to progressives looking to get the profit motive out of care. Indeed, Utah’s Republican-dominated state legislature has entertained public-purchasing options in the name of fiscal conservatism. And while a program that appeals to parsimonious conservatives might not seem to have the ambitious allure of other topline progressive programs, public pharma might be a necessary first step to not just win Medicare for All, but to sustain it and keep it solvent once it’s in place.

“If we got Medicare for All tomorrow, the management of hospitals and provision of care is right now so highly privatized and highly financialized, and so highly controlled by private equity, that it would make you cry,” added Brown. “There’s an extraordinary amount of money going out of provision of care and into financial markets bleeding us dry, to the point that Medicare for All and no other changes would be a really expensive public handout to the private sector in a lot of ways.”

While it would take a level of commitment and money to get such a program off the ground, it’s not as much of a moon shot as one might think. As recently as the 1990s, departments of health in places like Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York City produced things like the diphtheria vaccine, before it was privatized. Other countries, including Brazil, Cuba, Thailand, and South Africa, have public drug manufacturers, evidence that it is hardly cost-prohibitive to create.

A national manufacturer could plug holes in the supply chain where shortages have become commonplace.

Crucially, the groundwork has already been

laid in the nation’s biggest state. In 2020, in a bill that came as a surprise to many, California passed SB 852, the California Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which empowered the state legally to create a public label for buying and selling drugs at cost, called CalRx. A second provision, which passed the state Senate in May and awaits passage in the Assembly, would direct millions more from the annual budget toward the production of a generic manufacturing plant in the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Newsom has pushed state lawmakers to put $100 million into developing CalRx and getting the state’s manufacturing operation off the ground.

Not surprisingly, the program is beginning with insulin, as roughly four million state residents suffer from diabetes, a quarter of whom cannot afford the insulin they rely on. Not for nothing, the California program is also backed by the highly organized diabetes rights groups in the state.

The details of California’s program remain under negotiation and will have to be watched closely. But the consider-

able amount of resources already allocated not only to developing a public label for selling drugs at cost but to establishing FDA-approved facilities capable of producing those products themselves has drawn major public attention from neighboring states. Not long after California passed its initial legislation, Washington state followed with a bill of its own that created an even broader authority. A regional consortium of Western states, including Washington as well as Oregon and Nevada, have begun talking about arrangements on public bulk purchasing.

A public pharmaceutical manufacturer would not only upend the regime of high prices, it could have huge knock-on positive effects for the biosciences industry. Most drugs are currently produced overseas, but new public plants could offer the sort of well-paying manufacturing jobs that the political class loves to celebrate but seems incapable of reproducing. “I think that doing the actual production in the public sector is an industrial strategy for the country,” said Brown. It could even change the nature of whitecollar lab-coat work, she added. “[It’s] good for scientists who are in it for the science and not just patent chasers, who would no longer have to work at big pharma firms. Working in public pharmaceutical research could be much more equitable, with something more like tenure jobs.”

It might be unrealistic for the government to manufacture every single drug. But the for-profit industry would have to consider the risk of the public sector forcing their golden-goose products to face public competition if they set prices too high. That threat alone could moderate prices all across the industry.

For example, it’s unlikely Aduhelm maker Biogen would have initially priced its Alzheimer’s medication at $56,000, in a move that threatened to singlehandedly bankrupt Medicare, if it knew that came with the risk of a public manufacturer creating a generic version of its multiple sclerosis medication Tecfidera, which accounted for more than a third of the company’s revenue in 2020. (Medicare ultimately decided not to cover the drug widely; Biogen cut the price tag after public outcry—to $28,200.)

At least since Nancy Pelosi first grasped the

Speaker’s gavel in 2007, Democrats have pledged to be committed to regulating the sky-high cost of prescription drugs, and on the verge of passing reform legislation. Unsurprisingly, such an overhaul polls extremely favorably among Democrats and Republicans alike. But even if something finally passes this year, it won’t go far enough to truly reverse the misaligned incentives of the business model.

The most popular refrain from progressives regarding drug prices during the most successful moments of the Medicare for All push has looked to points north, like bulk

California’s public drug manufacturing initiative will begin by producing insulin, the price of which has increased more than tenfold since 1999.

importation from Canada, where drug prices are notably lower. But that solution is hardly durable, and given the era-defining fragility in supply chains, relying on imports is not a long-term solution that can be trusted in moments of crisis. Making needed medications at home is an enduring reform.

California has provided proof of concept for ambitious national programs in the past, setting in motion things like tailpipe emission regulations. Given the state’s size and economic might, a successful foray into public pharma could facilitate the embrace of a program at a national level. Already, a bill has been stranded in Congress since 2018, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced legislation with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) for an Office of Drug Manufacturing within the Department of Health and Human Services. With the tailwind of burgeoning programs at the state level, a public pharmaceutical build-out could be the beginning of a liberalism that actually builds, and a consequential first step toward health decommodification. n

Mars, Inc., is best known for making chocolate bars. But it also owns the most pet hospitals in the U.S., and workers say the conditions are toxic. “Welcome to Hell”

Vanessa Gutierrez of Pas-

saic, New Jersey, loved all animals, but maybe horses the most. She nurtured that love through several summers working as a counselor at a horseback riding camp. With her social media posts dotted with hashtags like #SavingAnimalsOneAtATime and #AgirlsBestFriendWillAlwaysBeHerHorse, she was destined to move into animal care.

Gutierrez loved to prepare the welcoming boards in the hospital rooms, adding the names of the pets who would be seen on a given day. But during her three years at VCA Veterinary Specialists of Connecticut, the tone of her posts took a noticeable shift.

It might have been the pandemic, which thrust immense pressure upon every veterinary worker in the country. The lockdown led many families to fill their lives with pets, increasing the need for health services without adequate resources at pet hospitals to meet the increased demand.

But Gutierrez’s bouts of anxiety and depression seemed to go beyond pandemic-induced stress. In June 2021, she walked away from VCA Specialists of Connecticut, describing the company as “the most toxic place I have ever worked & I feel so much better now that I’m out of there!”

That improved mental state did not hold. On October 27, 2021, Gutierrez died by suicide.

A story she told a month earlier on her public Facebook page may offer some clues as to why. While still working at VCA, Gutierrez went missing from her family for days and was eventually hospitalized for suicidal ideation. When she returned to her job, she found a disciplinary “No call/No show” write-up from her manager, for missing work.

Despite Gutierrez insisting she gave her manager a doctor’s note and that she was listed on the FBI’s missing persons list, VCA still asked for more information about the absence. Gutierrez said that security camera footage would show her physically handing the note to the manager, but the manager claimed to have never received it.

As a last resort, the company told Gutierrez that, regardless of her condition, she was in the wrong for not notifying the company that she would not be at work. “I’m sorry that I didn’t think to stop in the middle of my suicide attempt to call and let Management know that I would not be making it in for my shift,” she wrote.

In her post, Gutierrez said she emailed VCA president Todd Lavender on several occasions to report her concerns. Instead of responding to her, Gutierrez alleged that Lavender forwarded everything to VCA’s HR vice president Maria Druse, who was one of the people Gutierrez named in her messages. “That showed me that either you didn’t even bother to read my emails or you just didn’t care,” she wrote, weeks before her death.

BY JAROD FACUNDO AND BRIAN OSGOOD

Photos from Vanessa Gutierrez’s public Facebook page. She died by suicide last October.

Six days after her death, Gutierrez’s Facebook page was updated with an invitation to join a private group for current and former VCA employees called VCA Employees for Vanessa, to “demand justice for her within the company.” The group, later renamed Justice for Vanessa, currently has 303 members.

The Prospect learned about Vanessa’s story through veterinary professionals who were in close contact with the Gutierrez family following her death. They and the Prospect attempted to reach out to the Gutierrez family for an interview. The family did not respond.

The source of suicidal thoughts can be difficult to deci-

sively pinpoint; it’s never the result of a single event. But according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 90 percent of suicide victims had a diagnosable mental-health condition at the time of their death. In other words, with the proper resources and support networks in place, suicide is preventable.

One common factor in many suicides is stress. And to be sure, veterinary medicine is a pressure-cooker profession, requiring a high tolerance for graphic trauma, just like the human medical field. “I’ve seen extraordinary, unimaginable [animal] suffering,” one veterinary worker who requested anonymity said. “We see what first responders see.” And because many employees on the front lines have a deep connection to animals, having to deal with that suffering day after day can weigh heavily.

The costs of such conditions are borne largely by the newest entries into the profession. According to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median age for veterinary assistants and technicians is 26.7 and 31.8 years old, respectively. Women make up 84 percent of all veterinary assistants and 82 percent of all technicians.

However, while the trauma of pet care looms large in the lives of the young women who experience it, interviews with veterinary professionals identified the parent company of VCA, Mars, Inc., as the greater source of their anguish. Ten employees who worked at Mars facilities across the country, many speaking anonymously due to concerns over retaliation, described how issues like understaffing and tensions between workers and management made a physically and emotionally taxing job increasingly untenable. Furthering this bitterness is the feeling among many workers that their love for animals has been exploited to push them to accept unbearable working conditions, often at the expense of their mental health.

Several workers said that conditions in their workplaces became so bad that they considered taking their own life. When they expressed to management that they had been experiencing suicidal ideation, these workers stated that their mental-health concerns were treated dismissively. They found in Mars not an ally but a source of excessive strain.

That tracks with the social media traces Gutierrez left about her job with VCA. She relentlessly described an exhausting and toxic work environment, exacerbated by an uncaring, hostile corporate culture that imposed severe psychological distress, even after she left the company.

A 2019 study on the veterinary profession reported that male and female veterinary technicians died by suicide at a rate that was 5.0 and 2.3 times greater, respectively, than the general population.

Several posts in online Reddit communities such as r/VetTech also describe struggles of mental health and toxic work conditions across the profession. And technicians and assistants share stories about working conditions in private Facebook groups. Liz Hughston, a licensed veterinary technician and president of the National Veterinary Professionals Union, who has served as an administrator for several private groups, told the Prospect that “based on the countless experiences relayed to me by their employees and our members, Mars appears to be focused solely on profits … workers are mired in cynicism and helplessness.”

In a statement, a Mars Veterinary Health spokesperson said, “We are committed to taking a holistic approach to supporting our Associates’ wellbeing—particularly combatting systemic mental health challenges faced by veterinary professionals—and fostering a culture of safety to help ensure a future where people and pets are thriving.” The spokesperson said that “out of respect for privacy,” they would not comment on Gutierrez or other current or former employees named in this story.

The allegations contrast with the stated intentions of Mars, Inc., a privately owned company typically known for candy brands such as M&M’s and Snickers that is also the largest employer of veterinary professionals in the United States, with over 100,000 employees worldwide. Mars Petcare reported $18 billion in revenue in 2020, according to Statista. In June, Mars, Inc., made Poul Weihrauch, the head of its global pet care business, the new CEO.

The move into veterinary care came out of Mars’s

business in pet food, and it was furthered through a series of rollups of other pet care chains. A 2017 purchase of VCA for an estimated $9.1 billion was among a flurry of veterinary acquisitions over a 15-year period.

In July 2021, a month after Vanessa Gutierrez left the company, Mars Veterinary Health North America announced a $500 million “multi-year investment” in employee mental health, to promote “thriving careers, workforce diversity, and sustainable change across the veterinary profession.” In a press release citing “the evolving needs” of the profession, the company’s president, Doug Drew, said that after “considering feedback from more than 10,000 Associates, we are investing in programs that further enhance their health and well-being.”

But the testimony of Mars’s own workers paints a less sympathetic picture.

In 2014, Morgan VanFleet joined Seattle Veterinary Specialists’ facility in Kirkland, Washington. When she began there, SVS was an independent practice. “Veterinary medicine used to be a trusted profession,” she said. “When I started there were few corporate practices.”

But shortly after she started, SVS was purchased by BluePearl, a veterinary conglomerate. And on October 9, 2015, BluePearl executives announced to their employees that they would be joining Mars Petcare. The merger was touted as providing “unprecedented opportunities for growth and support.”

Over the course of her employment with BluePearl, VanFleet worked at four of its locations in the Seattle area: Kirkland, downtown Seattle, North Seattle, and Renton. But after the Mars deal, day-to-day life on the job worsened.

VanFleet was an emergency room/intensive care unit supervisor at the Kirkland facility, though she reported to two other managers. Despite most facilities scheduling workers for 8-to-12-hour shifts, VanFleet said she normally worked 14 or 15 hours. She said that in one instance she worked a 21-hour shift; understaffing made it impossible for her to leave.

The stress was psychologically reinforced by comments from management, according to VanFleet. She was once told by a supervisor, “You’re never going to make what a nurse makes.” Indeed, average wages for vet assistants and techs are $29,780 and $36,850, respectively, even though they could have supervisory duties and high-pressure responsibilities. A study published in 2019 found that median wages of assistants and technicians did not keep up with the cost of living, even in metropolitan areas where pay for veterinary assistants and technicians was highest.

Though such long shifts could potentially violate wage and hour laws, according to Hughston, state veterinary medical boards are more concerned with adequate licensing or investigating cases of fraud and theft than labor standards. Additionally, the medical boards generally do not mandate patient-to-provider ratios at vet facilities, something that could help prevent understaffing.

In 2014, before the Mars acquisition, VanFleet said she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that causes permanent damage to the nervous system. The next year, she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder, which she cannot confirm is directly related. Instead of being able to make the 30-minute commute to the Kirkland facility, VanFleet was told she could no longer drive so long as she had seizures regularly occurring. The bus to Kirkland and back home took two hours. Eventually, she applied for a transfer to BluePearl’s facility in Renton.

According to VanFleet, she was given the impression in the interview process that she would be able to leave work when her shift ended. Instead, the same understaffing issues led to her again staying for hours. Management chalked up the uncertainty to unforeseen emergency surgeries, but VanFleet insisted that such emergencies, like at any hospital, were common and should have been factored into staff head counts.

The transfer to Renton did not improve VanFleet’s mental state either. She was written up for leaving on time, when her shift technically ended. When she notified a surgeon about an uneven caseload that would cause her to stay more hours than she was scheduled, VanFleet walked away, and the surgeon followed her into a utility room. As the surgeon questioned her about why she was mad in the first place, VanFleet experienced a panic attack. She said, “That evening I nearly completed suicide.”

In a separate shift, while she was at a computer finishing a case and beginning the next one, she experienced shaking symptoms that meant a seizure was soon to come. Her last memory was falling out of her chair, hitting her head on a dog kennel to the right side of her, until EMTs arrived on scene and evacuated her from the facility.

Following the seizure incident, she communicated to management that she needed time to recover, but when they stopped responding to VanFleet’s emails and phone calls, she realized she no longer had a job. “I was fired for having a seizure disorder,” VanFleet alleged.

MMale and female veterinary technicians died by suicide at a rate that was 5.0 and 2.3 times greater, respectively, than the general population.

Mars purchased the VCA chain for $9.1 billion, part of a flurry of veterinary acquisitions.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the exact cause of multiple sclerosis is unknown. But VanFleet alleged that, after leaving BluePearl and obtaining a few months of medical treatment, her symptoms slowed and her seizure disorder stabilized. She can now drive herself freely.

VanFleet blames Mars for her physical condition worsening. “Your health deteriorates because you’re so mentally ill,” she said, explaining that she’s seen in others the physical manifestations of the psychological stress while working for Mars, Inc.: chronic fatigue, weight gain, depression, anxiety, self-harm, and substance use disorders.

Asked about BluePearl, VanFleet was blunt: “I never want to go back.”

Lindsay Smith started working at a Veterinary Specialty

Hospital of the Carolinas in 2017. A year earlier, Mars had purchased the North Carolina facility. Smith initially thought she had found a workplace where she’d be treated like a valued member of a “little family,” committed to a goal that unites many veterinary care workers: a passion for helping animals and their owners. She said that the facility didn’t feel overly corporate and operated with a degree of autonomy.

But in late 2019, through corporate restructuring, the facility was designated as a BluePearl specialty and emergency medicine facility. The little family started to change. Current and former Mars employees who spoke to the Prospect said that, after a corporate takeover, pay was often cut, qualified workers with years of experience were classified as low-skilled, and staffing was not adequate to handle the workload.

“I would work 17, 18-hour shifts due to lack of staffing and because I had a 200-mile round-trip commute, I would stay at the clinic a lot. They had a room the overnight doctor could sleep in,” Smith told the Prospect. “I regularly got told that this was not acceptable and that if I made the decision to stay late and to not go home that I would have to get a hotel room. I really felt like management was deflecting back onto me instead of accepting the fact that they did not have enough staff to handle the workload and they were burning out everyone on the floor.”

Once, while handling a large dog, Smith’s head was knocked against a kennel, and she suffered a concussion so severe that she says she struggled to remember the names of her own children. Smith claimed that BluePearl’s insurance provider initially refused to cover the medical expenses from the injury, leading to several heated phone calls.

Incidents similar to Smith’s are a common feature of veterinary work. Another technician at a Mars facility who requested anonymity told the Prospect, “My hands are currently covered in scratches. I’ve had teeth come very close to my throat.” While working at an emergency facility in Maryland, the technician described a separate incident where a German shepherd bit her colleague’s abdomen, almost killing them.

Following Smith’s head injury, she said she had to wait almost three hours for a shift replacement to arrive before she was allowed to drive herself to the hospital, and then a substantial commute back to her home.

In the weeks of recovery that followed, management reached out on several occasions, not to ask if she was feeling better, but to insist that the facility was short-staffed and she was needed back at work. “I gave that place so much of my blood, sweat, and tears,” said Smith. “And they don’t even ask if I’m all right?”

features at Mars’s facilities, according to workers who spoke to the Prospect. As one veterinary technician who requested anonymity put it, even the most dedicated professional cannot compensate for an understaffed facility. The technician explained that six patients per technician used to be the maximum allowable number. Today, technicians often oversee 18 patients at once.

“You end up deceiving clients,” the technician said. For example, an animal’s vitals need to be checked every hour. At the quickest, one could check vitals in six minutes, but if the patient is on medications or an emergency arises, the process takes longer. This becomes mathematically impossible with 18 patients to monitor.

According to Good Jobs First, which maintains a database of corporate regulatory violations, in 2018 BluePearl received a $20,000 penalty for workplace safety violations for a facility in Tacoma, Washington. In 2021, a VCA in Fairfax, Virginia, received a penalty of $5,163 for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. However, Hughston explained that public documents likely do not reflect the scope of occupational health and safety violations at Mars-owned facilities, because many workers likely do not have the resources or knowledge to file complaints.

Due to the understaffing, when a patient dies, it falls on the same workers who treated the patient to break the news to clients. Because of the intense emotions of telling a client their pet just died, it’s extremely difficult to discuss the financial arrangements, knowing that right after you need to treat your next patient.

At the end of every day, the technician and her coworkers asked themselves, “How many patients did we lose?” She continued, “I would cry driving home from work, sleep for five hours, then cry on my drive to work. You just sit in your car, cry for a bit.” Then she would be greeted during a shift change with lines like “Thank God, you’re here. Welcome to hell.”

Employees said that Mars would attempt to fill understaffing gaps with interns, who are typically either future professionals in training or veterinary medical students completing a yearlong residency. According to the Veterinary Information Network, an online community that provides resources for veterinarians, internships are not regulated by any organizational body, with no set workplace rules, hours, or minimum salaries. Mars employees said interns often worked as many as 18 hours each day.

The technician told the Prospect that a former intern they worked with at a BluePearl facility died by suicide months after their internship ended. Even though the intern’s death took place after leaving BluePearl, she felt like the company bore a measure of responsibility for her and her co-workers’ well-being because they worked so closely with the intern for months. “People are dying for this field. Something needs to change. I can’t bear the weight of losing another friend.”

Another worker who requested anonymity described a night shift where she was left alone for four hours. During that time, 12 emergency cases came in, half of which ultimately required euthanasia. Toward the end of her employment at BluePearl, she experienced what she called a “full-blown psychotic episode” and was hospitalized for five days for suicidal ideation. Afterward, management pulled her into their offices for questioning. “My doctor’s note should’ve been enough,” she said.

She described an environment where people would joke about how they’d rather be dead than show up for work. On her private Facebook page, she wrote a post disclosing her struggles with mental health. Someone on staff must have shared it with her managers, because management reached out to her. She said she was lectured about the importance of the company’s public image and why she shouldn’t post about her mental health.

The Prospect requested documentation of the incident, but the worker said that it’s common for such incidents to be resolved through “private conversations.” The worker alleged that this tactic prevents the creation of a paper trail.

Following the mental-health episode, the woman’s psychiatrist told her it was unsafe for her to re-enter the field. She now collects disability payments for mental and physical health reasons. “Every time someone kills themselves,” she said as we wrapped up our phone call, “we all hear, that could’ve been me.”

According to VanFleet, the company has for years told

workers that their mental and physical exhaustion is “compassion fatigue,” something separate from burnout that relates to “the psychological cost of healing others.” While compassion fatigue may be recognized by the American Psychological Association, Mars frames compassion fatigue as a personal failing, VanFleet claimed, further weighing on her and her colleagues’ psychological stability. “I have been gaslit so much I believe I am the problem,” she said.

To VanFleet, a more accurate term for her and her coworkers’ experiences would be moral distress, given the difficult position of having to balance genuine care for patients with corporate revenue. In one incident, VanFleet elected to provide pain medication to a cat for free. Afterward, she was written up for not refusing treatment because the client couldn’t afford the procedure.

“It’s gutting not being able to work by your values

WWorkers said that feelings of disposability, neglect, and exploitation were common features at Mars’s facilities.

For some workers, the full scope of the toxicity they experienced at Mars did not set in until they had found new jobs elsewhere.

and why you entered the profession in the first place,” VanFleet said. “If you exhibited human weaknesses, you could lose your job.”

A recent Facebook post by a former employee, Brandy Warnick, who worked at a facility acquired by VCA in 2019, speaks to this toxicity as well. For months, staff at the facility implored HR to do something about a doctor who had been brought on in July 2020 to help with staffing shortages. The doctor quickly earned a reputation for her callous treatment of both animals and fellow staff, once picking up a dog by the neck, lifting it off the ground, and screaming in its face in front of a customer. “[HR] consistently blew us off,” Warnick told the Prospect. “At a staff meeting I asked, ‘Is our mental health less important than hers?’”

In April 2022, Warnick drafted an email to the regional HR manager detailing her and her co-workers’ concerns, along with information about the doctor’s previous tenure, where she was allegedly at risk of losing her license over claims of animal abuse. VCA finally took action, but not against the doctor. Warnick was told to leave the facility, and says that VCA called the local police department to ensure that she left quietly.

“I have absolutely no idea why I lost my job … other than I wouldn’t support an abusive Dr and watch my staff be abused,” Warnick stated in the Facebook post. “This company is choosing profit over the mental health, well-being and fair labor for every staff member at that hospital.”

Many workers stated that the company is aware of mental-health issues among its workforce. But early solutions amounted to little more than personal self-care tips, VanFleet said. For example, management encouraged workers to consider journaling, doing yoga, and meditating.

More recently, the company has implemented programs specifically to address mental health. In a video on Mars’s website, a veterinarian says that a two-day mental-health and first-aid training sponsored by the company gave her the tools she needed to support veterinary staff. “I genuinely feel that the training that I was given, and the support that I was able to give, helped [veterinary professionals] get better and back to work.”

The Mars spokesperson told the Prospect, “A support strategy needs to be multi-faceted, and we are on a multi-year journey to invest in and build layers of support.”

In 2019, Banfield, another Mars-owned chain, announced ASK (Assess, Support, Know), a “first-ofits-kind program” for suicide prevention. The two-hour training sessions, in partnership with VetFolio, a resource portal founded by the nonprofit North American Veterinary Community, were given in person to 19,000 employees a year later. The training is now available online.

A social worker featured in the training tells viewers, “You don’t have to be a mental-health professional to provide meaningful support to people in mental distress. All you need is the confidence and willingness to ASK.”

The training session advises participants to assess their colleague’s potential mental-health episode by asking open-ended questions. Next, they are counseled to offer support through “active listening and empathetic statements,” and get to know what resources and professional help is available, including suicide prevention hotlines, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the veterinary professionals support organization Not One More Vet.

The recommendations amount to asking vet staff to be conscientious. “ASK is not intended to be counseling or treatment,” the narrator states. “It is intended to offer hope through empathy, caring, connection, and by referring them to professional help.”

At the end of the training, the social worker tells viewers to consider using paid time off, to take breaks throughout the day, and to express gratitude with their fellow colleagues. Suggested activities to “recharge the mind” include journaling, mindful breathing, stretching and meditation exercises, and a short mind-wander walk. These are the same self-care tips that were part of Mars’s earlier efforts.

Hidden within ASK’s terms and conditions, VetFolio states that they and their business partners will not be liable for any damages sustained from using their services. In addition, there is a forced arbitration clause, blocking workers or their families from participating in a class action lawsuit against VetFolio.

Starting earlier this year, BluePearl and VCA associates could get treatment through the telehealth provider Lyra Health for up to 12 free sessions per year. Lyra Health asserts that 76 percent of VCA associates who used their services reported seeing improvements. But Hughston explained that there’s a strong stigma against speaking up about one’s mental health, because so many workers have been retaliated against or know of others who have. “Why would they sign up when they know what’s going to happen to them?”

Earlier this year, a former Lyra therapist named Megha Reddy told BuzzFeed that the company’s “productivity-based” bonus structure incentivizes therapists to churn patients out. Reddy was expected, as a parttime therapist, to have a new slate of patients every six to ten weeks. And with a cap of 12 free sessions per year, the discretion therapists would normally possess to decide if a patient no longer needs treatment is out of their control.

Patients are periodically sent “outcomes surveys,” and Lyra Health claims the data collected will be confiden-

tial, anonymized, and aggregated. Yet, buried within its HIPAA notice page, Lyra states, “We can use and share your [protected health information] to support our business operations.” Lyra Health’s terms of use also include a forced arbitration clause. For many of those who spoke to the Prospect, programs such as Lyra Health are just a way for the company to check off a box and say that it cares about its workers’ mental well-being.

In recent weeks, Mars has announced a new mentalhealth program for BluePearl facilities called “Dare to Self-Care,” which repackages the same tips that it promoted during VanFleet’s tenure and the ASK era. The Prospect obtained documents from the new program, which included suggesting to employees that they set boundaries between themselves and the animals they care for. The new program acknowledges that while there are limitations to self-care strategies, employees should still consider activities like exercising, eating well, spending time with friends, and taking vacations as a way to manage their “caregiving burnout.”

A veterinary professional from the West Coast who requested anonymity said that, while the new program is helpful in the individual sense, they still felt that the proliferation of self-care strategies bypasses how Mars, Inc., contributes to such emotional distress.

If Mars admitted that its working conditions are impos-

sible, it would be an acknowledgment of its role in fostering a stressful and often desperate environment. Workers suggested that Mars could maintain proper staffing of not just technicians and assistants, but of dedicated social workers for clients and employees. (The Mars spokesperson said they are expanding their network of in-house social workers.) In addition, its mental-health treatment could better match what workers endure.

But this is not how those who have worked with Mars characterize the company. “It’s set up for maximum profit,” one worker told the Prospect. “There’s no concern about how quickly they’re burning people out.”

One way to ensure proper staffing and ensure worker concerns are heard is through unionization. But those initiatives in the veterinary industry have struggled.

Some grassroots organizing has begun on social media, with workers connecting and sharing their stories and finding commonalities in their experiences. But after a successful organizing drive in early 2018 at a VCA clinic in San Francisco that received help from the local longshoremen’s union, VCA resisted bargaining on the initial contract, earning an August 2019 complaint from the National Labor Relations Board. A year later, VCA shut the facility down, stifling the union effort.

In May 2018, workers at a BluePearl facility in North Seattle voted 46 to 4 to join the National Veterinary Professionals Union. Among its first organizers was Morgan VanFleet, spurred by how BluePearl fired her after her seizure incident. But in June 2021, BluePearl announced they would be shutting down emergency services at the hospital. The North Seattle facility is now permanently closed.

Hughston told the Prospect that before the North Seattle closure, approximately 60 to 75 percent of the bargaining unit had left because improved benefits were offered at other nearby facilities. “Mars hammered the [North Seattle] practice relentlessly and bargained at the edge of legality.”

An additional hardship for organizing is that industry working conditions lead to high turnover rates. According to the American Veterinary Medical Foundation, as of 2016, most practices averaged 30 to 50 percent turnover, and given today’s tighter labor markets those numbers may have increased.

As the world’s largest practice owner, the way Mars treats its employees and clients shapes industry standards. Pablo Ruiz authored a 2019 study on corporate consolidation in veterinary medicine that specifically examined Mars Petcare’s outsized influence. Ruiz told the Prospect, “Large group, corporate-owned veterinary practices should be able to provide better working conditions and wages to their support staff, but this hasn’t happened to this day.”

For some of the workers, the full scope of the toxicity they experienced while working for Mars did not set in until they had found new jobs elsewhere. “I had become so stressed, so much less patient with others, when I was working there,” said one worker. “After leaving BluePearl, I was able to get off of my anxiety medication. I started having fun in my life again, started waking up happy and excited to see my kids.”

Many of the workers who spoke to the Prospect characterized Vanessa Gutierrez’s suicide as an entirely avoidable tragedy that epitomized everything wrong with the current state of veterinary medicine.

One veterinary technician who requested anonymity said that half the deaths by suicide she knows of in her life were by other veterinary professionals. The technician said, mournfully, “It’s paralyzing hearing about the suicidal ideation among your co-workers.” n A slide from an ASK (Assess, Support, Know) training, which a Mars affiliate established in 2019.

“Old Springdale was very much a good old boy town. Old Springdale had no sense of culture, no sense of wanting to move forward, no desire to move forward,” she told me. Old Springdale—like most of Springdale’s current city council, which is all white except one member—is more likely to be found at Rodeo of the Ozarks than at the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, which Gachuzo-Colin founded, or at any event celebrating the large immigrant communities who make up most of the workers in the city’s poultry processing plants, she said.

Springdale is the heart of Arkansas’s poultry industry, and a center of the nation’s meat industry. Tyson Foods, the secondlargest meatpacker in the world and the country’s largest poultry producer, was founded and headquartered here. Tyson is the largest employer in Springdale and the third-largest in the state.

Tyson and the rest of the poultry industry have shaped Springdale’s economy and population, as well as the rural economy in the surrounding hills, over the last eight decades. Feed mills and processing plants line the highway; workers cluster in neighborhoods near the plants. The names of the poultry industry’s local entrepreneurs— Tyson, George, Parsons, and more—are attached to streets, parks, and facilities around the city, from John Tyson Elementary to Parsons Stadium, where the rodeo is held. Springdale is an industry town through and through.

One reason the poultry industry’s monopolization of Springdale flies under the radar as much as it does is because of another, flashier “company town” less than half an hour north. Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to the corporate headquarters of Walmart, and to several members of the company’s founding family, one of the richest families in the world.

In recent years, several of the Waltons, their family foundation, the local regional economic development council, and a web of interconnected investment and real estate firms have exerted massive amounts of influence over the northwest Arkansas region, which in addition to Springdale and Bentonville includes the cities of Rogers and Fayetteville, home to the state’s flagship university.

“Each city is owned by a company. Springdale is Tyson, Bentonville is Walmart,” said Rumba Yambú, the founder of the organization inTRANSitive, which advocates for the rights of trans immigrants in the state. “Because they have such power, it’s been easy for folks to subscribe to or obey the rules that they have unwittingly put out for northwest Arkansas.”

Yambú, now in Little Rock, immigrated to Springdale from El Salvador with their mother, who, like other immigrants, came to work in the poultry industry.

Walmart and Tyson—two of the world’s largest companies—play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs. In fact, northwest Arkansas could be considered a critical locus of what some refer to as “neoliberalism”—the marketization and privatization of governing, championed in part by President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during Tyson and Walmart’s surge to power and friendly with both companies and families. (Hillary Clinton sat for six years on Walmart’s board of directors.) Neither is a “company town” in the traditional mining or cotton mill sense. But with weak local governments and a severe lack of alternative capital, they’re company towns for the public-private age, that can live and die on markets far beyond their control.

The success of Tyson and Walmart resulted in a windfall for many people in northwest Arkansas, most notably in the form of stock options, corporate jobs, and the ability to remain on otherwise unprofitable farmland. The companies provided jobs, and the families’ philanthropic arms provided funds for infrastructure, development, and education.

But the flip side is apparent in the region, too: workers stuck in cycles of poverty because of the companies’ low pay and lack of benefits, a culture of silence around criticisms or dissatisfaction with the corporations because of how much power they wield, the emptying out and pricing up of the rural hinterlands in service of regional urbanization driven by corporate investment. The infrastructure and development initiatives cater largely to upper-middleclass lifestyles, not to those working in factories, in warehouses, or on the retail floor. These contradictions are fundamental to company towns—amenities on the one hand, exploitation and undemocratic institutions on the other.

“Northwest Arkansas is our home and by investing in our own backyard and recognizing the potential of our people, we’ve helped elevate the region to a global stage

Walmart and Tyson play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs.

and built a place we’re proud to call home,” Tyson said in a statement provided to the Prospect. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.

The northwest Arkansas metro region is

tiny by almost any measure—the 131stlargest metropolitan statistical region in the country with just over half a million residents. The largest city, Fayetteville, has a population of 95,230 as of the most recent census. Arkansas is one of the poorest states in one of the poorest regions in the country, and until the 1970s northwest Arkansas was one of the poorest parts of the state.

Walmart was founded in Bentonville in 1962; today, the city plays host to Walmart’s corporate headquarters, a slew of schools, art museums, and public parks, and hundreds if not thousands of offices of Walmart suppliers. Its residents are largely white-collar businesspeople; the median income is over $80,000 and the poverty rate just 7.6 percent. The city is over 70 percent white.

Tyson was initially founded as a chickenhauling company in Springdale in 1935; it eventually expanded into the other areas of the poultry industry and by the 1960s was a vertically integrated production company. Located about 20 miles down the highway from Bentonville, Springdale is home to Tyson’s corporate headquarters and two of its flagship processing plants (several other poultry producers, including George’s, another local company, and Cargill also operate plants in the city). The city’s median income is $50,343, and it has a poverty rate of 17.6 percent.

When large-scale poultry farming came on the scene in the 1940s, many farmers viewed it as a lifeline for the regional economy, allowing generations of Arkansans to stay on their land rather than moving to cities. Walmart also catered to the type of small towns that dot northwest

Tyson runs processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries, and contracts with poultry growers in the northwest Arkansas region.

Arkansas. Its first store opened in Rogers in 1962, with others opening across the rural South soon after.

The incalculable wealth of these two companies and their founding families has been extracted from other places, including their own rural hinterlands. It’s been well documented how the arrival of a Walmart impacts small businesses and the local economy in a given town, lowering wages and driving competitors out of business. The company also takes advantage of federal and state tax breaks, grants, and abatements, receiving at least $241,531,675 in overall subsidies, several million of that in Arkansas, according to Good Jobs First.

Tyson’s business model, especially in rural markets where it can exert near-monopsony control over chicken farmers, is similarly exploitative: The company traps chicken farmers in contracts over which they have very little say, a practice for which it has come under scrutiny for years. The working conditions in its processing plants are notoriously poor, and workers notoriously underpaid and overworked, a condition that came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic when the company worked directly with the Trump administration to draft the executive order used as justification to keep meatpacking plants open even as workers inside were infected and died. Managers at one Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, notoriously bet on how many of their workers would get infected with COVID, according to a November 2020 lawsuit. Hundreds of workers in Tyson’s Springdale plants contracted COVID, yet they remained open. Tyson has received roughly $63,948,020 in subsidies from the state and localities in Arkansas, per Good Jobs First.

While Bentonville is mostly white and relatively wealthy, Springdale is segregated, with higher-income white residents living in different neighborhoods and attending different schools than the working-class immigrants who provide labor for the city’s poultry plants. The Har-Ber Meadows neighborhood was founded in 1990 as a New Urbanist community, and census tracts in the vicinity of Har-Ber High School are more than 85 percent white in a town that’s one of the most diverse in the state. Meanwhile, the area around Springdale High School, on the east side of town, is majority-Hispanic.

Most of the Latino immigrants working at Tyson plants come from Mexico or El Salvador. A substantial population also hails from the Marshall Islands. Due to radioactive contamination from when the United States conducted dozens of nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshallese people have the ability to live and work in the United States without visas, and many have come to Springdale.

According to the most recently available census data, over 70 percent of the more than 14,200 noncitizen immigrants in Springdale

make less than $35,000 a year. Immigrant workers at Tyson’s plants made as little as $12.50 an hour until a recent boost to a $15.20 minimum last year. Its corporate workforce is much whiter and makes much more money. In addition to processing plants, Tyson also owns feed mills and hatcheries in the city, and contracts with poultry farmers (called “growers”) in rural Ozarks counties, including Benton and Washington, who “grow” the birds from chick to fullgrown and ship them back into town to be processed. With its processing workforce concentrated in the city’s core, and many of its contract poultry-growing operations in the rural reaches, Tyson’s economic reach is powerful, and its power over policymaking on the local, state, and federal levels gives it a unique place in a small metro economy.

It can be hard to cleanly separate the impact

that the Tyson and Walton families, and their respective companies, have had on the cities they occupy. The Waltons and the Tysons’ interests in regional development go back to the founding of the Northwest Arkansas Council by Walton, Tyson, and local trucking and transportation magnate J.B. Hunt in 1990. Their growth has been intertwined with each other, and their political and social spheres of influence are similar.

One distinction might be that Tyson’s economic impact has been felt by a broader swath of the regional population for much longer than Walmart’s. The poultry industry reshaped the regional economy before Walmart’s arrival on the scene reshaped national retailing. In contrast, Walmart’s impact on northwest Arkansas as a region exists on two vectors. First, there’s the company’s corporate footprint, including its implicit requirement that its suppliers and vendors have offices in the area, and a new 350-acre campus in Bentonville set to open in 2025; second, there are the family’s philanthropic and development activities.

The Waltons, whose family net worth of roughly $212 billion vastly outstrips the Tysons’ roughly $3 billion, have been steering the ship through their family philanthropy, the Walton Family Foundation, which makes more than $55 million worth of grants annually through its “Home Region” program, and invests many millions more into special projects, which include many efforts in northwest Arkansas. Bentonville’s ruling family has built a city—and increasingly, a region—with the kinds of amenities you need to attract a toptier corporate workforce: museums, private schools and well-funded charters, hotels, upscale restaurants, mountain biking trails, and private clubs.

For example, the foundation and Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam, financed the construction of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a worldclass art museum in Bentonville that opened in 2011. Exempt from state sales and use

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville in 2011, with grants from the Walton family and foundation.

With an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, there is no meaningful check on their power.

taxes by legislative fiat, Crystal Bridges holds in its collection paintings like Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton, Warhol’s Dolly Parton, and Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter. A satellite campus for contemporary art, The Momentary, opened a few years ago in an old Kraft Cheese factory. Over the years, the entire project has cost the Waltons well over $1.3 billion.

The Waltons, and increasingly the Tysons, have seeded and funded other public art organizations like CACHE, which operates two art hubs, one in Springdale and one in Bentonville. The Waltons’ involvement in art, which some local artists feel has gentrified the local scene, is not purely philanthropic; the Runway Group, the two grandsons’ investment group, puts money toward public art as well through OZ Art. When either family foundation funds organizations that impact the region’s immigrant or low-income populations, it is often through grants for cultural programming, entrepreneurship, or direct service—not bad things to fund, but also not things that will change a regional economy constructed around haves and have-nots.

Many regional economic development, research, and planning functions are undertaken by the Northwest Arkansas Council, which has 100 members, most of them companies. The council has been instrumental in projects like extending Interstate 49 into Missouri, incubating and supporting nonprofits, and helping to shape downtowns and “cultural destinations” including a regional greenway, the University of Arkansas, and local museums and theaters.

The bulk of the council’s funding comes from the Walton Family Foundation, according to my review of Walton Foundation tax filings and the Northwest Arkansas Council’s income reports (as a 501(c)(3), the NWA Council Foundation is not required to disclose its donors, but it does disclose the amount of contributions it received in total). According to my analysis, the foundation provided 47 percent of the council foundation’s total contributions in 2020, 82 percent of the total in 2019, and 53 percent of the total in 2018.

Both Bentonville and Springdale have been beneficiaries of Walton family largesse. The city of Bentonville has received $12.9 million, going to projects like the regional greenway and park design, as well as funding for “complete street” infrastructure and a bike and pedestrian master plan for the city. Over the years, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $10.15 million to the city of Springdale, the vast majority of that in the last decade. That includes millions of dollars for the construction of bike trails and a greenway, and $2.8 million for a new municipal campus in the city, the brainchild of the foundation’s Design Excellence Program.

The municipal campus will occupy several city blocks near the newly revitalized downtown, home to mixed-use developments spearheaded in part by a real estate and development group affiliated with Tom and Steuart Walton, Sam’s grandsons.

Unlike its Walton counterpart, the Tyson Family Foundation flies under the radar. It does not have a web presence or a readily apparent grantmaking process. Until recently, the Tyson Foundation’s relatively small grants were primarily used to support hospitals, colleges, and scholarship funds. That has changed in recent years with the appointment of Olivia Tyson, the millennial daughter of John R. Tyson, as the foundation’s president.

A self-identified philanthropist, Olivia Tyson has reoriented her family foundation’s giving strategy around education, culture, and arts organizations in Springdale. The company still maintains a more traditional presence in the community, donating chicken to local schools and food banks. But the foundation has spent more than $1 million to fund “reimaginings” of two Arkansas arts organizations, one of them Arts One (formerly the Arts Center of the Ozarks), as well as several art “activations” at a former hardware store downtown. The foundation has also put money toward downtown Springdale’s revitalization work and towards CACHE, the Northwest Arkansas Council’s local art hub.

The sense in parts of the local nonprofit world is that a new generation of Tysons is trying, in some sense, to play catch-up to the new generation of Waltons, tagging along on the coattails of the family that cemented itself more than a decade ago as the patrons of Arkansas culture and community. A grant contract I reviewed requires grantees to hashtag #tysonfamilyfoundation whenever they post about their projects on social media, an indication that the family is interested in burnishing its image, much like the Waltons have burnished theirs.

One of the most obvious ironies of Walton

and Tyson corporate and foundation funding is the amount of money that has been poured into support for local small businesses and small-scale agriculture by the two companies perhaps most responsible for the decline of small businesses and the rise of industrialized agriculture nationwide. They are insufficiently patching part of a huge hole that they created with their price-slashing, wage-cutting, local economy–destroying activities, and patting themselves on the back for it.

Yet with an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, and with regional economic development initiatives dependent on their founding families’ wealth, there is no meaningful check on the power wielded by these billionaires and their Fortune 100 companies. It’s not just the Walton and Tyson family foundations that are dependent on the well-being of the companies; other local foundations and lots of local wealth have been created on the back of Walmart and Tyson’s jobs and stocks. The companies’ growth is directly tied to the amount of capital in the area.

The Waltons are laser-focused on creating an environment that caters to the kind of people they want working at their corporate headquarters, rather than for a competitor. Springdale is comparatively underresourced, if you measure in terms of how much a city looks like a place uppermiddle-class people would want to come to. Their development efforts and amenities have been much more spare and less heavyhanded, at least until recently.

This is a big difference in the way that Bentonville and Springdale treat their company-town employees. Springdale’s processing workforce is much more interchangeable than Bentonville’s middle managers. A processing line worker is disposable; high turnover is a reality and even an expectation.

Springdale did not invest heavily in its downtown until Tyson announced it was moving parts of its corporate workforce there.

Gachuzo-Colin, the Springdale city council candidate, is frustrated with the lack of attention paid to the side of town where working-class people live, who benefit less from the economic development and revitalization plans, the park projects, and the arts investments than the wealthy side. “You’re not talking to the folks in your city when you’re building this shit. You’re talking to the new folks in the city. Why?” she said. “Those Tyson workers, those George’s workers, those Cargill workers. Those are the people y’all should be trying to talk to. Those are the people who have busted their ass.”

Where Gachuzo-Colin lives, children walk to the local elementary school in the street because there are no sidewalks. She compares their experience to the experience of kids on the white side of town, where the sidewalks, she says, are big enough for golf carts. “Those are beautiful streets, ain’t got no potholes, got none of that,” she told me. “I am going to make it my business to make sure that just like you can allocate the tax money over there, you should be able to allocate the tax money on the other side of town. What’s the sense in thriving so that people outside of the city can see all this great stuff, when the people who are in the city are not impacted by all this great stuff?”

Indeed, one of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education. The Walton Foundation’s early roots were in the school choice and charter school movement, and it has not left that goal behind. Much of northwest Arkansas’s vast and growing public, charter, and private school network is supported by Walton Foundation donations—including nearly $8 million to the Thaden School, a private school near downtown Bentonville established in the mold of Andover and Exeter, as well as nearly $4 million to the Arkansas Arts Academy, and grants for local organizations that help parents (including low-income parents) decide where, out of this smorgasbord of options, to send their children.

Magaly Licolli, the co-founder of workers’ justice organization Venceremos, which organizes poultry workers in the state, explained that the immigrant workforce in Springdale’s poultry plants lives in almost perpetual precarity, while the dangers of the industry make it nearly impossible for them to get ahead. “We have this gap of workers who don’t know where to go, what to do if they can’t find other jobs. They have to rely on charity, or whatever access they have to health care or food stamps,” Licolli said. “It keeps them in that status forever, in these cycles of poverty. And it’s just sad that these immigrants came for a better life, and at a certain point they felt they had a better life, and then everything gets lost immediately as soon as they get injured or lose their jobs.”

The Downtown Springdale Alliance and

Downtown Bentonville, Inc., which function as public-private partnerships that work in coordination with local government, indicate just how far corporate capture has gone. Both have received substantial funding from the Tysons and the Waltons in recent years.

Tyson has played a major role in downtown Springdale’s revitalization plans, kicking off with a $1 million donation in 2015, and announcing the move of hundreds of its corporate workforce to a downtown campus located on the site of the company’s original hatchery. That was a centerpiece of the eventual downtown master plan, which devotes an entire section of downtown to the “Tyson District,” and a streetscape “designed to support the new office and retail uses of Tyson Foods Inc.’s new Downtown Springdale facility.” Since 2015, Tyson has opened two more facilities in downtown Springdale: an automation and robotics research center and a second corporate office.

Both cities’ plans highlight community engagement and stakeholder listening sessions, but the scope of possibility in downtown Springdale was limited by the overarching point of the revitalization: attracting professional-class millennials and explicitly urbanizing the region on the model of Austin, Raleigh-Durham, and other growing metro regions around the country.

The 13-person steering committee for the Bentonville Community Plan adopted in 2018 included five people with direct Walmart and Walton connections, as well as a “resident-at-large” appointment who had spent 15 years working for Walmart, the executive of a retail software company, and the director of Visit Bentonville, the city’s advertising and promotion department, which has received more than $620,000 in Walton Foundation funding over the last several years.

The Downtown Springdale Revitalization plan was similarly stacked. The steering committee’s chair is a Tyson Foods executive, and Carl George of the George’s, Inc., poultry family was on the committee as well, representing his family’s company and the Downtown Springdale Alliance, another public-private partnership heavily funded with Walton and Tyson funds. George was once president of the Downtown Springdale Alliance.

The organization’s board is also filled with poultry and retail representation, including the president of Arvest Bank (which is chaired by Walton family member Jim Walton), a vice president of Tyson Foods, a representative from the Tyson Family Foundation, and the secretary of Blue Crane Development, a Walton project that has properties around northwest Arkansas. The Tyson Family Foundation has invested just over $30,000 in the Downtown Springdale Alliance; the Walton Foundation has given about $1.6 million.

Blue Crane’s properties include a Springdale development called 202 Railside, near Tyson’s new corporate complex in downtown Springdale, billed as an “eclectic, premium” community for those looking for “urban sophistication.” 202 Railside is adjacent to one of the lowest-income census tracts in Springdale, and it offers a “workforce housing” program for people under certain incomes (for one person, the income limit is $61,824; for a family of six, $102,451—still well above average incomes for many Springdale residents). Would-be residents must pass credit and criminal background checks to qualify.

Downtown Bentonville, once a sleepy town square with a Confederate statue at its center (removed in 2020 after police teargassed racial justice demonstrators in the square; the statue is being transferred to a different park), has been completely remade

One of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education.

in the last 15 years, transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like. Crafted in Walmart’s folksy, down-home image, downtown Bentonville tries to invite you in to its charm—come try an ice cream cone from the Walmart Spark Café, or shop at the original Walton’s 5 & 10, with Sam Walton’s old red Ford F-150 parked out front. The manufactured smalltown atmosphere in Bentonville comes at the expense of its authentic manifestations across the country.

Unsurprisingly, the Walton Foundation has invested handsomely in Downtown Bentonville, Inc., giving $1.12 million since 2015, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands granted to Visit Bentonville’s publicity operations. Through a maze of dozens of shell companies identifiable by their usage of two P.O. boxes connected to the Waltons, various members of the Walton family, and Walton Enterprises (the family’s corporate arm), the family owns chunks of land in downtown Bentonville and beyond—much of it near mountain biking trails and greenways developed with Walton money, through millions in grants to the nonprofit NWA Trailblazers. The grandsons’ real estate development group has had a hand in BlakeSt., a private downtown Bentonville club, and high-end local restaurants, hotels, and event spaces in Bentonville.

Family members continue to buy land throughout the region, including in rural reaches of the Ozarks near the Buffalo National River and the Kings River, two major outdoor recreation destinations, where there are also landing strips for a recreational aviation organization piloted by the Runway Group named Fly OZ. Though the Waltons aren’t the only ones shaping the future of northwest Arkansas, the amount of money at their disposal often ensures that if they want something, it will get done.

The family doesn’t necessarily see it that way, though they implicitly recognize the power imbalance. “We by no means are pulling puppet strings or telling people what to do,” Steuart Walton told Downtown Bentonville’s media arm when asked about the perception that the Waltons control Bentonville. “I’m a little bit reminded of church night supper … Some people would bring a freaking salad bowl this big, and it was great, and even with everybody digging in they couldn’t eat it all. And some people would bring a 12-piece KFC, and that’s great too. Everybody’s pulling in the same direction.”

The dominance goes beyond economic development. As I reported for Facing South, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Arkansas’s Economic Recovery Task Force was led by Steuart Walton and staffed by several people deep in the Walton family’s web of organizations, including three

Downtown Bentonville has been transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like.

people who then worked at the Runway Group and two others collectively referred to in meeting minutes as the “Walton Team.” As I also reported for Facing South, when COVID-19 was ripping through Tyson plants in Springdale in the spring and summer of 2020, a fact consistently downplayed by the company, it involved Springdale’s mayor, Doug Sprouse, in its PR campaigns.

The crisis PR team drafted comments that were eventually attributed to Sprouse in Tyson press releases. In a promotional video filmed by and released for the company, Sprouse said, “What we’re finding out is that much more often than not [COVID-19] is being spread when they’re not at work, when employees are not at work.” A CDC team assessing COVID-19 outbreaks in the area at the time found that it was in fact “very difficult to attempt to disentangle” workplace spread from community spread, and that 40 percent of the first cases in household-wide outbreaks in northwest Arkansas’s Hispanic population and 28 percent in its Marshallese population were people who worked in poultry processing plants.

“When we organize an action, we know that Tyson already knows ahead of the game what our plans are because there is this connection” between the company and local officials, said Licolli of workers’ justice group Venceremos, which led organizing around outbreaks at Springdale poultry plants during COVID.

Emails I obtained in a 2020 FOIA request bear this out. A senior vice president of Arvest Bank emailed the city in June 2020 ahead of a planned protest for poultry workers’ rights, saying, “We have to be careful that I don’t have a drive-up ATM anywhere nearby that has lots of cash in it that protestors could try to attack or have any of our employees in or around the area, move any bank vehicles, etc. This is just crazy!!” Sprouse, the mayor, forwarded her email to Jeff Wood, Tyson’s director of state and local government relations and a member of the board of directors of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. He also forwarded Wood the eventual permit Venceremos obtained for their protest.

In July, the Crystal Bridges museum opened

an exhibit called “We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy.” Featuring an original copy of the Constitution, one of 11 known to exist, the exhibit puts the Constitution in conversation with other pieces of Tyson’s corporate headquarters has spurred Springdale’s downtown revitalization to attract a professional-class workforce. art that “provide diverse American perspectives on the nation’s founding principles,” according to the museum’s press release.

The museum includes art celebrating labor activists, a form of democratic organizing to which Walmart and Tyson are both actively hostile, and abortion rights organizers, in a state with a strict trigger law that now bans abortions, after Roe was overturned. It’s jarring to have the notion of people’s rule uplifted in a museum supported by funds from multinational corporations that have run roughshod over state and local policymaking, development, and labor rights. Various Waltons and Tysons (and the companies’ PACs) have donated handsomely to politicians of both parties in Arkansas, but the majority of their donations in recent cycles are to Republicans, many of the same ones involved in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, attacks on public schools, and tax cuts for the wealthy—in the state legislature and in Congress.

Democracy is a radical notion, and one that has been undermined by corporate and billionaire activities in the northwest Arkansas region.

Many people in northwest Arkansas, including those involved with local community organizations and nonprofits, feel deeply indebted to the Waltons and Tysons, and are thus unable or unwilling to voice criticisms of them, even when they believe it’s deserved. A story I wrote about Waltonmotivated economic development’s impact on affordable housing in June resulted in a slew of off-the-record emails and DMs from people formerly or currently affiliated with organizations that receive funding from them. People are afraid that criticizing the powers that be will jeopardize their or their family members’ ability to get a job in the area. This culture of silence extends to the media. For many years, Jim Walton was the primary owner of the two largest daily papers in northwest Arkansas, and the new Axios Local newsletter, launched last year (disclosure: I was recruited for a reporter role early in the process and ultimately chose not to pursue it) hired a former Tyson spokesperson, Worth Sparkman, as one of its two reporters. Its daily newsletters are frequently sponsored by Walmart, the Walton Foundation, Ropeswing Hospitality (another group run by Tom and Steuart Walton), or the Northwest Arkansas Council.

The ability of businessmen to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many residents to vote.

In these two company towns, the amenities on offer are targeted toward the middle and upper-middle-class professionals like those Walmart, Tyson, and their families’ affiliated ventures hope to attract to the area. When the families and the corporations fund or draw attention to workingclass and immigrant communities, it is through grants to direct-service or cultural organizations. Systemic critiques of why working-class and immigrant communities struggle—critiques that would indict the companies on whose back the region’s growth is built—are much less welcome. That’s one reason Yambú moved inTRANSitive to Little Rock, they told me.

“The corporations create this way you should be as the perfect queer person. You can work for Walmart and be part of Walmart Pride, and go to the pride parades, but you’ve got to behave in the way that an ideal queer person would,” Yambú said. “They’re the ones that will go and have drinks with them and talk nicely and laugh and wave a flag, but they won’t pressure them or try to get them to speak up when it comes to our rights being taken away.”

Last year, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. Despite a sustained and targeted campaign to get the Waltons to speak out against the bill as it made its way through the state legislature, the family was quiet until after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill (his veto was overridden by the state legislature). Tom Walton, the Home Region Program Committee chair, released a statement saying the family foundation was “alarmed” by the policy and that it “sends the wrong message to those willing to invest in or visit our state.” True to the family’s market-oriented stance, the statement asked state leaders to consider the impact of the legislation on future economic growth and the state’s potential. Yet Walmart contributed $160,300 to anti-trans lawmakers in Arkansas, and Tyson gave $20,009, according to an analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy.

The lip service given to marginalized and working-class people, without meaningful action to support them, grates on some Springdale residents. “Everywhere you go you see little signs in Spanish, you see little signs in Marshallese, and that’s cute and everything. But what the fuck was that supposed to do?” said Gachuzo-Colin. “They have the ability to build a state-of-the-art park every six months. But you can’t figure out how to find a space to house people?”

Springdale’s recent outward veneer of concern for and inclusion of the city’s minority communities feels like a small victory, Gachuzo-Colin said, in the face of the city’s not-so-distant past as a sundown town. But it also feels like an attempt to brush over the inequities created by the industries that support Springdale—inequities of class, of race, and of country of origin.

The ability of businessmen and wealthy white people to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many Springdale residents to vote. Twenty-three percent of the city’s population is foreignborn, and 71 percent of those—roughly 14,240 people—are not U.S. citizens. As city council members consider new developments, new apartment complexes, and new park projects, Gachuzo-Colin says, they’re rubber-stamping projects that mostly aid the moneyed people in the city or the moneyed people whom the economic development projects are bringing in. The immigrant workers mostly have no political voice.

The wealth of funding available in northwest Arkansas creates a bubble of sorts, with a hard outside limit for how far critiques of power and money can go. Northwest Arkansas is both the best place in the state to be a nonprofit and, if you’re making a systemic critique of power, the worst. Foundations with corporate ties will fund what Yambú refers to as “ideal queers,” or charitable organizations with specific missions, but shy away from workers’ justice organizations, labor organizations, or nonprofits with more explicitly radical missions, ones that make systemic critiques of corporate influence and wealth. Licolli and Yambú both told me that they feel that the reason their organizations succeed is purely because of funders from out of state, who believe in their radical missions and are not tied to Arkansas’s business elite.

“There is a lot of need in Arkansas, but there is never this question about why there’s so much need in Arkansas,” said Licolli. “Not only the nonprofits that provide service, but also the organizations that call themselves grassroots or pro-immigrant that really don’t want to talk about the impact of these corporations, because people are afraid of losing their funding or losing their jobs.”

Others in the region’s nonprofit and community organizing spaces feel more conflicted than that—they believe their work is important, and would be impossible without funding, but are also aware of the limitations inherent in the system as it currently exists. Northwest Arkansas is not alone in this reliance on philanthropy; it is a situation nonprofits nationwide find themselves in, a creation in part of the United States tax code and America’s reticence to break up big companies and tax their wealthy profiteers.

On its face, northwest Arkansas can look like a place with thriving communities and a democratic spirit. The ad campaigns of the Walton grandsons and the Northwest Arkansas Council certainly sell it as such. But the reality is much more complex. Local governments and development policies at the behest of corporations, who also control the economic outcomes of most of their cities’ residents, are perhaps not democratic at all. When participation in community work is all but contingent on adherence to deregulatory market norms propagated by two of the country’s largest companies, the boundaries on what is possible, and what can be conceived to be possible, are remarkably narrow.

In northwest Arkansas, the bounds are a commitment to capitalism, vertical integration, and monopoly control; to the belief in entrepreneurship and market-based ideologies as the solution to all social and economic problems. The problem is that, as Springdale’s continuing inequities show, a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats—and companies, corporations, and the families that control them have little incentive to create and support cities that are equitable, democratic, and just. n Olivia Paschal is a freelance writer and journalist from northwest Arkansas and currently based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Virginia.