The AJIS 2023 prize was awarded to Zoé Cottin in her second year of a Master's degree in journalism at EJCAM. She won a check for 3,500 euros.
Her investigation "Filling the labor gap in poultry picking in Brittany" focuses on the little hands of the Brittany poultry industry, responsible for removing hens from farms to take them to the slaughterhouse. Working at night in the droppings, the pickers sometimes see their rights trampled underfoot. Zoé Cottin highlights the thinking emerging within the industry to protect them.
"The aim is not to conduct an agrobashing campaign, but rather to understand how the system in the poultry industry leads to a lack of respect for labor and forces bosses, strangled by European competition, to take action. In a system of subcontracting, where collection companies are dependent on the production rhythms of slaughterhouses, how can the stakeholders be made accountable? It's a dead end. Discussions are struggling to emerge to improve the working and employment conditions of poultry pickers in Brittany, but they are terribly topical."
