A week or so ago, a friend confessed he was curious about why I don't eat meat. I had just finished reading Christopher Cook's Diet for a Dead Planet so I started rattling off some of the human rights abuses in meat processing plants named in the book.
My friend was incredulous. He said: If that's true, it's absolutely horrible, but I find it very difficult to believe it's actually true. No doubt the particular cases in the book occurred, but how could that be widespread without the government putting a stop to it?
A few days later he came back and said "I was wrong." He had asked around a bit and found that the Dead Planet book gave a pretty accurate picture.
The short story here - what I told my friend that he didn't believe - is that a large percentage of slaughterhouse employees are illegal immigrants. They get recruited near our borders and promised generous wages. Of course, it's a classic bait and switch.
When the immigrants arrive at the slaughterhouses, often in rural parts of middle America, they have their pay docked to pay for transportation, housing, and even the equipment required to do their jobs. No matter how bad the conditions get, they fear speaking up because they fear deportation. Not to mention - few speak English and many are illiterate. Thus, the meat processing plants have absolutely captive labor forces.
That said, I hesitate to call them indentured servants because so many don't last long on the job. The work is miserable enough that the immigrants are often willing to just cut their losses and go home.
Those who do work in America's slaughterhouses face one of the highest injury rates of any job in the country. There are two kinds of injuries - the very obvious ones that come from falling into a piece of machinery and getting a body part hacked off, or the more subtle injury that builds up from doing the same motion over and over again with a dull knife.
It's difficult for a company to ignore when an employee loses an arm on the job, so the companies often willingly pay the worker's comp claims then. When it's a cumulative injury from using a dull knife, the more common injury in these plants, the companies are much more likely to deny any amount of blame.
According to Human Rights Watch:
An Arkansas poultry worker told Human Rights Watch "They have us under threat [bajo amenaza] all the time. They know most of us are undocumented - probably two-thirds. All they care about is getting bodies into the plant. My supervisor said they say they’ll call the INS if we make trouble.
A worker at Nebraska Beef said, "[The top personnel manager] is a Mexican. He knows who is undocumented and who isn’t, and he holds that over us. He says ‘I know how you got here’ and ‘I know you don’t have papers but I’m going to take care of you.’ That just makes people afraid of crossing him."12
Workers’ vulnerable immigration status often frustrates their right to workers’ compensation. Employees who file workers’ comp claims in contested cases (where the company claims an injury is not work-related) know they have a long battle ahead of them. Still, many are not prepared for the obstacles that arise. One Nebraska Beef worker recounted his perception:
If you hurt your back or your shoulder, something they can’t see, you go see the nurse. She tells you there’s nothing wrong and gives you Tylenol and says go back to work. If you’re still hurting they send you to the company doctor. He says you didn’t hurt yourself in the plant, go back to work.
Then you go see a lawyer to file a claim. On the paper it says you have to sign your real name and swear to it. A lot of people stop right there. Their work name is not their real name. Then the word gets back into the plant, "they make you tell your real name." So nobody wants to file even if they obviously get hurt in the plant.
The same report tells of an INS raid in a Nebraska beef plant. Undocumented workers hid in coolers for hours, freezing, to avoid deportation. Still, 200 were deported.
Another worker told what happened in the days following the raid:
The next day the company had us back at work with the lines going the same speed as before the raid. But we were missing more than two hundred workers on the lines. They said they’d fire us if we didn’t keep up. A bunch of us went up to the office and told the plant manager, either slow down the line or pay us more money. They gave us fifty cents more an hour and told us to get back to work. Then over the next week or two they fired the five people who spoke up for us at the meeting.
Three top company managers were indicted but the case's key witnesses were all deported so no one could be convicted.
Fast Food Nation makes the point that injuries would decrease if the speed of the line decreases. Unfortunately, the line speeds have only sped up in the past few decades.
Meatpacking's Human Toll, points out:
The U.S. government does little to protect meatpacking workers. As the Government Accountability Office has pointed out, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has "no specific standard that allows OSHA to cite employers for hazards" relating to line speed and repetitive stress injuries.
Indeed, job safety enforcement officials do not even have data "to assess the appropriate speed at which the lines should operate." This information does not exist because companies refuse to let government regulators or independent researchers measure line speed, examine workers' knife-cutting motions or study musculoskeletal injuries from repeated hard cutting.
If you'd like to find out more on this issue, I recommend reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser or Diet for a Dead Planet by Christopher Cook. Here is a taste of what you'll find in Dead Planet:
"When we first got here, we were killing five thousand pigs in ten hours," says Maria, a fifty-four-year-old recruit from El Paso who worked at PSF for more than one year packing and lifting thirty pound boxes of pigs feet. "Now the belt is at full blast with less people working on the line. We were doing pretty well when it was ten hours. Now they are trying to kill us by killing 7,100 in eight hours."
Emma, a packing-line work from El Paso, says she was denied bathroom trips [at a meat processing plant] even when she had morning sickness. Her supervisor told her to vomit in the garbage can next to the assembly line, she claims.
Also, here are a few more Human Rights Watch links:
http://www.hrw.org/...
http://hrw.org/...
http://hrw.org/...