Bone-crushing labor prevails across the American meatpacking industry

Brian Brown

One hundred and thirteen years have passed since Upton Sinclair wrote about the practice of abuse and exploitation of workers in Chicago’s meat packing industry in The Jungle. Much of what was written then about abuse and exploitation still rings true in present day America.

While the meatpacking industry has historically been a dirty and dangerous occupation, taking workers lives and limbs, a dangerous job will become a lot worse with the Trump administration pushing a further deregulation.

In a drive to ensure profits are maximized regardless of the result to the broad majority of workers, the United States Department of Agriculture has declared that the meat packing giants are essentially capable of regulating themselves. The changes will translate to an already poorly regulated industry being allowed to input more dangerous and drastic increases in line speeds and a reduction of safety inspections.

A new rule which went into effect in September reduces the number of inspectors required at pork plants and also removes a cap on the line speeds. According to a report produced by the National Employment Law Project, “the new rule would remove 40 percent of government food safety inspectors from the pig slaughter plants, turning the task over to plant operators with no required training, and allow plants to aggressively increase their already breakneck line speeds to process more hogs per hour and increase profits.”

The Trump administration, by removing limits on line speeds, is throwing workers into a literal meat grinder, guaranteeing that more workers will sacrifice their health and safety to benefit the profit interests of corporate management. “We’ve already gone from the line of exhaustion to the line of pain…” a poultry worker told a Human Rights Watch investigator, “When we’re dead and buried, our bones will keep hurting.”

While shoppers are often reassured of the purportedly humane treatment of animals processed for consumption, they are not made aware that the workers who produce the meat are treated daily with the utmost disrespect, forced to work in unsafe, inhumane conditions which lead to serious injuries and death.

The women and men who do the killing, deboning, cutting and packing in the American meat industry are white, black, Hispanic, young and old, native born and immigrant. They are all paid poverty wages—workers in the meat packing industry earn on average $23,800 per year or just $11.44 per hour—operating under the high pressure of line speed, wielding sharp knives with numbing repetition.

A slaughterer or meat packer can get salaries ranging between $16,000 and $24,000 depending on experience. Slaughterers and meat packers will most likely earn a pay level of $24,100 yearly.

When compared to the revenues of the largest meat and poultry companies, it becomes evident workers are being massively exploited. Tyson Foods reported revenue around $40 billion for 2018, Cargill raked in as much as $114 billion and Smithfield reported receiving more than $14 billion.

Meat packers have some of the highest rates of occupational injury and illness in the United States. Workers recently interviewed by HRW for the organization’s latest review of the American meat-packing industry reported shared experiences of serious injury or illness caused by their work.

The United Nations Human Rights Report found that “together poultry slaughter and processing companies reported more severe injuries to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) than, construction workers, sawmill workers, and oil and gas workers.” OSHA data shows that a worker in the meat and poultry industry lost a body part or was sent to the hospital for in-patient treatment about every other day between 2015 and 2018.

Workers in the meat and poultry industry work in environments where workspaces are refrigerator-cold or excessively hot, cramped, coated with grease and blood; saturated with the smell of dead animals and overpowering chemicals. “Everyone who goes to the plant is risking their lives every day,” Monica R., a worker at a Smithfield-owned hog plant told HRW, “you come home and give thanks to God because we don’t know when we’re going to get hurt.”