Considered by the United States Department of Labor to be one of the most hazardous industries in the United States, the meatpacking industry has an injury rate three times higher than the rate of any typical American factory. Each year, around forty-three thousand meatpacking workers – which is one out of three workers – “suffer an injury or a work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond first aid.”. Although this data was compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the statistics understate the number of meatpacking injuries that actually occur, due to underreporting by meatpacking companies. With thousands of injuries and illnesses of the most dangerous industry go unrecorded and slip under the radar, there is already a huge violation of Article 23 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where “Everyone has the right… to favourable conditions of work”, without even going into the details the jobs of this industry entail. Within the four walls of a meatpacking factory hides the bloodiest, most brutal lies when it comes to human rights. As a former employee of Monfort Meatpacking Company said, “Inside those walls is a different world that obeys different laws.” With companies unjustly concealing the horrifying truths that the industry chooses to ignore, men, women and children are constantly and continuously stripped of their basic human rights.
The brutal nature of the jobs in the meatpacking industry is physically dangerous to workers. Unlike the case for smaller animals like chickens, cattle can come in varying weights of hundreds of pounds. Therefore, machines and power tools often fail to effectively assist the meatpacking process of cattle. This is the reason why most of the work in America’s slaughterhouses is still performed by hand. These manpowered jobs include, but are not restricted to: the Knocker, Sticker Shackler, Rumper, First Legger, Knuckle Dropper, Navel Boner, Splitter Top/Bottom Butt and the Feed Kill Chain. The violence and brutal nature of these jobs are only suggested vaguely even with the explicit names. With lacerations being the most common injury, many workers often accidentally stab themselves or their coworkers. Other common health issues developed on the job include the development of tendonitis, cumulative trauma disorders, carpal tunnel, back and shoulder problems and “trigger finger” – “a syndrome in which a finger becomes frozen in a curled position”.
The assembly line speed also has to do a lot with the number of injuries on the job. The higher the speed, the more the production and the less the company has to pay the workers. However, with the line speed constantly increasing, the risks of workers in the line getting hurt is also increasing. To put things in perspective, in the early 1900s, meatpacking factories in Chicago slaughtered fifty cattle per hour; twenty years ago, the factories in the High Plains slaughtered one hundred and seventy-five cattle per hour; nowadays, many plants slaughter four hundred cattle per hour. “I packed hams for eight hours a day, 40 to 50 hams every minute. The processing line moves tremendously fast and doesn’t stop,” a former meatpacker in Nebraska, Teresa Martinez said. While the assembly line speed seems to be one of the most obvious cause of injuries, “cold temperatures and ergonomic problems” need to be fixed too, Andrew Levinson, an official of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration says. Thus, “any effort to prevent these disorders must take all of these factors into account, not just line speed.”
Not only does the nature of the job put the workers’ health in jeopardy, the inadequate treatment of the injuries also poses a health threat to workers, let alone the injustice that comes along with it. Meatpacking factories often under-report the number of injuries and the severity of them. Through the OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program, where “management, labor, and OSHA work cooperatively and proactively to prevent fatalities, injuries, and illnesses through a system focused on: hazard prevention and control; worksite analysis; training; and management commitment and worker involvement”, the number of recorded injuries in meatpacking plants did indeed go down. However, this does not mean that the number of people getting hurt is reduced. A main reason why the recorded number has gone down is because the Voluntary Protection Program merely encouraged companies “to understate injuries, to falsify records, and to cover up accidents.” It is also not uncommon for plants to keep two sets of injury logs: one complete record of all injuries, and one falsified record to provide to OSHA visitors. For example, the IBP beef plant in Nebraska kept two records: One recorded 1800 injuries in a three month period, and the one provided to OSHA recorded only 160, resulting in a huge discrepancy.
According to Human Rights Watch, compensation for work injuries and illness is a basic part of international human rights standards for workers. However, the United States meatpacking industry fails to recognize these rights by delaying and denying claims, “threatening and taking reprisals against workers who file claims for compensation for workplace injuries”, or even “instituted programs requiring workers who report injuries or accidents to undergo drug testing”, which adds risks to workers to report their injuries.
Another unjust and dangerous aspect to the meatpacking industry is the horrifying treatment towards women workers. Women are often manipulated, objectified, harassed and even raped by male counterparts in the plants. The sexual abuse of women in meatpacking plants dates back to as early as the 1930s and till this day, women who work at various plants reported that their bosses frequently “expect sexual favors in exchange for favorable working condition.”. A female worker at an IBP plant filed a lawsuit and testified that her coworkers had “screamed obscenities and rubbed their bodies against hers while supervisors laughed.” In another lawsuit against a Monfort plant in Cactus, Texas, fourteen women testified that their supervisors “pressured them for dates and sex, and that male coworkers groped them, kissed them, and used animal parts in a sexually explicit manner.”Although most sexual relations at these slaughterhouses are forced upon women by men, the physical intimacy between many supervisors and women who are paid by the hour “are for the most part consensual.”These women engage in such relationships in hopes of gaining better and safer position in the assembly line, if not a green card for a stable residential status in the United States. Having a safe work environment is considered as a basic human right by the United Nations, yet these women have to put themselves in an even more vulnerable position to regain their safety.
Not only are women objectified in this industry, children are also often abused due to the illegal prominence of child labor. Not only is child labor itself illegal in the meatpacking industry in the United States, to expose young children to the brutal nature of this industry is extremely immoral due to the exposure to hazardous chemicals and the requirement of them to work with deadly tools including knives and saws. In May 2008, the U.S. Government raided a meat plant, exposing huge child labor law violations. At least twenty-four children from Guatemala as young as thirteen years old were arrested. After the raid, young workers said “they were forced to work long night shifts of up to seventeen hours a day with no overtime pay.” They also said that they were “put to work on racing production lines using knives to cut meat and poultry with little or no safety training.” Forced child labor is a grave human rights violation and that the meatpacking industry hides under its facade.
The mental toll is often overlooked when compared to the physical danger in this industry. Often times, workers find that they just have to force themselves to not care about the animals in order to kill them. A former slaughterhouse worker says that, “The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time—that let’s [sic] you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them. … I can’t care.” There is a strong correlation between the “presence of a large slaughterhouse and high crime rates in U.S. communities” – a criminology professor at the University of Windsor, Amy Fitzgerald, proved this hypothesis. She argued that “Slaughterhouse workers, in essence, were “desensitized,” and their behavior outside of work reflected it.” The strong connection between this industry and crime rates proves that the aggressive nature of these jobs, mentally disturbs the human mind.
It is saddening that all types of slaughterhouse workers are constantly being taken advantage of and stripped of their basic human rights. Men, women and children are unjustly exploited for over seventeen hours per day. Though jobs related to the meatpacking industry are considered the most dangerous jobs in the United States, the frightening truth of these occupations are buried deep within the four walls of the factory.
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Bloody Crops: Unmasking the Meat Industry 