AMERICA’S SUPPOSEDLY “CHEAP” MEAT SUPPLY relies on cheap labor—but the costs to this largely immigrant workforce are astronomical. With declining union power, real wages have shrunk and workers are routinely denied bathroom breaks and health care. Employees are commonly wounded on high-speed assembly lines, suffering carpal tunnel and other disabling injuries. Long isolated, workers are taking these food sweatshops to court and joining with unions and community groups to resist the “killing line.”
From the sprawling parking lot at the end of a road named Harms Way (named, presumably, for company cofounder Dennis Harms), the Premium Standard Foods plant, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, in Milan, Missouri, has an immaculate, information-age look. At the closely guarded entrance checkpoint, workers punch in by slipping their hands into a fingerprint identification machine. Next to the front door, a sign reads: ON THE JOB SAFETY BEGINS HERE.
Mexican men in cowboy hats stream through the checkpoint as if they’re crossing another border. In the parking lot, a school bus idles in the biting January cold, slowly filling with workers awaiting their nightly ride home to disheveled company housing. Few of the men speak much English, but many, their arms bandaged and in slings, speak the universal language of pain.
Behind the factory’s polished front, assembly lines churn 7,100 pigs into packaged product each day. It’s not America’s biggest meat-packing plant, but it is brutally efficient. José, a rib cutter, works with three others slicing rib plates into 14,200 pieces a day—3,550 cuts per person. “It’s very tough,” he says. “We usually take about three seconds for each rib, sometimes ten seconds if there’s a lot of fat.”1
The workers here, mostly impoverished transplants from Mexico and elsewhere, don’t last much longer than the pigs. “Every week there are new workers, and every week others leave,” says José. “In two weeks, I have seen about two hundred people leave.” They leave, says José, because the company keeps speeding up the assembly line. To protect its narrow profit margins, the firm pushes the line to—and often beyond—the human breaking point.
There’s little time for bathroom breaks. “When they were giving us the orientations, they told us to use the bathroom before work because they would not give us permission to go during work,” says José. “We have four people working, and if one went to the bathroom, we would only have three to do the same amount of work. We would be making the others work even harder.”
Emma, a packing line worker from El Paso, says she was denied bathroom trips even when she had morning sickness. Her supervisor told her to vomit in the garbage can next to the assembly line, she claims.
There is also little time for medical care. Sergio Rivera felt stabs of pain in his first few days at Premium. “My hand hurt, I went to the nurse, and she put me back on the line in ten minutes,” he says. Local doctor Shane Bankus, a chiropractor in Milan, about a mile away from the Premium plant, says such treatment is the norm. The injured meat factory workers he sees “have got to get back to work, no matter how badly it hurts, which reaggravates it,” says Bankus. Adding to the injuries, he says, most of the migrant workers “don’t get any health insurance, because they want to send money home.” José feels pulses of pain when he closes his fist. But when asked if he visits the company doctor, José says, “No, because the company told us if we went to the company doctor we would have to pay. None of the migrants have health insurance. It costs too much money.”
Welcome to the rural jungle—not unlike Upton Sinclair’s bleak depiction a century ago—where a new generation of immigrant meat packers toil in a grim, bloody world far away from sanitized super market aisles. It is a world fraught with peril: nearly 20 percent of meatpacking workers—often uninsured and frequently undocumented—suffer injuries requiring medical attention. While factories are cleaner and safer today, “it’s still a deadly and dangerous industry,” says Robyn Robbins, assistant director of the Occupational Safety and Health Office of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
With meat consumption near record levels—the United States produced 91.2 billion pounds of red meat and poultry in 2007, roughly 230 pounds for every American consumer2—the meatpacking industry maintains brutal conditions by importing economically desperate immigrant workers. Turnover is higher than ever—up to 200 percent in some plants—because of grueling conditions and the precarious employment of undocumented workers.
In this high-volume, low-profit-margin industry, faster lines are the primary path to profits, explains anthropologist Mark Grey, who has studied meatpacking communities for more than a decade. “That’s how they make money—jamming lots and lots of animals through the plant—and that’s where your cumulative trauma problems come in.” Nearly 12 percent of meat packers succumb to cumulative trauma injuries, such as carpal tunnel and tendonitis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is thirty-seven times the average rate for all industries.
In a macabre, medieval scene, workers hack frantically at fast-moving carcasses while standing in pools of blood, fat, and chunks of abscess. Their knives, dulled from stabbing meat every three seconds or so, sometimes slice into the wrong piece of flesh—their coworker just a couple of feet away. Back injuries are common from slipping on the greasy floors. But the biggest risk is the mundane: the steady, ceaseless cutting—of heads, necks, knuckles, legs, organs, stomachs. Cutting a mind-numbing train of animal parts flying down the line at dizzying speeds: thousands of cuts per day, about three seconds per piece of meat.
Meatpacking was once a solid, if gritty, step toward the American middle-class dream. Before the union upheaval of the mid-1980s—symbolized by labor’s crushing defeat in the Hormel meat packers’ strike—unionized workers reported earning upward of $30,000 in a year.3 In the 1970s, packing firms relocated to the rural High Plains, moving slaughterhouses closer to feedlots and escaping the unions and higher wages of Chicago, Kansas City, and other midwestern cities, according to historian Jimmy M. Skaggs.4 By the late 1980s, immigrant refugees—many of them “products of failed American foreign policy maneuvers and plundered economies”5—were flocking to rural midwestern packing towns for dangerous, low-paid work that most white Americans simply won’t do.
Now the predominantly nonunion industry cycles through a constant supply of destitute migrants for whom $6 to $9 an hour seems like a godsend. Meat packers’ real wages have declined by $5.74 per hour since 1981, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data using 1998 dollars. Yet the people keep coming, and the conditions and turnover persist, largely the result of weakened unions and a virtually limitless reserve supply of immigrant laborers.
By the 1990s, it had become common industry practice to import workers through border-state labor recruiters who, for a fee, deliver busloads of Mexicans and Central American immigrants to plants throughout the Midwest, according to Mark Grey, professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa and director of the Iowa Center of Immigrant Leadership and Integration Reform. Many are undocumented and are prey to all manner of workplace abuse and widespread racist scapegoating. In 1998 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 25 percent of meatpacking workers in Nebraska and Iowa are undocumented immigrants.6 The situation is similar in poultry: A 1998 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor showed that 30 percent of chicken processors conduct long-distance recruitment. National Chicken Council vice president Bill Roenigk confirms that about 50 percent of the industry’s 245,000 workers are immigrants.
Even speedier than the slaughtered pig or cow, the dead chicken may be the fastest animal in North America. From “catchers,” to “hangers,” to “evisc” (short for evisceration), the processing of roughly 9 billion chickens each year—meeting increased demands for cheap, versatile meals and slimmer hips—rests on low wages and treacherous speed. The typical poultry factory can, in a single eight-hour shift, turn 144,000 birds into packages of “RTC” (“ready to cook”) chicken.
Amid clouds of ammonia and fecal matter carrying salmonella and other harmful bacteria, immigrant chicken catchers wade into 100-degree holding pens bustling with frantic, desperate birds. Dodging sharp beaks and claws, the catchers grasp the birds by their feet—generally snaring about 8,000 chickens a day—and hurl them into cages destined for the processing plant. Many catchers fall prey to cuts, eye infections, and respiratory ailments—not to mention enduring the constant urination of terrified chickens. At the factory, “hangers” attach the feet of up to 50 birds a minute (more than 20,000 a day) into metal shackles so that a razor-sharp wire just down the line can lop off the dangling heads efficiently. Rotator cuff and other repetitive motion injuries are widespread among hangers.7
After being scalded in huge vats of hot water to enable rapid plucking, the birds blast down the line to the evisceration section. Here, while most plants now gut chickens by machine, some workers perform “evisc” by hand—twisting and pulling the innards from 35 or more chickens a minute. In some plants, workers make up to 100 evisceration cuts a minute. Farther down the line, workers in “debone” stand shoulder-to-shoulder, slicing and chopping their way through joints, tendons, and tough gristle to produce the most popular chicken part on the market—boneless chicken breasts. The process here “slows” to 20 or 30 hard twisting motions a minute. Scissors and knives quickly dull, and workers routinely lacerate themselves or their neighbors when blades slip off the slimy carcasses. Disabling carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress disorders are common.
As annual chicken consumption has soared from 40 pounds per person in 1970 to 75 pounds today, the government has allowed industry to crank up assembly line speeds. According to research by attorney Marc Linder, corroborated by government documents, the poultry industry lobbied President Reagan’s USDA to increase factory line speeds from an already blinding 70 birds per minute to today’s astounding rate of 91 per minute. (The mere fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture sets line speeds should be disconcerting, as the agency’s mission is to spur food production, not to protect workers’ safety.)
During this intense speed-up, according to Linder, repetitive stress ailments skyrocketed. “Between 1980 and 1993, repetitive trauma disorders, as a proportion of all newly reported occupational illnesses, rose from 18 percent to 60 percent. The poultry processing industry recorded the second-highest incidence of repetitive trauma disorders in 1990—696 per 10,000 full-time workers. The highest incidence was recorded in the related meat packing industry.” Government meat inspectors were not immune: “The USDA’s admission that it sets the workload of its own employees ‘at the limit’ suggests that the USDA never orients its line-speed decisions towards workers’ needs for longer lives, less plagued by physical pain and disability.”8
Despite the poultry and meatpacking industries’ immense power over workers’ lives—spanning political, economic, and social realms—there is growing resistance to the brutality of the killing line. Worker lawsuits, some victorious, are steadily piling up a record of abuse and resistance. The industry’s walking wounded are rising up, filing complaints against meat and poultry factories across the United States. But individual resistance against corporate intimidation, harassment, and other obstacles is just one aspect of a growing rebellion.
Three unions—the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the Teamsters, and the Laborers International Union of North America—at turns cooperate and compete to organize meatpacking and poultry workers. Roughly 20 percent of chicken factory workers are unionized, while a slightly higher portion of the nation’s meatpacking workers are in unions. But these numbers tell only part of the story. Despite many victories in recent years, unions are fighting an uphill battle against an intensely consolidated industry over which they have little negotiating power. And they are still recovering from the devastation of the 1980s, when—thanks largely to President Reagan’s antiunion labor courts and increasing monopoly within the industry—meatpacking unionization and wages plummeted by 50 percent.9
After decades of wage losses (in real terms) and the demise of industry-wide wage agreements (in which unions negotiate industry wage standards, instead of downward-spiraling pacts with individual firms), the UFCW is only recently posting gains for workers. In 1998 the union won a struggle for the most basic of rights—the bathroom break. Poultry and meatpacking workers are “arbitrarily denied the use of bathroom facilities” and “often are forced to relieve themselves at their workstations,” according to the UFCW, which filed numerous worker complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Finally, after many individual case rulings, OSHA ordered the industry to give all workers access to company bathrooms.10
Perhaps most promising is the growing collaboration between unions and community groups—organizing not only around wages and health care, or working conditions, but also around the broader communities of this largely immigrant workforce. In Nebraska, a joint “union/community” campaign between the UFCW and Omaha Together One Community (OTOC) led to a major victory, winning union membership in May 2002 for nearly 1000 ConAgra meatpacking workers. Several months later, 500 of those workers ratified a two-year contract providing, according to UFCW, “affordable, quality health insurance,” small employer contributions to a retirement plan, more vacation pay, “two pair of safety work boots per employee per year,” and up to thirty days’ unpaid leave for long-distance travel so immigrant workers can visit their families without losing their jobs.11
These victories, while important and uplifting, must be placed in a broader context. For most meatpacking and poultry workers, wages remain miserably low. Hard-fought victories for bathroom breaks and two pairs of safety boots are cause for both celebration and a sober reality check: food processing workers and unions are battling relentlessly for things that ought to be taken for granted. While some immigrant workers have stood up courageously for better conditions, many remain isolated and intimidated by a whole collection of barriers, from social and cultural dislocation, to lack of education and English-language skills, to sheer economic desperation.
But the killing line shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Public outrage has swayed McDonald’s to ensure that the cattle that end up in its hamburgers are slaughtered humanely, yet no such effort has been undertaken on behalf of the workers who make those burgers. Students and other concerned citizens boycott shoe and clothing companies whose products come from sweatshops—but what about the sweatshops that produce our food?
Despite astronomical injury rates that have generally increased along with faster lines, government agencies have made no effort to reduce factory speed limits. For profit-minded corporations with low profit margins, there is little economic incentive to slow the disassembly process—unless companies decide it is worth it to reduce injuries and workers’ compensation costs, and to retain a stable workforce. But there has been no evidence of such forward thinking.
The food industry, including the farm labor sector, profits not only from cheap, highly exploited labor, but also from the remarkably modest expectations of immigrant workers who are accustomed to the lowest of wages, the toughest work, and spare living conditions. It may sound degrading or cliché, but what many immigrant workers demand—when they demand anything at all—is quite basic and humble by American standards. As José, the rib cutter for Premium Standard Foods put it: “If they paid a little more money and ran the line a little slower, the people wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t leave.”
But anthropologist Mark Grey and other critics, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, contend that meatpacking firms prefer short-term, destabilized workers so they can cut injury costs and beat back union organizing efforts. A migrant and immigrant workforce, says Grey, also enables companies to “pass along a lot of costs,” such as unemployment and disability payments, to the workers’ home country.
“Instead of dealing with the wages, working conditions, and injury rates, [meatpacking firms] are just trying to find new ways to cycle through new workers,” says Grey. “Ultimately, their concern is not about a stable workforce but maintaining a transient workforce.” And migrant they are. José the rib cutter, like Sergio Rivera, planned to leave in search of better work.