An undocumented Somali refugee, Mohamed, entered a meatpacking plant, hoping to earn money for his family, promising them that they would never go hungry again. Once inside the plant he discovered a “dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and extraordinarily unsanitary” room filled with people working shoulder to shoulder. Once hired, Mohamed experienced unsafe working conditions, racism, and day after day of misery, until one day he got fired because he was no longer able to perform his job, due to an injury he acquired while repetitively cutting hogs for hours on end. Poor working conditions, discrimination, pressure from supervisors, as well as exploitation are things that meatpacking workers go through everyday. No one should have to suffer through …show more content…
so much whilst at work. The unethical practices in the US meatpacking industry negatively affect employees, and need to be stopped. The meatpacking industry works to process meat after animals are killed.
Some companies do everything from killing the animals to packing them, others only process and pack the meat. These plants rely heavily on illegal immigrant workers that are trying to find a job where they won’t get turned into the immigration office. As much as three fourths of the meatpacking workforce is undocumented. Typically employees work six days a week, getting paid by the hour. When first hired, the average worker is paid $2.50 an hour. The wages are relatively low, even compared to similar opportunities. In fact, the average hourly meatpacking wage has decreased $5.47 since 1989. Not only are workers paid minimum wage or less but also have to work in dangerous conditions. One fourth of meatpacking workers suffer from a work related injury or illness, a rate which is five times higher than the national average. “The actual number is most likely higher,” Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, wrote. Although this is what Schlosser believes after years of research, the Iowa Beef Processors, a meatpacking company (IBP) denied the claim. Many people are morally opposed to the meat industry’s treatment of animals, however the unfair working conditions, pressure from supervisors, exploitation of illegal employees, and racial and religious discrimination that take place at meatpacking plants are far …show more content…
worse. Unfair and dangerous working conditions are a common occurrence at meatpacking plants for employees. Most workers have to make over 2,000 cuts of meat per shift, as most plants process over 30,000 animals everyday. To make employees work so strenuously and fast is unreasonable and unfair. These fast paced shifts are the main cause for work related injuries, many of which are “permanently disabling cumulating trauma disorders” (SPLC). According to some employees at a meatpacking plant from Star Meat & Poultry LLC, the company only cares about getting the job done so that they can get a profit. They fit as many bodies into the plant as possible, so that they can have a higher production rate. An Iowa meatpacking worker told The Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, “we are packed in a small space, there is not enough space, we are shoulder to shoulder, there is no room to move, some cut in one direction, others in the other, the chances to harm a co-worker are high.” This is yet another cause for job-related injuries, most commonly serious cuts and lacerations. As well as the confined working space, employees are made to use harmful chemicals without protection. One such worker, from a meatpacking plant in Minnesota, said, “I passed out; I was washing the band where the turkeys are killed with gas. I don’t know too much about it, or if it is related to the gas, but if you are cleaning that band and get splashed with that water, it harms you.” Not only are employees asked to work dangerously close to coworkers, but are tasked with jobs involving harmful chemicals, and no protective gear. Meatpacking companies obviously don’t worry about any possible health issues, or working conditions, they only care about upping the production rate and increasing their profits. For the most part, the US meatpacking industry’s working conditions, are unfair in the sense that employees are paid minimum wage or less to work with harmful chemicals in dangerous situations with their coworkers. Supervisors in meatpacking plants often pressure employees. According to Human Rights Watch, worker compensation is seldom paid due to the fact that employees rarely report injuries because they are under extreme pressure not too from their supervisors. Worker compensation is often denied because the injury, according to the plant supervisors, was not serious enough to be reported. The employees are therefore helping the industry get away with their alarmingly high injury rate, a consequence of submitting to pressure from supervisors. As well as the pressure not to report injuries, workers are also pressured not to stop working. A hog worker in Carolina claims that “the line is so fast there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when you cut yourself.” Due to pressure from supervisors, employees move faster and are more likely to get injured. On top of the really fast line speeds, the conveyer belts and machinery almost never stop. When Natasha Ford speaks about her time working in a meatpacking industry, she says that the line never stops, and that you have to keep working no matter what. The only time the line stops is if a bird gets stuck in it, hurt workers could not depend on the line stopping for them, often times the only other time the line stops is to wipe blood from an employees cut off of it. When Natasha first found out that she had histoplasmosis (a lung disease), she had a fit of muscle spasms and fell over. The line kept going, until finally someone noticed that she had fallen down, and could not get up. The line did not stop for her, it kept going, and if someone had not realized that she was injured, she could have been killed. Supervisors not only pressure employees the keep the assembly line going, but they also try to convince employees to sign away their rights. At some IBP (Iowa Beef Processors) plants, new employees are asked to sign a contract that bans them from suing their employer, in order to receive the company’s injury settlement plan. One of these contracts said, “I am giving up any rights I or any family member have to sue either the Company or anyone for whom the Company is responsible in exchange for being able to participate in the Program.” Although this may not be a form of direct pressuring, any person in their right mind would not sign to such an agreement unless being somehow pressured or exploited. Pressure from supervisors not only increases the injury rates, but also lets the industry get away with their high injury rates because employees are scared to report them, and have no right to inform the authorities about unethical practices. The exploitation of undocumented workers is a common occurrence at most meatpacking plants. Two thirds of employees at the Star Meat & Poultry LLC plants are undocumented, and are constantly told that if they make any trouble the supervisors will call INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). The company knows that the majority of their employees are undocumented, and therefore can get them to do almost anything. Fellner, from Human Rights Watch said that “the meatpacking companies hire immigrant workers because they are often the only ones who will work under such terrible conditions, and they exploit the illegal status of undocumented workers to keep them quiet.” Most employees are undocumented, so they don’t know their rights as employees and are afraid to complain. Consequently, they fall victims to supervisors. One undocumented worker from North Carolina explains, “We went on strike because management fired the supervisors who backed us up. One manager threatened to call Immigration if we didn’t go back right away.” Rather than try to reason with employees, the industry instead unfairly blackmails them. The industry knows that they have this against most of their employees, and therefore does not worry about keeping employees content at work. The ethics in the meatpacking industry are put into question. Although the industry claims that they care about their employees health and safety, and that they are one of the top priorities to the plant, the employees are actually taken advantage of, and threatened due to their status. Does the industry actually care about the employees? Discrimination due to race, nationality, and religion in the meatpacking industry cause an unstable work environment.
At one meatpacking plant Muslim and Somali employees are emotionally abused by coworkers and supervisors. There was some offensive graffiti at the plant, with things said like, “Fuck somalians,” “Fuck Muslims,” “Fuck Mohammad,” “Somalis are disgusting.” This causes for an unstable work environment, and could provoke the Muslim and Somali employees to take action against the discriminatory employees, causing even more discrimination. At the Green Island JBS Swift & Company plant coworkers and supervisors threw blood, meat, and bones at Somali and Muslim employees. This is not only unethical and discriminatory, it violates the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” Elmi and Kahin, two muslim employees, were fired for taking a break at prayer time to pray. If any Christian employee had taken a break to pray, there would have been no consequences. The laws of the USA prohibit harassment based on religion, and mandate that employers accommodate employees’ religious practices so long as doing so does not create an undue burden on the employer. Discrimination is to be expected everywhere, but for it to be taken to these levels of extremity, where Muslim employees are punished for the unethical practices of other workers and supervisors in the meatpacking
industry, is an abomination, and against the morals of the United States. The meatpacking industry deems itself to be fair and ethical with their 500,000 employees. According to Patrick Boyle, the AMI (American Megatrends) president and CEO, “employees are a valued resource.” He states that “Ensuring the health and safety of our workforce is good for employees and has business benefits, too, as they can perform their jobs in the best manner possible. Safe workplaces are positively correlated with quality, productivity, cost, turnover, and related measures of industry success.” Though Boyle has said this, when over 30 employees tried to petition for better working conditions and employee treatment, they were all fired. If employees are actually valued, why would they have been fired? Furthermore, if they had safe working conditions, why would they have petitioned in the first place? Boyle isn’t the only one who believes that the meat industry has fairly safe working conditions. Christopher Cook, author of Sliced and Diced, once asserted that “taxi drivers are 34 more likely to die on the job than meatpackers.” In spite of this proven fact, it is the way the worker dies that makes all the difference. Taxi drivers are likely to die of things outside of their control, like car accidents. Whereas meatpacking employees get seriously injured and die on the job due to the industry’s effort to maximize profit, whether or not it means employees will suffer for it. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics proclaimed that the injury rate of the meatpacking industry has decreased in the past few years. In 2011, for every 100 workers there were 6.4 work related injuries and illnesses, a 7.2 percent decrease since 2010. Although this decrease can’t be argued with, “the meatpacking industry has a well documented history of discouraging injury reports, falsifying injury data, and putting injured workers back on the job quickly to minimize the reporting of lost work days” (Eric Schlosser). Stop supporting the US meatpacking industry’s monstrosities, as soon as they lose the support of their customers, their unethical practices will be put to an end. Just think, if the meatpacking industry lies about working conditions, injury rates, and the value of employees, how much are they hiding about the meat itself?
Modern America has overcome vast amounts of worker mistreatment, from child labor to unsafe work environments. Each time the corruption thrived for a while before anyone found a need to put a stop to it. Slowly but surely, the flaws in the system crept out of the shadows, disturbing every individual who had been previously ignorant. Mac McClelland reveals that warehouse workers still suffer from such unjust treatment in her article, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.” After working in a real warehouse, she exposed the cruelty of her employers by providing an emotional description of her experience.
It is not just the animals who are being treated wrongly. The workers are vulnerable and suffer from injuries on a daily basis. This workforce requires so much protection, such as chainmail outfits to protect themselves from tools. From cuts, sprains, to amputations, “ The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory.” (238). Many immigrants come to the states, some illegally. Companies give their supervisors bonuses when they have little reported injuries as a reward for a spectacular job. Regardless, these supervisors do not make attempts to make the work environment safer. They threaten the employees with their jobs. They will put injured employees on easier shifts to heal so it will not look suspicious as to why they are in pain. Next to failing to report injuries, women in the slaughterhouses suffer from sexual assault. Male coworkers pressure women into dating and sex. Reported cases include men using animal parts on them in an explicit manner, making work another kind of nightmare. All this corruption and lack of respect for workers is all for a cheap meal people buy when they have the
In the book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser talks about the working conditions of fast food meat slaughterhouses. In the chapter “The Most Dangerous Job,” one of the workers, who despised his job, gave Schlosser an opportunity to walk through a slaughterhouse. As the author was progressed backwards through the slaughterhouse, he noticed how all the workers were sitting very close to each other with steel protective vests and knives. The workers were mainly young Latina women, who worked swiftly, accurately, while trying not to fall behind. Eric Schlosser explains how working in the slaughterhouses is the most dangerous profession – these poor working conditions and horrible treatment of employees in the plants are beyond comprehension to what we see in modern everyday jobs, a lifestyle most of us take for granted.
“Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer that grew the potatoes,” (Schlosser 117). Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser brings to light these realities in his bestselling book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Schlosser, a Princeton and Oxford graduate, is known for his inspective pieces for Atlantic Monthly. While working on article, for Rolling Stone Magazine, about immigrant workers in a strawberry field he acquired his inspiration for the aforementioned book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a work examining the country’s fast food industry (Gale).
Workers are also mistreated. They are underpaid even though the meat industry is one of ...
...es of cattle, which resulted in the increase of suicidal reports. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking companies have amplified the amount of cattle slaughtered each hour to fulfill the amount of meat consumed in the United States due to the cause of fast food. The damage that fast food had placed on illegal immigrant workers and sanitary workers that are employed in slaughterhouses are as much as murdering the men and women, minute by minute. The growth of fast food is too fast for our voices to be heard and fast food had implemented too much innovation in agriculture today for us to fix. We can still change the society that we live in today, as long as we withdraw our arrogant and selfish thoughts on fast food and think of ways to improve and recover what the fast food industry had done.
"Meatpacking in America: Still a Jungle Out There? . NOW |." PBS. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
In the early twentieth century, at the height of the progressive movement, “Muckrakers” had uncovered many scandals and wrong doings in America, but none as big the scandals of Americas meatpacking industry. Rights and responsibilities were blatantly ignored by the industry in an attempt to turn out as much profit as possible. The meat packers did not care if poor working conditions led to sickness and death. They also did not care if the spoiled meat they sold was killing people. The following paper will discuss the many ways that rights and responsibilities were not being fulfilled by the meat packing industry.
“I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing to the meat-supply of the civilized world. In other words, I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach” (Bloom). With the publication of a single book, Upton Sinclair found himself as a worldwide phenomenon overnight. He received worldwide response to his novel and invitations to lectures all over the world including one to the White House by President Roosevelt. In late 1904, the editor of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine sent Sinclair to Chicago to tell the story of the poor common workingmen and women unfairly enslaved by the vast monopolistic enterprises. He found that he could go anywhere in the stockyards provided that he “[wore] old clothes… and [carried] a workman’s dinner pail”. Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago living among and interviewing the Chicago workers; studying conditions in the packing plants. Along with collecting more information for his novel, Sinclair came upon another discovery--the filth of improper sanitation and the processing of spoiled meat. With the publishing of his novel, Sinclair received international response to its graphic descriptions of the packinghouses. The book is said to have decreased America’s meat consumption for decades and President Roosevelt, himself, reportedly threw his breakfast sausages out his window after reading The Jungle. However, Sinclair classified the novel as a failure and blamed himself for the public’s misunderstanding. Sinclair’s main purpose for writing the book was to improve the working conditions for the Chicago stockyard workers. Sinclair found it...
Deborah Fink has described in her book “Cutting into the Meatpacking Line” how fluency in English, along with gender, race, and ethnicity has played a role in the inequality and discrimination inside the meatpacking plant, where she has become a part of for a short period of time. Accordingly, in chapter four, Fink mentioned that “racial division ran throughout the plant” (Fink, p. 113) and that most of the management and supervisors were white except for one distinct higher level employee named “Ricardo”. Furthermore, Fink also described that distinctions amongst workers in the cafeteria was obvious so as discrimination towards minority groups on the floor plant. With that said, the ability of some workers to speak the English language as
was the sheer power that big companies possess the food industry. The top 4 meat packing companies which are Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill Meat solutions, and Smithfield Foods; control 90% of the meatpacking in the United States (Kenner). In addition to that, there were more than 1,000 slaughterhouses in the U.S in 1990, but in 2007 there was only 13 (Kenner). In the film Food Inc. a union organizer explained how Smithfield was taking advantage of low income workers, especially undocumented immigrants. Smithfield chooses low income, rural settings for its giant slaughterhouses, such as the hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, NC which is the world's largest slaughterhouse (Kenner). This way Smithfield can manipulate workers into doing about anything with the threat of losing their jobs, most often to keep quiet about what happens inside the slaughterhouse
There are many laws protecting employees and employers against harassment and discrimination. Harassment and discrimination constitutes more than just race, color, and religion. However, employees fail to report harassment and discrimination due to the lack of knowledge about their rights. Three of the most important laws e...
Factory farms have portrayed cruelty to animals in a way that is horrific; unfortunately the public often does not see what really goes on inside these “farms.” In order to understand the conditions present in these factory farms, it must first be examined what the animals in these factory farms are eating. Some of the ingredients commonly used in feeding the animals inside factory farms include the following: animal byproducts, plastic, drugs and chemicals, excessive grains, and meat from members of the same species. (Adams, 2007) These animals are tortured and used for purely slaughter in order to be fed on. Typically large numbers of animals are kept in closed and tight confinements, having only little room to move around, if even that. These confinements can lead to suffocation and death and is not rare. Evidence fr...
According to statistics of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and state and local fair employment practices agencies, the number of charges alleging workplace discrimination based on religion or national origin has been significantly increased after September 11, 2001. Therefore, I will deal in this term paper with the influence of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on religious discrimination in the workplace.
Work plays an important role in our daily life, it is considered much more huge part of our personal life. During our daily work we make many relationships throughout our career history. Sometimes these relationships become lasting, and sometimes employment discrimination might happen. This relationships that we thought it last could be cut off by the devastation of claims of discriminatory treatment. Discrimination in the workforce has been an issue since the first people of workers in United States in the present day and as well in the past. Some employees were subjected to a harsh working conditions, verbal abuse, denial of advancement,, and many other injustices. There was also the fact that certain employees were being treated differently than other employees.