Beef: Social Issues - Meatpacking (The Most Dangerous Job in the U.S.)
Nearly a century later, one would expect that the conditions of the slaughterhouses would be significantly safer than they were in Sinclair’s time. Unfortunately, as the modern-day version of The Jungle, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, illustrates, meatpacking is the most dangerous job in the U.S., with injury rates three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory. Every year, more than one-quarter of the meatpacking workers in this country are reported to suffer an injury or a work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond simple first aid.1 Injuries include, but are not limited to, amputated limbs, missing fingers, broken bones, cuts small and deep, torn muscles, concussions, hernias, slipped discs, and pinched nerves. Fatalities are not uncommon.
Meatpacking plants in the days of Sinclair slaughtered and packaged an average of 50 cows an hour; today the rate is 400 per hour. While there is modern equipment that contributes to the higher number produced, much of the work is still done by hand. Supervisors and managers receive bonuses that are in part based on their workers’ injury rate. Though this is meant to encourage safety, it also encourages managers to discourage the reporting of injuries. In fact, as high as the reported injury rate in the industry is, there is strong evidence that the actual injury rate is much higher.2 Those who follow suit are given easier jobs to allow them time to heal. Those who instead choose to report are punished through transferring to harder jobs, cut wages, worsened hours. Unsurprisingly, the average meatpacking employee lasts about a year on the job.3
Worse than the first two shifts of slaughtering and packaging beef in the meatpacking plants is the third shift by the cleaning crew, required to rid the plant of the remains of 3,000-4,000 slaughtered cows. Using power hoses filled with a mixture of water and chlorine heated to 180 degrees, these independent contractors clean the blood, leftover renderings, and manure while most of the equipment is still running (to ensure that every part of them is cleaned). The steam and fog that fills the facilities make it challenging to see what you are doing, and the stench of chlorine mixed with slaughtered animals is enough to make some workers sick as they work.4 Injuries are even more common for employees in this shift. Fatalities are “extraordinarily high.5
Learn how the beef industry gets away with murder.