Beef: Social Issues - How the Beef Industry Gets Away With Murder
How does the beef industry get away with this continued “wage slavery,” to borrow Sinclair’s term? First, it is revealing to look at whom the industry hires for these unappealing and dangerous jobs. The majority of its meatpacking and sanitation employees are Latino immigrants, with varying degrees of proficiency in English. Some are U.S. citizens, but a large number are not. Many, in fact, are undocumented aliens. Consequently, they don’t want to bring attention to themselves, risking their salaries and their places here in the U.S.
Second, the majority of the industry’s employees are not union members. Iowa Beef Packers (IBP), owned by Tyson’s Foods, and ConAgra, the two largest meatpacking companies, made a point beginning in the 1970s-1980s to hire and retain “scabs” during union strikes at its slaughterhouses. They shifted their employment recruitment methods to hire more immigrants (sometimes going so far as to take recruitment buses straight to Mexico to find new employees)—the less English they spoke, the better. These new workers were less likely to report injuries or otherwise complain, and more likely to take lower pay. Moreover, they were easily replaceable for any reason. The industry had found, in a sense, disposable workers.1
Third, and perhaps most troubling, the use of “disposable workers” is encouraged by the U.S. government’s lack of true oversight and protection of slaughterhouse employees. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for creating policies to limit workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths. In doing so, they are also responsible for creating punitive measures against companies for violating those policies. Yet there are multiple examples to suggest that when it comes to the meatpacking industry, OSHA turns a blind eye. In the late 1980s, after an exhaustive Congressional inquiry into the meatpacking industry, OSHA fined IBP $2.6 million for underreporting worker injuries, and another $3.6 million for the high rate of injury at one of its plants. After being fined, IBP created a new safety program, which OSHA rewarded by reducing the fines to $975,000—a drop in the bucket for a company whose annual revenue is hundreds of millions of dollars. Subsequent lawsuits against IBP by its employees revealed that the company willfully underreports employee injuries and undercompensates injured employees.2
In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser also points to two incidents at IBP and at National Beef, respectively, in which identical situations caused identical multiple worker fatalities—occurances with enough time between that measures could have been taken to prevent their repetition. OSHA fined each company only $480 for negligence in connection with the fatalities, giving even more meaning to the concept of disposable workers.3