Breaking the chain

The whole meat industry system is built around producing cheap meat and it means that fewer and fewer low-income families, even in the developed world, have access to high-quality meat.  

Undocumented workers, many from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, formed a perfect corporate workforce: thankful for their pay cheques, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionise or even complain. “They don’t ask for breaks. They don’t ask for raises,” one worker at the Hormel plant in Fremont told me. “They just work harder and harder, because they need to work.”

In modern meat-packing plants, the rate of production is set by a chain conveyor system. The chain determines everything about how a day in the plant goes, and workers often talk about it as if it were a living thing, something to be feared.

In 2006 and 2007, when the American mortgage crisis began to peak and then stock markets crashed worldwide, the freedom to run faster production lines positioned Hormel to capitalise on demand the economic downturn created for budget-friendly meat like Spam without significantly increasing its workforce or raising wages to match the elevated output. The industry has been stretched to the breaking point by the drive for cheaper and cheaper meat. And Hormel, in particular, with its runaway demand for Spam and no government regulation to slow things down, has pushed its lines to breakneck speeds.Consider this:

 In 2002, Hormel’s production lines were running at 900 pigs per hour; by 2007, they were running 1,350 pigs per hour. That’s a 50% increase in five years, but the number of workers on the line increased by only about 15%. So, obviously, everyone is working harder, working faster, and mistakes occur, like the incident involving Maria Lopez.

Statistically, people who work at any meat-packing plant for five years have a nearly 50-50 chance of suffering a serious injury. And an extensive study of packing-house workers conducted by the University of Iowa in 2008 suggested that the number of injuries may be significantly under-reported. The study found that the large numbers of undocumented workers from Mexico and other parts of Latin America are almost half as likely to report an injury or job-related illness as their white counterparts.

Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads would go sliding along the belt. Workers sliced off the ears, clipped the snouts, chiselled the cheek meat. They scooped out the eyes, carved out the tongues, and scraped the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. The last worker harvested the brains by inserting the metal nozzle of a 90lb-per-square-inch compressed-air hose into the opening at the back of each skull, tripping a trigger that blasted the pig’s brains into a pink slurry. (The brains were sold in Asia as a thickener for stir-fry.) But each burst of air was also aerosolising small amounts of porcine brain tissue, which workers were unknowingly inhaling. The workers’ immune systems produced antibodies to destroy the foreign cells, but because porcine and human neurological cells are so similar, the antibodies didn’t recognise when the foreign cells had been eliminated – and began destroying the healthy human neural tissue of the workers. In the end, the plant experienced what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classified as an “epidemic of neuropathy”, involving about two dozen employees, nearly all of them Hispanic, including several who sustained permanent brain, spine and nerve damage. Once the cause was clear, the machines were shut off. But after they filed workers’ compensation claims, many say they were fired for not having legal immigration status; some received compensation.

The speed of pork production is not only affecting the health and safety of workers on the line; now lines are moving so fast that the safety of consumers is being placed at risk. Inspectors have discovered pig carcasses with lesions from tuberculosis, septic arthritis (with bloody fluid pouring from joints) and smears from faecal matter and intestinal contents. But the plants were never shut down. The chain never stopped. The US Department of Agriculture’s inspector general warned that these “recurring, severe violations may jeopardise public health” but concluded that because they do not face substantial consequences for repeated food safety violations, “the plants have little incentive to improve their slaughter processes”. Despite the report, the agriculture department is not only advocating continuing a self-inspection pilot project, but now is proceeding along a path towards implementing it across the US. The government is arguing that the results of the programme are sufficiently encouraging that the US should expand it to more than 600 pork processing plants across America. Food safety advocates are asking the obvious question: in what sane universe do you make America’s worst violators into the new model?

In 2012, one of the participating Canadian packing houses was involved in the largest meat recall in the country’s history, more than 12m pounds of beef in all, after 18 people were sickened by E coli from meat processed at that plant. That same year, the US Food Safety and Inspection Service visited the participating plants in Australia and, according to internal communications, found repeated contamination of meat by faecal and intestinal matter. In November 2013, the European commission published its own audit of Australian meat from those plants being exported to Europe and concluded that the privatised meat inspection system was not in compliance with EU food safety regulations. In New Zealand, an exposé found that company-employed inspectors were less likely to report problems than their government counterparts –and even threatened government inspectors when they attempted to slow or stop production because of food safety violations. One government inspector reported “seeing copious amounts of faecal and other contamination being missed by the company inspectors”. When asked the reason, he responded bluntly: “It’s the speed of the chain.”

Because the speed of the chain determines everything about production – from the farms to the factories to the grocery counter – it gives new meaning to the Communist Manifesto slogan  “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”

Taken from here