In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry.
In an excellent muckraking report which underlines the importance of metropolitan newspapers, The Charlotte Observer has shined a bright light into one of the murkiest corners of our food system: poultry-packing factories.
The report focuses on North Carolina-based House of Raeford, the nation's seventh-largest poultry packer. According to an industry trade journal, Raeford churns out 20 million pounds of ready-to-eat chicken each week, slaughtering 3.6 million birds. And it's growing fast; its 2006 production represented a 28 percent leap from the previous year.
Chickens aren't the only sentient beings that suffer from that high volume. Here is the Observer:
The company has compiled misleading injury reports and has defied regulators as it satisfies a growing appetite for America's most popular meat. And employees say the company has ignored, intimidated or fired workers who were hurt on the job.
According to the Observer, the federal government has systematically looked the other way while poultry giants like House of Raeford repress injury reports on a shop floor characterized by high volume and quick repetitive movements involving sharp knives.
The poultry giants hide worker injuries to preserve their profit margins.
Companies have a financial incentive to hide injuries. Ignoring them lowers costs associated with compensating injured workers for medical care and lost wages.
Also, the government rewards companies that report low injury rates by inspecting them less often. And regulators rarely check whether companies are reporting accurately.
The Observer quotes a whistleblower within OSHA -- the federal agency that's supposed to oversee workplace injuries. According to the official, "OSHA is allowing employers to vastly underreport the number of injuries and illnesses their workers suffer." For poultry processors, he claims, the real injury rate "is likely two to three times higher than government numbers suggest."
Interestingly, the official says OSHA oversight began to falter in the Clinton 1990s, not the Bush 2000s.
Early in his career, he said, OSHA looked closely at companies' injury and illness logs and issued big fines to businesses that underreported such incidents.
But by the 1990s, he said, industry groups and pro-business lawmakers were accusing OSHA of focusing on what they perceived as frivolous paperwork violations. Today, he said, the agency is conducting fewer inspections and issuing fewer fines, leaving businesses to police themselves.
That observation brings to mind the Clintons' ties to meat giant Tyson, as well as Hillary Clinton's jaw-dropping recent decision to name a flack for the meat industry as co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary.
The Observer article -- part of a series scheduled to run all week -- documents several cases of workers who were hustled back to work or fired after being injured on the job. The great bulk of them are undocumented workers -- people whose legal insecurity makes them wary of coming forward with their complaints.
The series exposes yet again the truth that our food system relies on the ability to abuse workers, animals, and the environment in order to maintain profits while churning out "cheap" food.
Mad-man disease
In yet another recent incident of an activist group catching industrial-meat producers inflicting cruelty on livestock as a matter of course, the Humane Society of the United States recently documented animal abuse at a factory-style slaughterhouse in Chino, Calif.
According to the HSUS account:
In the video, workers are seen kicking cows, ramming them with the blades of a forklift, jabbing them in the eyes, applying painful electrical shocks and even torturing them with a hose and water in attempts to force sick or injured animals to walk to slaughter.
Of course, it should be noted that those same workers are almost certainly under severe pressure to keep the kill line running smoothly, by any means necessary. The real villain here is an industrial food system that treats animals as industrial inputs.
It's also of note that this company is so obsessed with bringing "downer" cows to slaughter. The facility in question "is the second-largest supplier of beef to USDA's Commodity Procurement Branch, which distributes the beef to needy families, the elderly and also to schools through the National School Lunch Program," HSUS reports.
Mystery meat of tortured downer cow doesn't sound like a very wholesome school lunch.
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Comments
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amc89 Posted 12:24 pm
11 Feb 2008
These stories point to the need for green, labor, immigrant and animal activists to work together to combat factory farming and promote eating lower on the food chain. Among the first campaigns should be getting more farm-to-school programs off the ground so beef and chicken from horrible meat packers like these don't get into children's school lunches.
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caniscandida Posted 5:04 pm
11 Feb 2008
AMC is absolutely right, and it is something that we should insist upon: people who are disturbed by abuse that affects one class of victim are certainly not insensitive to related abuse affecting others; we are natural allies. The most thoughtful animal welfare organizations, such as Best Friends of Kanab, Utah -- which is the subject of a National Geographic series called "Dogtown," and also recently received attention from CNN's Anderson Cooper for taking in a large number of Michael Vick's pit bulls -- , make it clear that kindness to animals is indivisibly bound up with kindness and justice to human beings.
It was natural for John Edwards to shift his emphasis on ending poverty to protesting pig CAFOs in NC. And I hope that he sees this article on House of Raeford, and, since he has some time on his hands, takes it upon himself to begin a reform of the industry.
Since many of the workers at House of Raeford are Latino, it would be interesting to know more about how immigration status affects their employment. For one reason or another, the reporter chose not to pursue that matter; but it is well known that many undocumented workers dare never to complain or make requests or bring grievances against any superiors, because they have no more than minimal rights, and can be threatened with deportation at any time.
Note this grotesque bit of klutziness, reported in the Charlotte Observer article:
<<
House of Raeford says it looks out for the safety of workers and treats them with respect.
"We come to work with five fingers and toes," said company safety director Bill Lewis. "And we go home with the same thing we came in with."
>>
Of course most of us, when we came into the world, had a few more than five digits.
On another matter: As it happens, I put a link to the very same HSUS page, about downed cows, that you have linked to here, in the "Edible Media" thread, without knowing that you had already made it available.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:15 pm
11 Feb 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/magazine/10wwln-essay-t ...
I have been quietly pushing for this for a long time now. My guess is that grubs or larvas may be prepared more palatably for most adventuresome diners than adult insects. But small adults, such as chapulines, are no problem really.
The issue of sentience, though, remains serious, no less so than in the case of shrimps, crabs and lobsters, to whom insects are not too distantly related, and with whom they share a comparable neurology.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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javaearth Posted 12:34 am
12 Feb 2008
However, I think most people do not care about human nor animal crulty. - If we did, there would be less factory farming, there would be less starvation, there would be less deforestation... the list is endless.
I think we need to be realetic that majority of people really do not care about anything beyond themselves, their health, their houses and cars, and few other people in their network.
For the few % of people that do care, a) they are meet with much anger, b) never really supported, c) overworked and under paid.
It feels like society rewards people for being mean and selfish! Where is the ethics in that?
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amazingdrx Posted 1:42 am
12 Feb 2008
Sure organic, free range chicken costs more, so just eat less. Fill up on healthy organic beans and other high protein veggy products.
As far as re-regulating corporate agribizz, your choices are limited. The time to make pols face issues like this is past, maybe the next election cycle?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:08 am
12 Feb 2008
Here is an Observer editorial, accompanying the poultry-worker series, on migrants, titled "Poultry series exposes a new, silent subclass:
Neglect of workers has ugly precedent in Carolinas history." It's by the paper's editor, Rick Thames.
Today we ask you to join us for a six-day series on the plight of Carolinas workers who put America's most popular meat on the table.
These workers -- about 28,000 of them in the Carolinas -- process chicken and turkey in all its forms. Whole birds, fillets, nuggets, slices, cubes, sausage and even hot dogs.
It may surprise you to learn that most of the workers speak Spanish. Many of them entered the country illegally.
Should that matter as you consider the working conditions you will read about?
I say yes, but maybe not for the most obvious reason.
It should matter because the neglect of these workers exposes an ugly dimension to a new subclass in our society. A disturbing subclass of compliant workers with few, if any, rights.
I say disturbing because North and South Carolina share some regrettable history of building economies on the backs of such workers.
Before the Civil War, slaves and poor sharecroppers powered the region's tobacco and cotton plantations. Early in the 20th century, children as young as 8 were put to work in Carolinas textile mills to help feed their poor families.
Consider the parallel to illegal immigrants. Same as slaves and sharecroppers, same as the cotton mill workers derisively termed "lintheads," this subclass is now a scorned bunch.
And yet they help power our economy. We live in houses they built. We drive on highways they paved. We eat the chicken and turkey they prepared.
Illegal immigrants often take the least desirable jobs, earning low wages, because those jobs lift them and their families from the poverty they left behind in their homelands.
As a group, they are compulsively compliant, ever-conscious that one complaint could lead to their firing or arrest or deportation.
"Some speak out, but most of these workers just wanted to remain in the shadows," said Franco Ordoñez, a reporter who spent months speaking to workers in the Latino communities surrounding the poultry plants. "It's just not worth it, considering how much they've already risked, to draw more attention to themselves -- even if they're hurt. They're like the perfect victims."
And, as you will read today, businesses take advantage of their silence and vulnerability.
Will we allow such conditions to go unchecked again?
That is the broader question raised by an Observer investigation.
Victual Reality
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bookerly Posted 9:27 pm
12 Feb 2008
Great Post Tom!! And thanks to the Charlotte Observer for these reports. Please keep us informed as to how the reports are received, and if there is any governmental follow up.
Dear JavaEarth, I understand your feeling. But consider that perhaps the vast majority of people who don't "care" are not really indifferent. Rather they are so focused on survival and exhausted from the struggle, that there is nothing left for compassion. Or maybe there is nothing left in them to make them think that their voices will be listened to.
This is one of the reasons that the "gap" between the rich and the poor matters. As the vast majority of people loses ground, it becomes harder to organize them to deal with the plight of others (at least in an America where collective action has been successfully demonized for over 50 years).
Someday this sleeping giant may unite and waken. We can only hope it is not too late.
patrick in Beijing
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caniscandida Posted 11:23 pm
12 Feb 2008
And JavaEarth definitely deserves to be affirmed for deploring the opposite phenomenon, the Stepfordization, I guess, of American society.
But I suspect that you and JavaEarth are talking about different sets of people.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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