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Cutting the
Gordian Knot In 1905, publication of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle describing the abominable state of American slaughterhouses set off a storm of public protest. Meat sales across the country dropped by one third and on July 30, 1906, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act, mandating that any meat entering interstate commerce must be inspected and approved for purity by federal meat inspectors. In 1958, another major reform, driven by a national campaign in
which the Animal Welfare The Humane Slaughter Act was enthusiastically supported by the unions because improperly stunned animals cause worker injuries. While the unions were strong, the Act appeared to work well. During the ’80s and ’90s, however, disquieting reports began seeping from behind the closed gates of America’s slaughterhouses. The publication of Gail Eisnitz’s blockbuster book Slaughterhouse in 1997 (AWI Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4), the product of years of painstaking and often dangerous investigation, revealed a situation on the killing floors far worse than any outsider could have imagined. For chapter after chapter, Eisnitz documents horrors almost beyond imagination, not in a few isolated cases, but from North Carolina to Washington State. The Humane Slaughter Act, she found, is entirely unenforced; most workmen—apparently even some inspectors—never heard of it. Living cattle, fully conscious and struggling, are shackled to the line to be skinned and dismembered. Live hogs are routinely dumped into scalding vats. “There’s no way these animals can bleed out in the time it takes to get up the ramp” workmen told Eisnitz. “By the time they hit the scalding tank they’re still conscious and squealing. Happens all the time.” For those who must see to believe, a video of conscious cattle being skinned and dismembered alive at IBP’s (formally Iowa Beef Processors) huge Wallula, Washington slaughterhouse was shown recently on Seattle television (see Barbaric Butchery of Cows, page 13). Workers at the plant, who have defied one of America’s most sinister corporations to tell the truth about conditions under which they labor, have sworn in affidavits that up to 30% of the animals going up the line are still alive. How has an industry gained such dominance that it can ignore not only the Humane Slaughter Act but a whole spectrum of laws designed to guarantee food safety, safeguard workers, protect the environment, prevent control and manipulation of markets and prevent illegal immigration? What can be done? To answer the first question one must turn to the history of meat packing and the takeover of the industry during the ’70s and ’80s by the ruthless entrepreneurs who now control it. In a startlingly brief time these men broke the power of the unions, replaced a longstanding American-born workforce with legal and illegal immigrants, subjugated federal and state regulators and eliminated independent competitors to gain control of the market. How they did it—by “union busting,” in deals suffuse with the cloying redolence of corruption—has yet to be fully told. But if the answer to the first question is complex and shrouded, the answer to the second is not complex at all. Although it required the elimination of active unions and the “neutralization” of government officials before it could be applied, the primary “reform” introduced to “increase efficiency” was brutally simple. This was to increase the speed of the line, or chain, upon which victims are hung and butchered, by 200 to 300 percent. It is from this single operational change that the disastrous situation in American slaughterhouses chiefly derives. Conscious animals are carried, struggling and vocalizing, down the line because those assigned to kill the victims do not have time to perform the task correctly. Those who dismember live animals do so because they will be fired if they do not. The appalling injury rate among slaughterhouse workers—characterized by Gail Eisnitz as “walking wounded”—is equally a function of excessive line speeds. Struggling animals cause innumerable injuries. But even absent this, workers are driven to such dangerous haste that accidents are inevitable. Additionally, line speeds have played a major role in the dramatic—by some estimates 500%—increase in food poisoning experienced since meat packing “reforms” began in 1970. It is physically impossible for a line inspector to properly inspect the current output of 100 cattle and from 600 to 1000 hogs each hour! As line speeds accelerated, inspections became more and more cursory. The situation was immeasurably worsened in 1998 when USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), once again yielding to industry wishes, introduced a system it calls Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) that allows companies to devise their own methods of guaranteeing food safety. The practical effect of HACCP has been to remove inspectors from the line, thus eliminating any possibility that the Humane Slaughter Act might be enforced, and to replace systematic carcass inspection with “random spot checks” for bacteria. Fortunately the Court of Appeals ruled HACCP violates the plain language of the Meat Inspection Act which requires that federal inspectors must “carefully examine” each carcass before approving it* (see Court Says No to Self Regulation, page 12). But the decision does not alter the fact that it is not possible, given the ratio of carcasses to inspectors, to perform careful examinations. The answer to the second question is therefore obvious. Atrocities against animals can be brought to an end, worker injuries reduced to a modest fraction of the present rate, and meat contamination substantially relieved by a simple corrective. That is to reduce line speeds in slaughterhouses to 1970 levels or around 40% of current velocities. For those who say this is not “administratively feasible” or would require “excessive bureaucracy” there is, once more, a simple answer. It can hardly be beyond human ingenuity to devise tamperproof governors to fix the maximum velocity of the line and to prevent managers who believe that “minimally stunned” animals “bleed better” from reducing the lethality of stunning devices. At the same time, sealed video cameras should be installed to keep the killing floor under constant surveillance. The economic effects of an enforced slowdown of line speeds would be little short of revolutionary. Dominant packers have used accelerated line speeds to help them to force smaller plants out of business and gain control of the market. A slowdown would reverse the process by compelling the industry to bring its large, unused capacity back on line. Some idled plants, such as IBP’s huge Council Bluffs, Iowa slaughterhouse which was closed in 1998 (apparently to help create a processing bottleneck and depress the price of live hogs) belong to dominant packers. But there are hundreds of small plants, driven from business, that might still be restored. Once assured that a line speed reduction really would be enforced, investors would rush to bring idled plants back into production and break ground for new ones. The percentage of packing capacity controlled by the dominant packers would drop dramatically. Their ability to repress producer prices with “captive supply” and artificial bottlenecks would be lessened accordingly. Vertical integration, which has very nearly destroyed independent hog farmers in the US, would be jolted hard by a slowdown in line speeds. It would take years and massive investment in processing facilities for companies such as Seaboard and Continental Grain to regain their “fully integrated” status. The allure of vertical integration might wind up considerably less appealing. In the meantime, as small slaughterhouses come back on line across rural America, the free (cash) market would begin to re-establish itself. Small sale barns would re-open. Tens of thousands of family hog farmers who quit raising hogs because they lacked feasible markets, would gain the option of returning. Many doubtless would. How about labor? Reduced line speeds would open up tens of thousands of new jobs. How do we answer industry’s assertion that unless INS waived all restrictions (an INS raid on the slaughterhouse in Gibbon, Nebraska exposed 68% of the workers as “non-documented Hispanics”) a slowdown would create an acute labor shortage? In the US twenty-five years ago, (and until quite recently in Canada), slaughterhouses were operated by well paid unionized workers who often spent their entire working lives in the same plant. They did not leave voluntarily. They were driven out and replaced by a shifting population of immigrants (average time on the job today is little more than a year) desperate enough to tolerate bad treatment and dangerous conditions for as little as a third the hourly wage paid under union contract. Reduction of line speeds would open the way to re-Americanizing the work force. Packers would be forced to compete for labor by offering higher wages and benefits. Less dangerous conditions would make the work less unattractive to non-immigrants. Small packers resuming business would seek out former employees still living in the community. A slaughterhouse, under the best of conditions, is a grim and terrible place. That can never change. But slowing line speeds to 1970 levels would greatly reduce the atrocities now committed against helpless animals. It would avoid thousands of worker injuries every year. It would reduce public exposure to meat borne pathogens that are the chief cause of up to 9,000 food poisoning deaths in the US each year. A substantial percentage of these victims are young children. A forced line speed reduction would also do a great deal to open a closed, monstrously rigged system to the workings of the free market. And it would hasten the day when instead of using a captive workforce that can be exploited, bullied, maimed and discarded with complete impunity, packing companies will have to compete for US workers on the US labor market. Excerpts from affidavit of slaughterhouse employee “…there are accidents because the cows are still alive. At the back hoof, the cow was kicking and it cut off one worker’s three fingers. The cows are kicking and jumping and everything. And the company didn’t save the fingers, so the worker lost them….” “…the meat is all green and all dirty from the manure. The meat gets dirty with manure because the skin is dirty and the cows are kicking.” "You know they're alive because they are breathing real hard, they make noise, they kick the other cows, and it moves the whole chain."
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Institute was deeply involved, came to
America’s slaughterhouses. This was the federal Humane Slaughter Act
which requires that the animal be rendered “insensible to pain” by a
“rapid and effective” means before being “shackled” to the
conveyor chain, or “line,” upon which they are hung by a hind leg,
where their throats are cut and where they are skinned and dismembered.
Federal meat inspectors are empowered to enforce the Humane Slaughter
Act by shutting down the line if animals are being killed “not in
accordance” with the Act. Because shutting down the line for even a
few minutes costs a packing house thousands of dollars in lost
production, this is a potentially powerful enforcement tool.
