Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Line workers at the poultry plant earned between eleven and thirteen dollars an hour—a pittance compared with some factory jobs, but better than anything else Flor could find, which was why, eventually, she put aside her memories of the less appealing aspects of the job and applied to work there again. This time she was assigned to “live hang,” where workers hoisted live chickens out of crates and hooked them by their feet onto metal shackles that were fastened to the conveyor belt that circulated through the plant. Once attached to the belt, the birds passed through an electric current (which stunned them), an automated throat slitter (which sliced their necks), and a tank of scalding water (which loosened their feathers). If a chicken somehow emerged from the tank alive, which happened on occasion, a worker wielding a knife would slash its neck manually. The first time Flor saw this, she cried and vowed never to eat chicken again. Most of the time, though, she was in too much agony to think about the chickens. Live hangers had to put sixty-five birds on the belt per minute, a frenetic pace that required lifting the chickens up two at a time, one in each hand, and then immediately reaching down to grab the next pair. For the larger men on the shift, repeating this movement for hours on end was grueling. For Flor, a petite woman with small hands, it was excruciating. After a few days, she could no longer feel her forearms, which were numb with pain. At night, she devoured painkillers to soothe her throbbing neck and shoulders.

  Eventually, the pain led Flor to ask her supervisor for a different job. She was switched to “twin pack,” joining a crew of workers who slid broilers into plastic bags on the other end of the line. The job demanded far less heavy lifting, but the repetitive strain was worse, not least because the bags were often stuck together, forcing workers to pry them open with their fingertips before maneuvering a chicken inside. Flor’s wrists and fingers started to ache, particularly on her left hand. After a while, she went to see a nurse at the plant health clinic. “I can’t do this—please help me,” she begged. She was transferred again, this time to the debone department, which reduced the strain on her left hand but soon caused her other hand to ache.

  The pain was constant, yet the physical distress was not what bothered Flor the most. What upset her even more was the verbal and emotional abuse that accompanied it. The supervisors at the plant never asked her how she was feeling. Instead, they berated her. “You just don’t want to work!” one of them snapped. Their only concern seemed to be running the lines at maximum speed, prompting them to bark at the workers as though they were wayward children. Flor was a survivor, and an optimist, but the humiliating tone touched a nerve, reminding her of the way her grandfather used to shout at her grandmother. The most humiliating ordeal of all was requesting to go to the bathroom, which required stepping away from the lines. Although workers were given a thirty-minute lunch break and one other short respite during their shifts, the bathrooms were crowded during these interludes. If they asked to go at other times, they were frequently chastised. Because they were afraid of the supervisors, Flor learned, some of her female coworkers wore an extra pair of pants beneath their work uniforms and, when desperate, wet themselves on the production line. Having witnessed and survived worse bullying, Flor was not afraid, sauntering off to the bathroom without asking for permission when she really had to go, an act of insubordination that prompted the supervisors to glower at her.

  The irony was that Flor was herself married to a supervisor, to whom she began to voice complaints at home. “Why do you pressure the workers so much?” she would ask Manuel, pleading with him to advocate on their behalf. He was unmoved. “You’re not the only one—deal with it,” he would say. The pressure she felt was nothing, Manuel told her, next to the pressure that he and his fellow supervisors felt from their superiors, who badgered them at meetings to push the workers even harder.

  TORTURED FLESH

  I first met Flor Martinez at Our Lady of Guadalupe Hall, a community center across the street from an adobe church in Bryan, Texas. The center was hosting a workshop to educate poultry workers about their rights. A contingent of Guatemalans had come from North Carolina, a group of Mexicans from Arkansas, the home of Tyson and one of the leading poultry-producing states in the country. During breaks, the workers mingled outside, chatting in Spanish and filling their plates with homemade flautas and tamales prepared by one of the workshop’s organizers.

  Why were so few native-born Americans hired to work in poultry plants? In 2017, the podcast This American Life aired an episode in which some residents of Albertville, Alabama, were invited to weigh in on this question. A small town in the northeast corner of the state, Albertville was home to two chicken plants that, like the rest of the poultry industry, had boomed in the 1990s, the decade when chicken was successfully marketed as a low-cholesterol alternative to beef. In places like Albertville, the boom in chicken consumption meant jobs, but the jobs went mainly to Mexicans and Guatemalans, whose arrival fueled resentment among locals wondering why more Americans weren’t hired. “There are people out there who want jobs,” complained a woman named Pat who’d begun working as a giblet wrapper at one of the plants in the 1970s. “They just quit hiring Americans.”

  This view was shared by some influential Alabama politicians, among them the then senator Jeff Sessions, an ardent foe of immigration whose perspective on the issue was shaped by the changing composition of the poultry workforce in his home state. (“I really doubt that he would have made immigration his signature issue if not for his experience with the poultry plants in Alabama,” Roy Beck, a close friend of Sessions’s and the founder of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, told This American Life.) At one point, Sessions attended a town hall in Albertville where residents vented their frustration about the immigrants who had flooded into their community. It was enough to convince him that permissive immigration policies enabled foreigners “to take away the few jobs there are, leaving Americans unemployed.”

  Whether the jobs in question would actually have been desirable to many Americans was open to question. Yet to some extent, the influx of immigrants was what made them undesirable. In Albertville as elsewhere, working in a chicken plant became “immigrant work,” the status of which was diminished by the hiring of foreign-born workers who exerted downward pressure on the wages and bargaining power of all employees in the industry. The plant where Pat the giblet wrapper worked was a case in point. It had a union, but because Alabama was a right-to-work state, new hires weren’t required to join it, and a lot of immigrants didn’t, causing membership to drop to 40 percent (it had once been 94 percent). Pat’s salary also dropped; at the time the episode of This American Life aired, she made $11.95 an hour, roughly half of what she would have earned if her wages had kept up with inflation. In 2002, workers in poultry plants were paid 24 percent less, on average, than the average manufacturing worker. By 2020, they were paid 40 percent less. In theory, the growing popularity of chicken should have tilted the bargaining power to workers’ advantage and forced companies to raise wages. The supply of immigrants willing to work for less—desperate workers whom the company preferred, locals like Pat sensed, because they didn’t join the union and rarely complained—spared the industry this burden.

  This dynamic was familiar to the economist Philip Martin, who studied how the entry of immigrants into certain niche labor markets (picking vegetables, cleaning hotel rooms) made these jobs harsher and less appealing, validating and confirming their unattractiveness—their dirtiness—to native-born Americans. “Employers feel under no compulsion to upgrade dirty jobs as long as immigrant workers are available,” observed Martin, “guaranteeing that dirty jobs get less and less attractive to Americans.” Immigrants thus acquired a kind of social dirtiness that was tinged with racism and exacerbated by class anxiety as low-skilled American workers feared that more pliant foreigners were displacing them. “It made us all think that we were gonna be pushed out the door,” said Pat.

  To be sure, Americans with more liberal views of immigration di
d not see foreign-born workers this way. They saw them as resourceful strivers who did the hard, thankless jobs that no one else would otherwise have done. Liberals were more likely to shower these immigrants with praise than to view them as dirty interlopers. When the jobs in question involved slaughtering animals for mass consumption, however, it was another matter. The killing of animals raised on industrial-style factory farms was, after all, associated with many things—the mistreatment of livestock, the overuse of hormones and antibiotics, the despoliation of the environment—that liberals found abhorrent. Factory-farmed meat was “tortured flesh,” as the writer Jonathan Safran Foer argued in his bestselling book Eating Animals: carved off the bones of grossly overfed, genetically engineered chickens, cows, and pigs that were crammed into filthy, disease-infested sheds, deprived of sunlight, and subjected to untold cruelty and suffering, all to maximize the profits of a handful of giant corporations.

  To eat this meat was to be complicit in the torture, Foer’s book implied, a message that resonated with a growing number of health- and eco-conscious consumers who preferred to buy organic meat that came from family farms or opted to become vegetarians. But if consuming factory-farmed meat was deplorable, what did this say about the people who hacked apart the animals, the live hangers and tendon cutters who worked for the giant corporations and were directly involved in the killing process? To the extent that they appeared in exposés of the meat industry, these workers tended to be depicted less as resourceful strivers worthy of admiration than as callous brutes. In a section of Eating Animals titled “Our New Sadism,” Foer described a Tyson facility where workers “regularly ripped off the heads of fully conscious birds.” He described another facility—a KFC “Supplier of the Year”—where “chickens were kicked, stomped on, slammed into walls, had chewing tobacco spit in their eyes.” If you worked in the industry, you were likely to turn into a vicious torturer, such stories suggested, although, to his credit, Foer acknowledged that the workers themselves were often severely mistreated as well. Such acknowledgments rarely appeared on the websites of organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which posted undercover videos of “sadistic workers” inflicting abuse on farm animals and advocated charging the perpetrators with criminal felonies. “The blasé attitude towards unbearable suffering and the outright sadism that you can see on this video turns up again and again and again when one of these hellholes is exposed,” one PETA video and blog post declared.

  * * *

  Both on the right and on the left, then, albeit for very different reasons, the people working in America’s slaughterhouses are likely to be viewed disparagingly. To be seen as dirty, which is how people whose jobs bring them into direct contact with the flesh and blood of animals have long been seen in many cultures. “In Tokugawa-era Japan, butchers were categorized among the eta, or unclean people, and had to live and work in segregated parts of cities,” notes the historian Wilson J. Warren. “In India, people who worked with dead animals were part of the untouchable caste.” The condemnation was less sweeping in countries such as France and England, but direct involvement in the killing of animals nevertheless carried a moral taint. In his influential treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693, the philosopher John Locke noted that butchers tended to be excluded from juries, on the grounds that “they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind.”

  More than two centuries later, in 1906, a searing exposé of the meat industry appeared in America. By the time Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published, the era of the village butcher, a skilled craftsman who catered to the members of a local community, had given way to the era of large meatpacking companies that capitalized on the invention of refrigerated railroad cars to transport meat from distant farms to centralized slaughterhouses in big cities like Chicago. (They also capitalized on the absence of antitrust laws to stifle competition and maximize their profits.) It was in a Chicago slaughterhouse that Sinclair’s novel was set. Although it was a work of fiction, Sinclair spent seven weeks in the stockyards of Chicago before writing the book, which drew its force from its harrowing realism. Like Foer’s Eating Animals, The Jungle described the mass slaughter of livestock in grisly detail, “a very river of death” presided over by workers who emerged from their shifts spattered in blood. Unlike in Foer’s case, Sinclair’s primary goal was not to draw attention to the mistreatment of animals. It was to dramatize the plight of the workers, which Sinclair, a socialist, hoped to change. “The novel I plan would be intended to set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits,” he informed his publisher. Among the brokenhearted was The Jungle’s protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago to pursue the American dream. After his elderly father dies from a lung infection contracted while working at a meatpacking plant, Jurgis cannot afford to give him a proper funeral. He ends up getting fired after sustaining an injury at the plant, where workers are routinely exposed to unsafe conditions and denied basic amenities, such as heat during winter and access to toilets. “There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands,” wrote Sinclair in one of many passages that suggested that working in the meatpacking industry was not only dangerous but befouling.

  First serialized in a socialist newspaper, The Jungle was a popular sensation, shocking readers horrified by its descriptions of dead rats and tubercular beef that was ground up and sold to unsuspecting consumers. Sales of meat declined sharply. President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to lunch at the White House. Sympathetic to the idea that the meatpacking industry was a nefarious trust—if not to the cause of socialism—Roosevelt soon dispatched investigators to probe conditions in Chicago’s stockyards. The investigation helped spur passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. For Sinclair, a twenty-seven-year-old writer whose previous books had been critical and commercial failures, the reaction was intoxicating. But it was also sobering. The Jungle made Sinclair the most famous muckraker of his generation, but it did not allay his concern that once the fear of eating contaminated meat abated, the big packing companies would go back to exploiting their workers as ruthlessly as before. What roused the indignation of his readers was not the mistreatment of these workers but the risk of eating rancid meat, Sinclair ruefully concluded. “I aimed at the public’s heart, but by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he later remarked.

  Upton Sinclair died in 1968, by which point concern about the working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago had faded from the headlines. Yet in the intervening decades, the conditions in the industry improved, not because the public demanded this, but because workers did. A major force behind these improvements was the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which successfully organized an industry in which racial and ethnic divisions were deliberately stoked. At the turn of the century, the workforce in meatpacking plants had been dominated by eastern European immigrants. By 1930, one-third of the workers in Chicago’s stockyards were African American. Many Black workers were initially recruited into the industry as strikebreakers and were given the harshest, least desirable positions. During and after shifts, a “social and cultural apartheid” prevailed that prevented workers of different racial backgrounds from mingling, much less from linking arms on picket lines. The UPWA went to great lengths to bridge the divide, holding racially integrated rallies, integrating the bars and taverns near the stockyards, and encouraging Black workers to serve as shop stewards. Its efforts did not go unnoticed by publications such as The Chicago Defender, which praised the union’s struggle to “defeat prejudice.” In the decades after World War II, its efforts also began to pay off, resulting in industry-wide wage scales that were 15 percent higher than the average for all manufacturing jobs.

  Working in a slaughterhouse was still not easy. It was a dirty, difficult job, associated with an activity�
�killing animals—that aroused widespread disgust. But for several decades, meat packers were able to earn a respectable living and to exercise their collective bargaining rights, making the story told in The Jungle seem obsolete. The improved conditions lasted until the early 1970s, when a company called Iowa Beef Packers pioneered a new production model. Instead of locating its plants in cities, IBP situated them in rural areas—closer to farms and cattle ranches, which could reduce transportation costs. The areas in question also tended to be hostile to unions, which lowered labor costs. When a strike broke out at IBP’s flagship plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, the company responded by importing Mexican strikebreakers. The move was part of a new “low-wage strategy” that the company implemented to give it an advantage over its competitors. Soon enough, IBP’s competitors began to emulate the strategy, bringing the good times for meatpacking workers to a halt. By 1990, wages in the industry were 20 percent lower than the average for all manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile, the injury rate soared as a once-stable job was radically de-skilled and transformed into an increasingly dangerous, temporary one.

  Lacerations, torn muscles, distended fingers: the workers in America’s slaughterhouses had plenty of tortured flesh of their own. “My scars are many: on my hands, arms, heart, mind and soul,” one meatpacking worker said of the brutal conditions he endured. “I have learned that I am nothing to any packer but a fucking piece of dirt.” In many slaughterhouses, the turnover rate exceeded 100 percent annually. How could plants in rural areas find enough healthy bodies to replace the workers they churned through? Without help from lobbying organizations such as the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which pushed for allowing more low-skilled immigrants to enter the country, they might not have. Among the lobby’s members was the American Meat Institute. Meatpacking companies sometimes enlisted third-party contractors to bring immigrants and refugees from war-torn nations like Sierra Leone into the United States. By the 1990s, an estimated one-fourth of the industry’s workforce consisted of undocumented immigrants whose marginal status made them far less likely to stand up for—or even to know—their rights. In 2005, a Human Rights Watch report revealed that basic rights were systematically violated in industrial slaughterhouses and that these violations were inextricably related to the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor. “All the abuses described in this report—failure to prevent serious workplace injury and illness, denial of compensation to injured workers, interference with workers’ freedom of association—are directly linked to the vulnerable immigration status of most workers in the industry and the willingness of employers to take advantage of that vulnerability,” the report found.