Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Flor was still working at the center when, at the beginning of March 2020, she started hearing from workers who were concerned about a new hazard: the coronavirus. The workers had good reason to be concerned. Like prisons, the kill floors of America’s slaughterhouses would soon be overrun with COVID-19, owing both to the crowded conditions in the plants, where workers often stood shoulder to shoulder, toiling in close quarters on the lines, and to the fact that at the outset of the pandemic the meatpacking industry devoted far more attention to continuing to operate at full capacity than to protecting its frontline employees. Sanderson Farms was no exception. Early on, Flor heard from frightened workers who complained that they were not being supplied with masks, much less spaced six feet apart from each other, in accordance with the social distancing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On March 20, 2020, Lampkin Butts, the company’s president, sent workers a memorandum on “work attendance,” informing them that as employees in a “critical infrastructure industry” they had a “special responsibility” to continue showing up for their shifts. The memo said nothing about slowing down the lines so that workers could stand farther apart from each other. Toward the end of March, workers were supplied with masks, and some hand-sanitizing stations were installed. The company also began requiring workers to have their temperature taken every morning, sending home anyone with a reading above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. But those with other symptoms—runny noses, coughs—were not sent home, Flor said, and many felt the company was trying to hide the number of workers who had contracted the virus to avoid triggering panic.

  One morning, as she was tracking all of this, Flor came down with a fever herself. She lay in bed for days, unable to move, her head pounding, her throat parched no matter how much water she drank. As she eventually learned, the cause was COVID-19. Flor battled the virus for days, fearing, at times, that she might not make it. “I was really, really sick,” she said. Although the symptoms eventually abated, Flor had meanwhile learned that she had another potentially fatal disease: breast cancer. Flor relayed all of this to me in a string of text messages. In one of the messages, she mentioned that she was no longer working at the center, which, despite advocating for better working conditions for others, did not provide its own employees with health insurance or family medical leave, as she’d discovered while in quarantine. “I been fighting for the rights of workers that I thought I was given,” she wrote. “I’m not planning to work for this place no more.”

  As dispiriting as all this was, Flor did not strike a note of self-pity or defeatism. She sounded optimistic, buoyed by the fact that, once again, she’d managed to overcome long odds. “I really think this is a miracle because I’m not supposed to be alive,” she wrote, “and I’m here.

  “I can’t work now, so practically I have no income,” she went on, “but we be ok. Mexicans are used to struggling and surviving.”

  7

  “Essential Workers”

  Dirty workers acted as “agents for the rest of us,” Everett Hughes averred, carrying out unsavory tasks that many citizens tacitly condoned even as they distanced themselves from (and looked down on) the people who performed them. This was true of the guards who staffed the jails and prisons that served as America’s de facto mental health asylums after states closed their psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s. It was true of drone operators who conducted targeted assassinations on behalf of an increasingly distracted and apathetic public after 9/11. In both of these cases—as in all of the examples that Hughes described in his essay—the people who did the dirty work were commissioned to perform their duties by the state. Their employer was the public, which underscored the fact that they were not rogue actors but agents of the body politic.

  But in the United States, as in all modern societies, there is another way that citizens can support—and benefit from—dirty work that is allotted to others: not by serving as their employers, but by consuming the products they make. Flor Martinez worked for a private company, not the government, but the force that exerted the greatest pull over her industry was the appetite of the American people, consumers who ate prodigious quantities of chicken, beef, and pork while conveniently avoiding ever going near the production sites. One might think that health concerns and the growing popularity of once-exotic vegetables like kale have led Americans to scale back their consumption of animal protein. The statistics suggest otherwise. In 1960, the per capita consumption of meat and poultry was 161.8 pounds. Twenty years later, in 1980, it had risen to 192.9 pounds. By 2000, the balance had shifted—less red meat, more chicken—but overall consumption continued to climb. After the 2008 Great Recession, the level fell slightly, most likely because families on tighter budgets could not afford as much meat, but the decline didn’t last very long. In 2018, the Department of Agriculture forecast that the average American would eat 222.2 pounds of meat and poultry over the course of the year, a record figure and double the amount of animal protein that government nutritionists recommended. This was also more than twice the amount of meat that the average person on the planet ate.

  What Americans wanted was cheap meat that could be consumed in abundance, the numbers suggested, which is one of the reasons that companies like Sanderson Farms and Tyson ran the lines in their slaughterhouses so fast, churning out as much product per dollar invested (and hour passed) as possible. This efficiency benefited everyone, the industry’s spokespeople claimed, keeping meat affordable and enabling families to buy as much of it as they wanted. But as the author Michael Pollan has noted, the cheapness of American meat masks an array of hidden costs: to the environment (raising cattle is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a major cause of deforestation and water pollution); to public health (higher risks of heart disease and, thanks to the overuse of antibiotics, drug-resistant infections); to living animals, as even committed meat eaters would likely have acknowledged if shown what happened in America’s factory farms and on the kill floors of industrial slaughterhouses. “No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do,” observed Pollan in his influential book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat.”

  The remove is both physical and aesthetic. The steaks and drumsticks sold in supermarkets come in sterile, odorless packages that obscure the system’s brutality. Some of the items that fill these packages—boneless patties, breaded nuggets—bear little resemblance to meat at all, making it easy to forget that an animal was killed to produce them. The desire to conceal this would not have surprised Norbert Elias, who, in The Civilizing Process, singled out the killing of animals as an example of how “disturbing events” came to be hidden in. In medieval societies, Elias noted, the upper classes routinely carved dead animals at the table, “not only whole fish and whole birds … but also whole rabbits, lambs, and quarters of veal.” Over time, this norm gave way to “another standard by which reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are avoided to the utmost. In many of our meat dishes the animal form is so concealed and changed by the art of its preparation and carving that while eating one is scarcely reminded of its origin.”

  Elias went on: “Specialists take care of it in the shop or the kitchen … The curve running from the carving of a large part of the animal or even the whole animal at table, through the advance in the threshold of repugnance at the sight of dead animals, to the removal of carving to specialized enclaves behind the scenes is a typical civilization-curve.”

  To eat meat in America in the twenty-first century was to stand at the far end of this curve, at a safe remove from the repugnant sights that slaughterhouse workers encountered on a daily basis and that consumers were not even permitted to glimpse on television. In her book Slaughterhouse, the animal rights activist Gail Eisnitz described her attempts to persuade a senior producer at 20/20 to air a segment on the mistreatment of
livestock that she’d uncovered at several meat and poultry plants. The producer was intrigued, but the idea was ultimately rejected, out of concern that the material would be “too graphic for the viewing public.” The night Eisnitz learned this, she surfed the channels on her television, taking in a show about a cop who beat a confession out of a prisoner, a drama in which a rape occurred, and the nightly news, which consisted of “a solid half hour of war, starvation, and genocide,” none of which was considered too graphic for the viewing public.

  The political scientist Timothy Pachirat has described the industrial slaughterhouse as a “zone of confinement,” an isolated, violent place “inaccessible to ordinary members of society” (Pachirat borrowed the term from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman). To penetrate this zone, Pachirat decided to apply for a job at a beef slaughterhouse, a plant whose workforce consisted mainly of immigrants and refugees and whose kill toll exceeded ten thousand cows a week—twenty-two hundred per day, a figure that gave rise to the title of a book he later published about his experience, Every Twelve Seconds. To kill so many animals at such a pace was messy, Pachirat discovered, splattering the workers in manure, blood, vomit, and offal (the cow’s entrails and internal organs). It also required a good deal of brutality and violence. At one point during the five and a half months he worked there, Pachirat was assigned to the chutes, where workers used electric prods to maneuver cows through a serpentine corral that led to the slaughterhouse. “The cattle jump and kick when shocked … and many also bellow sharply,” he wrote. When a cow collapsed in one of the chutes, the line kept moving, causing the downed animal to get stomped on. From the chutes the cows proceeded along a conveyer to the knocking box, where they were shot in the head with a captive-bolt gun. One day, Pachirat entered the box and was shown how to use it. After aiming the bolt a few inches above the cow’s eyes, he pulled the trigger and watched blood spurt out of its skull. The slain animal was carted off on the conveyer; within seconds, another appeared in the knocking box, “head swinging and eyes large in terror.” A coworker later warned Pachirat to avoid working as a knocker. “That shit will fuck you up,” he said. The warning resonated, not least because, during his time in the chutes, Pachirat repeatedly came into direct contact with the cows, patting their noses and gazing at their velvety hides. “Fucked up is exactly how I feel,” he wrote afterward. “It is how I would describe many of the chute workers, and it captures the rawness and violence of the perpetual confrontation between the living animals and the men driving them.”

  “The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll,” a worker at a pork slaughterhouse told Gail Eisnitz. “Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them.” Many of his coworkers abused drugs or alcohol to try to numb themselves, the worker said. “Only problem is, even if you try to drink those feelings away, they’re still there when you sober up.” The statement reminded me of the stories I’d heard from prison guards like Tom Beneze, who worked in a profession that drove people to rely on similar coping mechanisms. Killing animals for a living could have an equally profound effect on workers’ psyches, Eisnitz’s account suggested.

  Pachirat came to a different conclusion. Working as a knocker could indeed cause severe emotional distress. “Nobody wants to do that,” another worker told him. “You’ll have bad dreams.” But most of the workers at the plant did not seem troubled by what they were doing. A major reason for this was the division of labor on the kill floor, which was segmented into so many different subspecialties—belly ripper, liver hanger, head chiseler—that the act of killing became fragmented (only the “knocker” actually killed the animal, many workers were convinced). This description matched the impression I gleaned from the one kill floor that I managed to see firsthand, at a poultry slaughterhouse where workers were given similarly specialized roles: one group harvesting livers, another slicing necks, a third trimming “defects.” As the workers pruned and gutted the birds, rivulets of pink bloodied wastewater ran along the floor, sloshing onto the soles of my shoes. It was unsettling, and the smell on the kill floor caused me to gag at first. Yet it was easy to imagine how, after a while, slicing necks or harvesting livers became mundane, a technical task devoid of anguish, which is how the Sanderson Farms workers I’d interviewed described their jobs to me and how, over time, even the chute workers at the slaughterhouse where Pachirat got a job came to feel, mocking him for being soft. “You motherfucking pussy!” one worker shouted when Pachirat refused to use an electric prod to push the cows toward the knocking box. “What’s the point of shocking them?” Pachirat asked. “The point is pain and torture,” the worker said.

  To judge by this exchange, organizations like PETA are not wrong that working in a slaughterhouse can instill a blasé attitude toward suffering. It can foster cruelty and sadism. But who bears more responsibility for this cruelty: the workers who shock and kill the animals (and whom some PETA activists have advocated charging with criminal felonies), or the consumers who eat meat without ever thinking about the costs? After quitting his job at the beef slaughterhouse, Pachirat debated this question with a friend. “She maintained, passionately and with conviction, that the people who did the killing were more responsible because they were the ones performing the physical actions that took the animals’ lives,” he wrote. Pachirat argued otherwise, insisting to his friend “that those who benefited at a distance, delegating this terrible work to others while disclaiming responsibility for it, bore more moral responsibility, particularly in contexts like the slaughterhouse, where those with the fewest opportunities in society performed the dirty work.”

  “FULFILLING ORDERS”

  There is no way for this work to be anything but terrible, some would argue. One could hardly begrudge animal rights activists from organizations like PETA for feeling this way. Even organizations that do not share PETA’s agenda know better than to portray the slaughter of livestock for mass consumption as a pleasant undertaking. “Killing and cutting up the animals we eat has always been bloody, hard and dangerous work,” noted Human Rights Watch in its 2005 report on labor conditions in the meatpacking industry. At the turn of the twentieth century, the stockyards where the killing was done “were more than sweatshops,” the report went on. “They were blood shops, and not only for animal slaughter. The industry operated with low wages, long hours, brutal treatment, and sometimes deadly exploitation of mostly immigrant workers.”

  And yet, as with other forms of dirty work, the conditions in the meatpacking industry were not foreordained. They were shaped by rules and regulations and by government agencies that, in theory at least, had the power to make the work less terrible, both with respect to how the animals were treated and with respect to how the workers were. Whether agencies would actually do so was another matter, of course. Following passage of the 1906 Meat Inspection Act, which was signed into law shortly after Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, the government began to regulate the meatpacking industry to prevent a recurrence of the unsanitary practices that had shocked and horrified Sinclair’s readers. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. Department of Agriculture dispatched federal inspectors to slaughterhouses to examine carcasses and, if necessary, halt production in order to remove contaminated meat from the lines. The system wasn’t perfect, but it functioned well enough to assure consumers that the meat they put on their dinner plates was safe to eat. In the 1980s, however, the Reagan administration embraced a new system of “streamlined inspection.” Touted as more modern and scientific, streamlined inspection enabled companies to accelerate production while cutting the number of federal inspectors on the lines. In 1991, the reporter Scott Bronstein published an exposé in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that described the consequences in the poultry industry. “Every week throughout the South,” Bronstein reported, “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections,
cancerous tumors or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers, instead of being condemned and destroyed.” Bronstein quoted inspectors who told him that the USDA seal of approval ensuring that poultry was safe for human consumption had become “meaningless.” “We’re well aware of the problem,” one industry spokesman acknowledged. “And we don’t have an answer for it yet.”

  Six years later, in 1997, the Clinton administration rolled out an industry-friendly solution to the problem—the so-called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system. Framed as a watershed reform that would improve safety, the new system instead transferred authority to quality assurance officers employed by the industry and reduced federal inspectors to secondary spot-check duty. Some federal inspectors jokingly called HACCP “Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray.” An updated version of HACCP—known by the acronym HIMP—eventually emerged and was given a different label: “Hands in My Pocket.” As the number of federal inspectors declined, companies took to spraying meat with bacteria-killing chemicals such as peracetic acid, or PAA, and chlorine. The sprays—which were banned in Europe, where consumers overwhelmingly opposed consuming meat doused in chemicals—did nothing to address the filthy conditions on factory farms that exposed so many animals to disease. They did nothing to halt excessive line speeds. It was not even clear that they were effective at killing off dangerous pathogens. The one clear advantage the chemicals did have was that they were cheap, enabling the USDA to further reduce staffing and allowing companies to speed production even more. As one USDA poultry inspector told The Washington Post, “They don’t talk about it publicly, but the line speeds are so fast, they are not spotting contamination, like fecal matter, as the birds pass by … Their attitude is, let the chemicals do the work.”