by Eyal Press
“REGULATION BY SHAMING”
To be sure, America is not the only country that relies on foreign laborers to work in slaughterhouses. In Germany, the dirty work in these facilities has often been delegated to transplants from poorer neighboring states (Bulgaria, Romania) who are hired through subcontractors, housed in crowded quarters, and ruthlessly exploited. Perhaps not surprisingly, outbreaks of COVID-19 erupted in some German slaughterhouses as well. In June 2020, fifteen hundred workers at a plant in North Rhine–Westphalia tested positive for the virus, prompting the authorities to close local schools and order a lockdown. But when Tönnies, the company that owned the facility, tried to blame the outbreak on the plant’s foreign workers, its owners were immediately rebuked. Hubertus Heil, Germany’s labor minister, accused the company of taking “an entire region hostage” and demanded that it pay damages. After Tönnies apologized and offered to pay for widespread testing in the community, Heil was unappeased, telling the press he had “zero” trust in the company. He later called the meatpacking industry a system of “organized irresponsibility” and proposed “fundamental” change, including increased monitoring and a ban on subcontractors.
Here was another way that public officials could respond when dangerous and degrading work conditions came to light: by shaming the companies that profited from them. This approach was not unheard of in America. In 2009, OSHA launched an initiative to shine a light on companies that willfully violated the law. In 2014, after four workers at a DuPont facility in Texas were asphyxiated following exposure to a toxic chemical, David Michaels, an epidemiologist who headed OSHA at the time, declared, “Nothing can bring these workers back to their loved ones … We here at OSHA want DuPont and the chemical industry as a whole to hear this message loud and clear.” According to Matthew Johnson, an economist at Duke and the author of “Regulation by Shaming,” a study of the policy’s deterrent effects, targeting such messages at local media and industry trade publications led to a 30 percent reduction in violations at adjacent facilities in the same industry. A single news release could have the impact of two hundred OSHA safety inspections, the study found.
The Trump administration took a different approach, one outlined in a September 24, 2020, memorandum, in which Patrick Pizzella, the deputy secretary of labor, instructed OSHA and other enforcement agencies not to publicize company violations “absent extraordinary circumstances.” Press releases about COVID-related violations promptly stopped. Protecting the reputation of meatpacking companies was evidently more important to the government than protecting the lives of slaughterhouse workers. The low value placed on the lives of these workers came to light when a nonprofit organization called Justice at Work sued OSHA for failing to protect meat packers at a Maid-Rite plant in Pennsylvania. In March 2020, OSHA had received a complaint alleging that the conditions at the plant, where workers toiled in cramped quarters with no barriers between them, posed an “imminent danger.” The agency, without bothering to inspect the facility, determined that the danger was not imminent. When an inspection finally was approved several months later, in July, OSHA contacted the plant’s director of human resources beforehand to announce that it was coming. At a hearing, Matthew Morgan, a lawyer for Justice at Work, asked if giving a company a heads-up was conventional practice. It wasn’t, an OSHA inspector indicated. “Then why did you do it here?” Morgan asked. “To make sure that I was safe from COVID-19,” the inspector said, explaining that a “job-hazard analysis” had been done on the inspectors’ behalf and that her superiors had determined that taking added precautions was justified before entering the facility. “OSHA has a right to protect employees,” the inspector told Morgan—a right that Maid-Rite workers could evidently do without.
Along with lax oversight came something else: waivers from the USDA granting fifteen poultry slaughterhouses permission to run their lines even faster. According to the National Employment Law Project, all of the plants that received the waivers had records of severe injuries, had been cited for violations by OSHA in the past, or had COVID-19 outbreaks at the time.
The coronavirus pandemic did occasion some shaming in America as well—not of the meatpacking industry, as in Germany, but of the workers themselves. In a call with a bipartisan group of congressional representatives, Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, suggested that the outbreaks of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants had more to do with the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives than with workplace conditions. Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, asserted that “99%” of the cases at meatpacking plants in her state could be attributed to the fact that the workers lived “in the same community, the same buildings, sometimes in the same apartments.” As with guards who were blamed for having a penchant for cruelty when abuses in prison came to light, such statements implied that the key moral failure rested with a few reckless individuals—“bad apples”—rather than with the exploitative system in which they worked.
Such statements touched a nerve in Dulce Castañeda, a resident of Crete, Nebraska, which was home to a pork slaughterhouse owned by Smithfield. Castañeda did not work at the plant. Her father, a Mexican immigrant, did. At the start of the pandemic, Castañeda learned that her father and other workers at the slaughterhouse were given hairnets rather than N95 or surgical masks. At one point, the company announced that it was closing the plant, but then abruptly reversed the decision and kept it open. Although Smithfield eventually made masks available and installed plastic barriers between workers on the disassembly line, these barriers were removable, Castañeda’s father told her, and many workers still believed they were at high risk. Castañeda’s father had underlying health conditions, yet, like many workers at the plant, he was too afraid to submit a complaint to OSHA, fearing it would trigger retaliation from the company. On May 27, 2020, Castañeda decided to file a complaint of her own. In it, she listed an array of concerns, among them that social distancing rules were not enforced in the cafeteria or bathrooms and that employees were not kept informed about which of their coworkers were exposed, positive, or sick. By this point, more than one hundred workers at the plant had fallen ill, helping to explain why Saline County, where Crete was located, had one of the highest per capita rates of infection in the country.
After contacting OSHA, Castañeda was cautiously optimistic. “I had a little bit of hope that perhaps if they start receiving these complaints, then maybe that would encourage them to get out here and actually see for themselves what’s happening,” she said. Her hopes were buoyed when an OSHA officer called her immediately. The officer proceeded to explain that maintaining social distance was the responsibility of the workers, not the company. “He said, ‘The employer cannot sit there and watch them all day,’” she recalled. When Castañeda asked whether OSHA might conduct an on-site inspection, the officer said this was unlikely because Smithfield was “complying with everything.”
At the end of the call, the OSHA officer said one other thing, recommending that Castañeda tell her family members to wear masks and to practice social distancing. The advice was “a slap in the face,” she said, as if she and her family members had not already taken these steps and as though the problem were not the conditions at the plant but their personal behavior. Her bitterness deepened when, a few weeks later, she came across an article quoting a letter that Kenneth Sullivan, the CEO of Smithfield, sent to Nebraska’s governor, Pete Ricketts, in which he described social distancing as “a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops.” Ricketts could have responded to this insulting claim the way Hubertus Heil did to Tönnies in Germany. That is, he could have shamed the company for holding places like Saline County hostage and announced that he would do everything in his power to reform the industry. Instead, he fixed the blame on a more convenient target: the workers. “What do we see in places where we see a lot of spread of the virus?” said Ricketts. “Well, we see people concentrate together, and that’s certainly true with our food pro
cessors.” Soon, meatpacking workers in Nebraska found themselves being turned away from retail stores or asked where they worked before getting haircuts, Tony Vargas, a state senator from Nebraska, told NPR. In other words, they started to be treated like “polluting persons” whose own moral failings were the problem, which is how dirty workers are often made to feel. This was how Dulce Castañeda felt after coming across a story in which another Smithfield spokesperson blamed the outbreak of COVID-19 on “living circumstances in certain cultures,” which “are different than they are with your traditional American family.”
“That’s saying that we don’t live in good conditions,” she said with dismay. “That we’re dirty.”
VIRTUOUS CONSUMERS
While “essential workers” in the poultry industry were made to feel dirty, nonessential workers in fields like finance and computer engineering—the “people with laptops”—were sheltering in place, more distant from what transpired in industrial slaughterhouses than ever before. Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from.
And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system. Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.
Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.
But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.
“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.
“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”
The farmer’s observation helps clarify why ethical eaters often seem far more attuned to the welfare of the animals in the food system, taking pains to buy beef and chicken labeled “cage free” and “Certified Humane,” than to the welfare of the workers, about whom the labels say nothing. It also underscores the limits of virtuous consumption, which can reduce politics to a market transaction whose main purpose is to make individuals feel better about themselves. These individuals often care more about their own health and about a certain kind of purity—the purity of not eating meat laced with antibiotics, the purity of keeping artificially processed food out of their kitchens and bodies—than about fair wages and labor abuses. To the extent that the “good food” movement focuses on the choices that consumers make in the marketplace, it risks diverting attention from structural issues like the conditions of production in the food industry. It may also come across as sanctimonious and elitist. In many poor urban areas, farmers markets and grocery stores that sell organic chicken and grass-fed beef do not exist, after all, and their products would be unaffordable to many residents even if they did. The price of the organic meat sold at supermarkets like Whole Foods is significantly higher than the price of the value pack sold at Walmart. The bill at a typical farm-to-table restaurant—restaurants modeled on the locavore idyll, where everything from the heirloom vegetables to the grass-fed lamb is locally sourced—is likely to be double or triple the cost of a meal at a local diner, to say nothing of a fast-food restaurant.
It is easy enough to engage in virtuous consumption if you have plenty of disposable income. It is significantly harder for families living on tight budgets, much less those who rely on food stamps. The result is to create a virtue divide that all too often mirrors the class divide. While the poor buy the bad meat sold at KFC and Walmart, the rich consume the ethical meat sold at fancy restaurants and places like Whole Foods, purchasing beef and chicken adorned with labels that affirm their own sense of purity and virtue. As in so many other areas of life, virtue correlates with privilege, enabling affluent consumers to buy their way out of feeling complicit in the impure, dirty practices that go on inside factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, which churn out food that other, less virtuous people consume. Among the less virtuous people are the workers who toil in these slaughterhouses, the live hangers and belly rippers who keep the “disassembly lines” running.
PART IV
THE METABOLISM OF THE MODERN WORLD
8
Dirty Energy
On the morning of April 21, 2010, Sara Lattis Stone began frantically calling the burn units of various hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana. She was searching for news about her husband, Stephen, who worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where a massive explosion had occurred. The blast took place the day before Stephen was scheduled to return home from his latest three-week hitch on the rig, a semisubmersible floating unit called the Deepwater Horizon.
In the hours after a spokeswoman from Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon, called to tell her that an “incident” had required the rig to be evacuated, Sara veered between panic and denial. One minute, she was telling herself that Stephen was fine. The next, she was convinced that she would never see him again. On Facebook, she came across frightening messages—“the water’s on fire!”, “the rig is burning”—posted by the spouses of other workers. At one point, Sara got on the phone with one of them, a woman who had her TV tuned to the same channel that she was watching, which was airing live coverage of the blowout. As they peered at the screen, both heard the same update, describing the blast as a catastrophic accident and raising the possibility that no one on the rig had survived. The news prompted both of them to drop their phones and scream.
