Unsanitized: Welcome to the Jungle, Again

As in the early 20th century, meatpackers today are low-paid and frequently injured or sickened. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for May 17, 2020.

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The following is a guest edition of Unsanitized from Jake Rosenfeld, the author of What Unions No Longer Do (Harvard University Press, 2014). This article is adapted from the forthcoming book You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy.

During a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the former general counsel for the American Meat Institute remarked: “There is nothing in which the American public is more interested than a tender piece of wholesome meat.” Upton Sinclair’s lament about the reaction to The Jungle, his famous 1906 novel—“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”—spoke to the public’s comparative lack of interest in the wholesomeness of the work required to get that meat from the farm to the grocery aisle. Among our major meat producers and political leaders, what was true in 1906 remains true today.

In Greeley, Colorado, a huge JBS beef-packing plant that began testing its supervisors for COVID-19 earlier in April shut down after results indicated that over 40 percent were infected. Two weeks later it reopened, even though it hadn’t tested all of its employees as previously promised. Many workers still haven’t received a diagnosis. Seven plant employees have died from COVID-19; officially, nearly 300 have been sickened, although the actual infection number is likely higher.

JBS’s decision to reopen without knowing which workers have the virus is cruel, likely shortsighted, and constitutes an ongoing public-health threat to the communities in which the workers live. But it made a certain amount of business sense. While local officials called for the plant to remain shuttered, powerful voices in Washington, D.C., and beyond demanded it and other meat processors open up. In total, nearly two dozen meatpacking facilities have had to close for at least a brief period due to the raging pandemic that has sickened over 6,000 of their workers and killed nearly two dozen across the United States. These closures sparked concerns about a nationwide meat shortage, and motivated President Trump to issue an executive order calling on the plants to continue operations. He has also promised to shield firms from liability against any employee lawsuits. Governors in Iowa, Ohio, and other states that are home to meat-processing facilities are now also ordering workers to return to their jobs, regardless of how scared those workers may be about their risk of exposure. In these states, failure to resume work will result in the workers’ loss of unemployment benefits.

Even in better times, meatpacking was one of our worst jobs. There are hundreds of thousands of employees working on the lines in meat-processing plants across the country. Most of them are classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers.” Pre-pandemic, their mean hourly wage was actually lower than retail workers’. Slightly higher up the occupational chain are the nearly 80,000 “Slaughterers and Meat Packers.” This category describes the workers directly involved in killing, or those performing the most precise cuts. Mean hourly earnings for these skilled slaughterhouse jobs were on par with those of retail sales workers.

That is where the similarities between the jobs end. Amputations in meatpacking are common, with one estimate suggesting that two occur in a typical week. Fingers are the most likely to go, but incidents of severed arms, toes, and legs aren’t unheard of.

Routine bodily damage that comes from working fast and repetitively afflicts a sizable fraction of the workforce. A study of a poultry-processing plant in 2014 found that one out of every three workers suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. Another study of a Midwestern pork processor found a similar fraction had experienced a serious injury after just six months on the job. Disproportionately Hispanic, and many lacking legal status, these workers are unlikely to confront their employers over unsafe working conditions or low (or stolen) pay out of fear of exposure.

Is there something inherent about meat processing that renders the occupation low-paying and highly dangerous? Our own history suggests otherwise. Sandwiched between Sinclair’s time and the present day were a few decades in which slaughterhouse work was, all things considered, well compensated and not as risky.

Winning such gains was no easy feat, seeing as how the workforce had been deliberately constructed to sow internal divisions. Then as now, employers used language and other cultural divisions to retain their workplace power by inhibiting worker solidarity. There was nothing accidental about this strategy. In 1904, economist John Commons toured a Chicago plant and was startled to find that all the recent hires were Swedish. A manager explained the strategy: “It is only for a week. Last week we employed Slovaks. We change among different nationalities and languages. It prevents them from getting together.”

Beginning in the 1930s, the efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC) finally got the workers together. By the 1960s, these two unions represented nearly all slaughterhouse employees outside of the South. This density allowed for industry-wide wage bargaining and safety standards to which all the major employers adhered. From the end of World War II up through the 1980s, pay for meat-packers often exceeded average wages in manufacturing. In 1970, for example, cutters and trimmers earned nearly $24 an hour in today’s dollars. Frontline slaughterers took home nearly $26 an hour. For a full-time worker, that averages out to over $54,000 a year—a solid, middle-class salary in many parts of the country.

By the mid-1980s, however, these hard-won gains in income and safety had been lost. In 1985, the annual injury rate in the industry topped 30 percent, meaning that for every 100 slaughterhouse workers, 30 suffered an injury requiring more than just first aid. This rate was quadruple the average across the private sector. And no pay raise compensated workers for the danger. Real wages peaked in the late 1970s, and declined precipitously throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

IBP, once the country’s largest beef processor, led the charge away from the highly organized, largely urban industry structure that predominated during the post–World War II decades. Other companies mimicked IBP, relocating to rural locations, de-skilling many positions, and shifting to non-union labor. Today, IBP is a subsidiary of the giant Tyson Foods company. Last month, a Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, shut down after hundreds of workers contracted COVID-19. By early May, more than a thousand plant workers were sick; three had died. Last Friday, the plant reopened.

Too often in our history, employers and politicians have prioritized keeping Americans’ stomachs full, not their workers alive. But the post–World War II period when workers had gained real power shows that you can do both. Doing so requires listening to workers’ concerns and paying them a fair wage commensurate with the risks they take. It means shuttering plants until they meet basic safety standards, such as testing all workers to see if they’re infected with a deadly, easily transmissible virus. And it means updating our increasingly obsolete set of labor laws to empower unions, the organizations that delivered hard-fought gains in safety and pay to meatpacking workers in the mid-20th century.

Surveying Chicago’s meatpacking plants during the early 20th century, Sinclair concluded, “Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody.” Once again, we’re witnessing the unspeakable in our meatpacking plants. We shouldn’t take any of it for granted.

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