OUIL501 - ‘I felt like a piece of trash’ – Life inside America’s food processing plants

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/21/life-inside-america-food-processing-plants-cheap-meat

Until now, little attention has been paid to the workers who plant and harvest produce in the American south or who work in the high-speed packing houses in the midwest.

the meat industry was becoming overwhelmingly staffed by recent immigrants – many without legal employment status – as a way of pushing production lines to go faster and faster.

Undocumented workers, many from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, formed a perfect corporate workforce: thankful for their pay cheques, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionise or even complain.

In 2006 and 2007, when the American mortgage crisis began to peak and then stock markets crashed worldwide, the freedom to run faster production lines positioned Hormel to capitalise on demand the economic downturn created for budget-friendly meat like Spam without significantly increasing its workforce or raising wages to match the elevated output.

in 2002, Hormel’s production lines were running at 900 pigs per hour; by 2007, they were running 1,350 pigs per hour. 

The speed of pork production is not only affecting the health and safety of workers on the line; now lines are moving so fast that the safety of consumers is being placed at risk. Inspectors have discovered pig carcasses with lesions from tuberculosis, septic arthritis (with bloody fluid pouring from joints) and smears from faecal matter and intestinal contents.

 when the whole system is built around producing cheap meat, it means that fewer and fewer low-income families, even in the developed world, have access to high-quality meat. So it’s not enough to buy grass-fed steaks for your own family and then tut-tut at poor families lined up at McDonald’s or filling their shopping carts with Spam.