12/22/23, 10:43 PM How the meat industry turned abuse into a business model | Grist

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How the meat industry turned

abuse into a business model
As a long-time student of the meat industry, I read Ted Genoways'
extraordinary article on conditions at the "head table" of a factory-
scale pig-processing plant with delight. As a human being, my reaction
was revulsion.

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Tom Philpott

Published Jun 30, 2011

Topic Climate + Agriculture

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Cross-
posted
from
Mother
Jones.
As a
long-
time
student
of the
meat
industry
, I read
Ted The meat industry routinely abuses workers and animals.
Genowa
ys’ extraordinary article on conditions at the “head table” of a
factory-scale pig-processing plant with delight. As a human
being, my reaction was revulsion.
In a singleAlllong piece, Genoways
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history Donate
of U.S.
meat over the past 80 years. We get the unionization of the kill
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floor in the wake of Sinclair’s The Jungle , the post-war emergence

of meatpacking as a proper middle-class job, the fierce anti-union
backlash of the ’70s, followed by corporatization, scaling up,
plunging wages, and then, well, all manner of hell breaking loose,
graphically documented by Genoways. All I can add to the story is
to emphasize how forces in the broader economy turned the meat
industry into one that profits not by putting out an excellent
product, but rather by relentlessly slashing costs.
In his story, Genoways reports that Quality Pork Processors sped
up its kill line by 50 percent between 1989 and 2006, while the
plant’s workforce “barely increased.” The strange malady acquired
by those workers in Austin, Minn., makes for an eye-popping
story, but the rough conditions they worked under aren’t the
exception — they’re industry standard. By 2005, things had gotten
so dire for meatpacking workers that Human Rights Watch —
typically on the lookout for atrocities in war zones — saw fit to
issue a scathing report on their plight. The report’s title says it all:
“Blood, Sweat, and Fear.”

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What drives such routine worker abuse? What would make a

company steadily increase pressure on its workers to the point of
endangering them, even as wages flatline?

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The surface answer is, of course, because they can. After the
unions evaporated, the meatpacking workforce became extremely
vulnerable. By the ’90s, meatpacking had become such an awful
job that native-born Americans abandoned the industry as quickly
as they could. Undocumented workers from Mexico and points
south, fleeing agrarian decline in those regions, filled the void.
Unprotected by unions, one brush with authority away from
deportation, undocumented workers are easy targets for the
predatory practices of powerful employers, as Genoways
demonstrates.
But there are deeper forces than naked power on display.
Corporate profit strategy shifted in the wake of the 1970s — era
stagflation crisis — in a way that transformed not just
meatpacking but also the broader
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could no longer assume they had the power to raise prices to
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burnish the bottom line. Wage inflation, and the fear of it,
convinced them that holding prices down was the better idea.
Profit would be eked out by selling ever greater volumes of stuff —
and by holding costs, including labor costs, to a bare minimum.
As Barry C. Lynn showed in a luminous 2006 Harper’s essay —
later expanded into the book Cornered: The New Monopoly
Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction — the new profit
regime required a new antirust regime. U.S. antitrust authorities
still operated under Progressive-era policies that had them
looking for instances of anti-competitive behavior. There are two
ways companies wield improper market power. The first is
monopoly: they use their market heft to impose artificially high
prices on consumers, like, say, OPEC sometimes does with oil.
The second is called monopsony. That’s when dominant
companies use their weight to squeeze their suppliers —
everything from their own workforces to the companies that sell
them inputs — into giving them better terms.
In the ’80s under Reagan, the authorities essentially stopped
prosecuting monopsony and focused only on monopoly, Lynn
shows. It was a convenient change for Big Business, because
gouging consumers on price was now passé; the path to profit
growth lay in gouging suppliers on cost. The goal was to get as big
as possible and sell products as cheaply as possible, keeping
volume high and the the antitrust cops at bay; and impose
relentless pressure on cost. The strategy sparked a massive wave of
consolidation, as companies bought each other out, scaled up,
and/or merged in a rush to grab market share.

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The food industry is probably the example par excellence of the

post-Reagan monopsony economy. Lynn shows that Walmart’s
move into groceries, starting in the early ’90s, accelerated the
industry’s already-rapid consolidation. In order to remain
profitable despite Walmart’s constant demand for more product at
ever-lower prices, food companies had to get bigger and bigger —
and constantly hunt for opportunities to slash their expenses.
The meat-processing giants led the way. A 2007 report [PDF] from
University of Missouri researchers Mary Hendrickson and
William Heffernan tells the story. In 1989, the four largest hog
processors slaughtered 34 percent of the hogs raised in the United
States. By 2005, that ratio had risen to 64 percent. The same trend
held sway in beef and chicken — and has only intensified since.
Today, just four giant companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and
Smithfield — process more than half of the beef, chicken, and
pork consumed in the United States.
Yet more consolidation may be afoot. Smithfield, by far the globe’s
largest pork producer, is actively looking to get even bigger.
According to Bloomberg, among its potential buyout targets are
Sara Lee, which has become a major player in the processed meat
sector; and even Tyson, the largest overall U.S. meat producer. A
combined Smithfield/Tyson would own dominant positions in
pork, beef, and chicken.
As these companies lurch along, forever looking to get bigger and
cut corners to maintain profitability, society pays a steep price for
all the cheap meat they churn out. Genoways nailed how workers
fare under our cheap-meat regime. Abuse of animals is routine.
Entire ecosystems
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Bay — once one of the globe’s most productive fisheries, brought

to near-ruin by runoff from a stunning concentration of factory
chicken farms. Family farmers are literally turned into serfs as
they scale up to meet the industry’s demands. And we all face the
menace of the antibiotic-resistant pathogens now brewing up on
animal factory farms, which now consume 80 percent of an
tibiotics used in the United States (both to make livestock grow
faster and keep them alive in cramped, filthy conditions).
Meanwhile, the industry can be expected to vigorously fight any
attempt to curtail its abusive practices. Market power extends to
the political sphere — the meat lobby is one of those powerful D.C.
players that — like oil and banking — has the cash to maintain
friendships on both sides of the political aisle. As Monica Potts
recently reported on Grist, the meat lobby has financed a push to
stop Obama’s USDA from implementing new rules that would
force the big processors to deal more fairly with farmers. The
rules, mandated by the 2008 farm bill, stand in danger of being
nixed. Advocates are encouraging consumers to call the White
House to urge President Obama to stand strong against the
pressure.
Meat-industry abuse: not just for workers
As I tried to tease out above, the meat industry’s business model
hinges on cutting costs. And relentless cost-cutting pressure
translates to relentless pressure to cut corners down the
production chain, from the slaughterhouse kill floor to the
factory-farm pen. Workers pay the price for the mountains of
cheap meat the industry pays out.
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Animals pay, too. They are treated as industrial commodities —

like identical machine parts being churned out by a factory — not
living beings that have evolved over millennia to thrive or suffer
under specific conditions. Systematically objectified, factory-farm
animals are subject to routine abuse. If you worked as a quality-
control inspector on an assembly line, you’d think nothing
slamming a defective widget into the waste bin. Widgets feel no
pain. As a matter of course, animals get the same treatment, as
this — the latest in a string of appalling recent undercover videos
— demonstrates:

Now, unlike other recent cases of abuse exposure, this one isn’t
likely to result in the responsible company declaring the workers
involved “bad apples” and firing them. Most of what you see in
the video is entirely routine and industry-standard — like the
practice of
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no anesthetics. “Tail docking,” as the practice is known, is

necessary on factory hog farms, because distressed hogs tend to
try to chew each others’ tails off. The same isn’t true of hogs that
live outside. Note also the practice of tossing piglets roughly
across rooms — which a plant manager is caught onscreen training
workers to do, based on the theory that piglets are “bouncy.”
What’s happening here isn’t just a moral abomination. Public
health, too, is threatened by abusing animals to the point the
point they have open wounds and then hoping daily lashings of
antibiotics will keep infections at a manageable level. I can’t
imagine a better strategy for incubating antibiotic-resistant
pathogens. According to Mercy for Animals, the group that
planted the undercover investigator at the facility, documented
these conditions:

● Mother pigs — physically taxed from constant birthing —

suffering from distended, inflamed, bleeding, and usually fatal
uterine prolapses
● Large, open, pus-filled wounds and pressure sores
● Sick and injured pigs left to languish and slowly die without
proper veterinary care

Rather than change practices in response to public outrage over

these exposures, the meat industry has floated legislation in
several states to ban the practice of sneaking cameras onto factory
farms. It’s an industry that can’t bear scrutiny.

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