Schlosser: Meatpacking reforms have rotted away

Schlosser: Meatpacking reforms have rotted away

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s expose of the barbaric conditions in Chicago slaughterhouses shocked and sickened the nation.

“The Jungle” prompted public outcry that sparked sweeping reforms of the meatpacking industry. But those reforms have rotted away like flesh on a carcass, and in 2006, working conditions, production methods and sanitation standards in the meatpacking industry recall those of 100 years ago, according to journalist and social critic Eric Schlosser.

“Over the past 25 to 30 years, this country has returned to ‘The Jungle,’” Schlosser told the audience at his Feb. 27 lecture, “Fast Food Nation,” presented as part of the 2006 President’s Lecture Series.

“Looking at the meatpacking industry raises some basic issues about America today: The growing power of corporations, the capture of government regulatory agencies by those corporations and the widening gap between the rich and the poor,” Schlosser said.

A century ago, monopolies, called “trusts,” controlled almost every sector of the U.S. economy — from steel to coal to sugar. They expected workers to put in 70-hour weeks for paltry pay, and they polluted freely, broke unions and sold products of indiscriminate quality at whatever price they chose.

Sinclair saw the beef trust as “a symbol of everything wrong with American society,” and he sought to expose the exploitation of its workers. His best-seller prompted an epic battle by the government against the beef trust that ended with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

Slowly, conditions improved for the workers, the industry became unionized and “by the mid-50s, being a meatpacking worker was to have one of the best manufacturing jobs in the United States,” Schlosser said. “It was still a dangerous job and a dirty job, but it was a high-paid job.”

Things had turned around so much that even the worst company to work for at the height of the beef trust, Swift and Co., had become one of the best. It even adopted a paternalistic attitude toward its workers.

After decades of antitrust enforcement, the beef trust was gone. No longer did five companies control 55 percent of the market. A competitive market for meat with hundreds of meatpacking companies had emerged, and in 1970, the four largest companies controlled only 20 percent of the market, Schlosser said.

But the triumph would be short-lived.

The fast food industry began to grow in the ’70s, and product uniformity became paramount for these restaurants.

Customers came to expect a product to taste and appear the same whether purchased in Boston or San Diego. To ensure this uniformity, fast food companies used fewer suppliers. “McDonalds cut back from using about 175 different meat suppliers to using only five,” he said. Meat suppliers were growing to serve the needs of the fast food industry, and one meatpacking company, IBP, was becoming the biggest and most powerful in the nation.

Founded by former Swift executives who were fed up with its paternalistic labor model, IBP rose to prominence by slashing labor costs, Schlosser said. It moved slaughterhouses into rural areas and away from labor unions, cut wages by 50 percent and employed immigrants from Mexico.

Forced to compete, other companies followed suit, and these practices quickly became the industry standard.

“Today, the meatpacking industry is more centralized and more concentrated than it was 100 years ago when Upton Sinclair wrote ‘The Jungle,’” Schlosser said. “Today, the top four companies control 80 percent of the market.”

Among those, Tyson Foods, which acquired IBP a few years ago, has become the largest meatpacking company in the history of the world.

“This one company now slaughters, every week, 5 million chickens, half a million hogs and a quarter of a million cattle,” Schlosser said. “And Tyson has gone further beyond IBP in cutting wages, reducing benefits and working very hard to break unions.”

Without unions and with a workforce of recent immigrants and illegal immigrants who are unlikely to complain, the meat-processing companies sped up production tremendously, he said. “More speed equals more profit.”

However, more speed also equals more injuries.

Five years ago, the industry “had a rate of serious injury three times higher than the average in manufacturing,” Schlosser said. And rates for cumulative trauma injuries — carpal tunnel syndrome and serious injury to necks, backs, shoulders or elbows — were 35 times higher than the average in manufacturing.

But the federal government has largely turned a blind eye to the matter, he said.

“We have seen a return to the laissez-faire, small-government, free-market rhetoric,” Schlosser said, noting that “the meatpacking industry has given more than $150 million in political donations in the last six years to President Bush and Republican candidates for Congress.”
He said it is no surprise that among Bush’s first acts upon taking office was to get rid of the ergonomics standard that would have greatly reduced the cumulative trauma injuries in meatpacking — and was a piece of legislation initiated under Bush’s father’s administration.

More recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics changed how worker injuries are reported; simply because of a bookkeeping change, the number of injuries reported fell by 50 percent overnight, and the industry celebrated its new safety record.

Today, these statistics are no longer compiled, so the current injury rates are unknown.

“This is the fundamental attitude toward worker safety today,” he said. “If you don’t count the injuries, they didn’t happen.

“The fact that we do not see it does not mean it’s not there,” Schlosser said as he urged the audience to be conscientious consumers.

“All of you are connected to and responsible for this system — those of you who eat fast food, definitely, but even those of you who are gourmands and who would never think of going to a McDonalds and even those of you who are the purest vegan,” he said. “You are connected to this system, and its costs are ultimately being imposed on you. We’re the ones paying the price for this corporate greed.”