Slow The Line
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There are two kinds of people who kill animals for a living:
the ones who want to
and
the ones who don’t.
In that vein, I offer these slaughterhouse worker comments:
“Slow the line”
“There are a lot of injuries in the plant”
“They increase the number of pieces and they pile on more and because of this you cut yourself”
“Your hands swell and your shoulders hurt”
“I cut my hand with the knife”
“I fell, the floor was slick”
“At the beginning my hands were inflamed, I fell and broke my hand”
“The supervisors should treat you a little better and they should pay attention when you have to go to the bathroom because there were 3 people who wet their pants and I know of one guy who pooped in his pants 2 times”
“Tendons – sometimes you don’t say anything because they just tell you to use ice and pills”
“When there are visits from high bosses they slow down the line”
“It would be good if the line remained the same speed as when visitors come”
“The supervisors scream at you without any reason”
“They should treat you like human beings because I know of 3 people who urinated and pooped in their pants on the line and afterwards they laugh at you”
“In almost all my jobs I have been hurt and operated on…I am tired”
“Before they were killing 2,200, now 3,200″
“There is mistreatment in the company”
“I know 2 people who have urinated and pooped in their pants on the line”
“We need permission to go to the bathroom sometimes people wet their pants”
“We need to go to the bathroom – there are people that have wet their pants on the line”
“The plant doesn’t care about the people or the quality they only care about production”
Please try to do something about the speed of the line”
“One needs permission to go to the bathroom and some have gone pee and poop [working] on the line”
“The supervisors need a course in human relations, they treat the employees really badly”
“As you work in this cold place, it affects your bones and it hurts”
“They should recommend to the companies that to be a supervisor one should be trained in human relations so they don’t
mistreat employees so much”“They treat you worse than animals (screaming, etc.)”
Source: a report created by Nebraska Appleseed on slaughterhouse worker safety found here >>
YOU can make a difference. You can SLOW THE LINE by going vegan. You can SLOW THE LINE by encouraging others to go vegan.
Thanks for the report info: Marcus & Hawthorne
I agree with you about the labor abuses in the meatpacking industry. Since the 1980′s, when the meatpacking companies drove the United Food and Commercial Workers out of many of their plants, labor conditions have sharply decayed.
This is similar to what has happened in much of the American manufacturing sector, due to basically the same reason – deunionization.
The solution is also the same – these workers need to unionize, and their action to organize themselves in the only way these abuses will ever stp.
However, for individual consumers to decide to personally stop buying meat will no more resolve labor abuses in the meatpacking industry than refusing to wear clothes will resolve labor abuses in garment manufacturing!
Look, if you don’t want to eat meat, that’s your business.
But don’t kid yourself – your personal consumer action will NOT resolve these workplace abuses, only direct action by workers themselves at their factories will ever make the abuses stop!
No, they won’t completely resolve injustice, but if you buy meat, there’s blood on your hands in more ways than one.
Heard of blood diamonds? The same reasoning there applies here.
The same principle holds true with diamonds – your personal jewelry purchase decisions will NOT improve labor conditions in Sierra Leone’s mining industry – only the labor struggles of Sierra Leonian workers have any possibility of making a difference.
So, if you don’t want to eat meat because you have a philosophical or moral problem with the consumption of animal flesh – or because you don’t think meat is healthy to eat – or because you think meat processing is bad for the environment – or whatever, that’s a perfectly valid personal choice.
But don’t have any illusions that you are helping the meatpacking workers, because your individual atomized action is, at the end of the day, profoundly irrelevant.
Those workers will have to save themselves – you cannot do it for them with your consumer activism.
Decreased demand will slow the line.
Period.
Mr. Butler, I happen to believe that any and every step in the right direction has meaning. And that reports like these do help to advise consumers about exactly what their money goes to support. Awareness of a problem is the beginning to solutions: Slow the line. End the line. Go vegan.
Consumers of meat and animal products should be paying the true cost to produce this product to their plate. IOt should not be offset by taxpayers, welfare and subsidies. Thousands of gallons of water to produce one pound of beef and it sells for that cheap at the store? Slaughter house workers having no medical benefits until they pass 6 months of probation and 80% don’t and those that do – most barely stick it out a year? C’mon and wake up people! Trying to cut the margin of expense to profit by speeding up the slaughter line at the risk of animal welfare and worker safety is simply not acceptable in a modern world and should be monitored by openess/inspectors and USDA undercover agents and punished with fines and sanctions that are meaningful enough instead of assumed to be the cost of business. Fast Food Nation was a wonderful book and film expose of worker exploitation in the factory farm animal industry. Until then, I felt anger at the workers. Now I have sympathy. This story helps support that sympathy.