Labor rights in the American meatpacking industry are largely regulated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which regulates union organization. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulates the safety and health conditions applicable to workers in the American meat packing industry. According to scholars of the American meat packing industry, despite federal regulation through OSHA and industry oversight, workers in meat production plants have little agency and inadequate protections. Workers in the industry perform difficult jobs in dangerous conditions, and are at significant risk for physical and psychological harm. In addition to high rates of injury, workers are at risk of losing their jobs when they are injured or for attempting to organize and bargain collectively. Several studies of the industry have found immigrant workers—"an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry."
Characteristics of the American meat production industry
Within the meat production industry, "meatpacking" is defined as "all manufacturing of meat products including the processing of animals." This includes production of beef, pork, poultry, and fish. The scope of the American meat production industry is large; it slaughters and processes over 10 billion animals per year.
Since 2004, four companies essentially control the American meat production industry. Broken down, the companies managed 81% of the beef production, 59% of the pork production and 50% of the poultry market. Within the poultry industry, Tyson and Perdue control each stage of chicken production, from raising the chicks to shipping the meat to grocery stores.
The number of animals butchered in the meat production industry appears to be growing. In 2010, nearly 10.2 billion land animals were slaughtered and raised for food in the United States. According to a report by the Farm Animal Rights Movement, based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), these numbers indicate a 1.7% increase from the 2009 data. There was a 0.9% increase in U.S. population between 2009 and 2010, "meaning that animals [slaughtered] per-capita increased slightly" by 0.8%.
Meatpacker demographics
While American agriculture has largely been dependent on migrant workers for the last century, thousands of immigrants, mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, now travel north to work in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. According to a study in the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law, "most meatpacking employees are poor, many are immigrants struggling to survive, and most are now employed in rural locations." In 1998, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that about a quarter of meatpacking workers in Nebraska and Iowa were illegal immigrants. The USDA published similar numbers, estimating the percentage of Hispanic meat-processing workers rising from less than 10% in 1980 to almost 30% in 2000. The lack of rights of undocumented workers makes them invisible to the public. In addition, following the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, "immigration law takes precedence over labor law," which challenges undocumented workers' ability to get compensation benefits.
Slaughterhouse employee turnover rates tend to be extremely high. One company, ConAgra Red Meat, reported a 100% annual turnover rate in the 1990s. Such high turnover rates makes it harder for the workforce to unionize and, consequently, easier for the industry to control its workers. Starting in the 1980s, Cargill, Conagra Brands, Tyson Foods and other large food companies moved most slaughterhouse operations to rural areas of the Southern United States which were more hostile to unionization efforts.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2000, 148,100 people worked in meatpacking and over 250,000 worked in poultry processing. Despite the growth of the meat production industry, slaughterhouse workers' wages have been decreasing rapidly. Slaughterhouse workers' wages were historically higher than the average manufacturing wage. This trend reversed in 1983 when slaughterhouse worker wages fell below the average manufacturing wage. By 2002, slaughterhouse workers' wages were 24% below the average manufacturing wage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006, the median wage for slaughterhouse workers was $10.43 per hour which comes out to $21,690 per year.
Workers' rights of meat-packers
Historical context
In the 19th century, the slaughterhouses of the principal meat companies of the U.S. were in the south side of the city of Chicago, Illinois. To not pay high wages to a skilled workforce, the larger slaughterhouses established a disassembly line to transform a carcass into meat; the disassembly-line production system eliminated the work of skilled meatpackers.
In the slaughterhouse, the difficulty of working on a carcass-disassembly line was in the great daily quota of animals to slaughter-and-dismember. The meatpackers worked in poorly illuminated, cold rooms that featured un-drained floors that held contaminated water, animal feces-and-urine, and the concomitant sewage. In such an inadequate workplace, the meat-packer suffered physical injuries and contagious illness. Moreover, to ensure a stable workforce, the meat companies established rental housing for their workers in the communities that circumscribed the stockyards of Chicago, such as the Back of the Yards neighborhood.
In the early 1880s, the stockyard workers organized into labor-and-trade unions and formally demanded higher wages and proper workplace conditions from the meat companies. Given that most of the meat-packers were recent immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries the meat companies used Old World racism to divide them as organized stockyard workers. The meat companies then "recruited [poor] Poles, Serbs, Croatians, Slovaks, and other recent Southern and Eastern European immigrants as workers" in the stockyards. In the event, when the European white workers unionized and went on strike in 1894, the meat companies then employed Black Americans to work in the stockyards, and so break the strike.
In the novel The Jungle (1904), Upton Sinclair revealed the abuses of the meat-packers and the poor sanitary conditions in the slaughterhouses. The substance of the novel was a factor in the legislation of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and of the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906). Moreover, the Federal Bureau of Animal Industry then reported to the U.S. Congress meat-company complaints that the presentation of the business practices of the meat industry in The Jungle was "intentionally misleading and false" and also presented "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact".Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture... on the So-called "Beveridge Amendment" to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, 1906, pp. 346–50, 59th Congress, 1st Session. Despite the novel and the legislation, Americans "paid little attention to the . . . abusive working conditions and treatment" to which the meatpackers were subjected. Labor rights and working conditions improved consequent to the large-scale organizing of workers into labor-and-trade unions by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935).
From the 1930s to the 1970s, pay and conditions improved for meatpacking workers. According to a report by the Human Rights Watch, "master contracts covering the industry raised wages and safety standards." However, standards began decreasing in the 1980s as companies began relocating to rural areas and certain companies became "industry powerhouses." Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) especially transformed the meat production process so that, in each stage, workers have a mindless, repetitive movement to complete "in what the industry calls a disassembly-line process." IBP and peer companies increased the speed of the lines and decreased wages.
Even if companies chose not to relocate, many companies simply shut down their plants, let their established and organized workers go, and reopened with a non-unionized, immigrant workforce. Employers strongly resisted attempts workers made to unionize in relocated or reopened plants; the recent history of plant closures gave employer threats significant credibility. A Human Rights Watch report on conditions of meat and poultry plants asserted that "as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, the meatpacking industry was returning to the jungle" Sinclair wrote about a century before.
Industry working conditions
Workplace conditions have made meatpacking an extremely dangerous job. The repetitive motions place severe stress on workers' hands, wrists, arms, shoulders and backs. In addition, the disassembly lines move extremely quickly; according to investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, "one of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line."
The more quickly a line moves, the more difficult it is for a worker to keep up and the higher the chance of injury. To contextualize the speed of disassembly lines today, the old meatpacking plants in Chicago would process about 50 cattle an hour. The newer plants in the 1980s would process about 175 cattle an hour. Today, in the 2018s, some plants process up to 400 cattle an hour. Not only do the disassembly lines move quickly, but workers also reported constant pressure from their supervisors to keep up to pace the line set. According to the Human Rights Watch, federal regulation of speed of disassembly lines only considers two factors: avoiding adulterating the meat and poultry, and not obstructing a plant's productivity.
In his book Fast Food Nation, Schlosser also asserted that workers are pressured to not report injuries. Because the bonuses of managers and foremen are often tied to the injury rates at their plant, slaughterhouse supervisors are not incentivized to report incidents.
Other risks of injury come from the close quarters in which workers cut the meat and the types of jobs they perform. The spacing between workers, as well as the height of the disassembly lines and work surfaces, are the same - despite differences in worker body types. For some workers, this forces them to make an extra effort to complete a given task and creates additional risk of injury. Furthermore, despite the growing automation in slaughterhouses, many of the tasks involve heavy lifting, shoving, and turning animals, animal parts, or equipment.
Although slaughterhouse workers are provided with protective gear, the inevitable condition of the work areas means workers are exposed to "blood, grease, animal feces, ingesta (food from the animal's digestive system), and other detritus from the animals they slaughter."
2020 COVID-19 pandemic
See Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the meat industry in the United States.
Industry response
Pro-industry organizations, such as the American Meat Institute (AMI), have pointed out that the number of staff injuries in meat processing facilities have decreased in recent years. According to a 2005 article in The New York Times, "the [meat production] industry also asserted that packing companies did not violate laws allowing workers to unionize and did not treat workers more harshly because of their immigration status." The article quoted Patrick Boyle—president of the American Meat Institute—dismissing the 2005 Human Rights Watch report as "replete with falsehoods and baseless claims."