Slaughterhouse Smackdown: Wall Street Journal or Grist?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.27.06
On Thursday we read a rather late review of Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel "The Jungle" in the Wall Street Journal. We were intrigued by this paragraph: "Yet it's nice to think that if he had lived a little longer, Sinclair might have had some second thoughts about the ideas he expressed in "The Jungle." Capitalism has served the huddled masses rather well. The descendents of Sinclair's exploited workers don't toil on the kill floors of meatpacking factories. Instead, they occupy better jobs as fully assimilated Americans. They also eat safe meat, processed for them by a new generation of immigrant laborers from Latin America and Southeast Asia -- people whose lives are no doubt challenging, but also full of the realistic optimism that one day they will be no longer tired, no longer poor, and breathing free. Sinclair's problem was that, unlike them, he couldn't see the jungle for the trees. "
On the same day we read Grist's article on chicken farming "In rural America, the poultry companies can get workers for a song, and the workers are so grateful to get the jobs," says Jackie Nowell of the United Food and Commercial Workers. These workers -- usually poor, and often African American or Hispanic -- "are exposed to feces [and] any disease the chicken has," Nowell says. "There are also horrible levels of dust and dander inside these houses.... Workers in poultry processing plants also face serious dangers from machinery, carpal tunnel syndrome, and health hazards such as contaminated microorganisms and dust. "There are huge health and safety violations in every plant."
We suspect that in exactly 100 years, exactly nothing has changed. We wonder- which to you think is a more accurate representation?
On a trip to Europe, I spent a week as a guest of a Danish chicken farmer. He invented a robotic system of feeding, cleaning, and retrieving eggs from his 40,000 hens. He even recieved an award from Purdue for his work.
His major gripe with us Americans was that we weren't interested in his system because we could hire Mexicans from less than the cost of the system.
What does it say about poultry producers when they'd rather expose humans to the risks of poultry farming instead of a machine?
There is definately room for improvement as the poultry farming example shows. But it would be incorrect to say to say that, "in exactly 100 years, exactly nothing has changed." Capitalism has brought a lot of benefit in many ways, but it has also brought problems. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is not an either/or problem; it is far more complex.
What the market fundamentalists at the Journal also don't understand is that it wasn't unfettered capitalism that uplifted those 1906 workers and thier kids. It was capitalism supervised and corralled by the government through healty and safety standards, minimum wage and child labor laws etc.
Those checks clearly are not being applied to today's rural plants
Can I say both and neither? The free market brought about changes that have resulted in some level of betterment for the descendent of Sinclair and humanity. But, it was the populist movement that injected regulations that provided safety from unbridled greed. The minorities are still abused, but it is only at the hands of the majority. So I think the only people really at fault are the consumers for the consumption of these horrendous products from slaughterhouse. We are the ones that are abusing our fellow animals (human and otherwise). The company and immigrants are simply rational opportunists. Both are sort of right, but neither presents a more accurate representation. I’m sure I don’t have the correct representation either, but I’m sure it’s much more complex then either watered down economic/political stance.
There are incredibly huge factory henhouses in California's central valley. Food water medications etc. go in one end and washed sorted and packaged eggs come out the other. The conditions for the hens are pretty awful, but they are given the minimum they need to stay productive. There are human workers supporting the operation and they get the minimum they need to stay productive. I was once in a henhouse that held 250,000 birds. The fact that the misery for humans and animals was mechanized and highly efficient probably made the whole thing a little worse to look at.