Saturday 4 June 2016

Meat the Packers

It’s not much to my credit, but I’d never given a thought to the welfare of people who work in the meatpacking industry until recently, when I read this harrowing and gross article. It describes a stressful, abusive culture, where workers report being denied access to toilets during shifts. This industry has been notorious for its abuses for over a century - certainly since Upton “Funk” Sinclair published his hyper-depressing novel of alienated labour, The Jungle, in 1906 - though, I admit, this had passed me by.
Within the last decade, similar reports have been made about meat-processing firms in the UK (for clarity, meat-processing firms are the ones where animals go in, and denuded salmonella- and ecoli-ridden mislabelled polyfillered corpses come out, and you eat them, you weirdo). In 2010, the EHRC released a report that detailed exploitation of migrant employees, who are less likely to seek redress; health and safety violations; verbally and physically abusive working environments, and, again, refusal of toilet breaks during shifts. Seriously, meat-guys, just let people go to the toilet, sheesh.
More recently, in 2015, the Guardian published this report on the poultry industry, rehashing the old formula of punitive conditions, abuse of rights, poor hygiene, strain and exhaustion. Some poultry barons got in a flap, claiming this report was not representative, but the way that the same types of abuse recur over years and across continents suggests that these problems are endemic in an industry which relies on “the product”, as employees call it, being processed on a vast scale, extremely quickly.

(All this is without addressing the psychological damage done to workers by being made cogs in a killing machine, more on which later …. )

I’m chary of comparing humans to animals, mostly because people find it insulting & I am a woman of extraordinary politesse. But it’s hardly surprising that an industry for which sentient creatures are fodder should treat the dignity and well-being of its employees with equal indifference. They are fodder too. As Keston Sutherland writes in an analysis of Marx’s language, capitalism is cannibalism. Labour is reduced to Gallerte, a jelly of extraneous meat, bone and tissue: workers’ time and energy, “brains, muscles, nerves, hands,” are ingredients in the production process which must be obtained cheaply and used economically to maximise profit.
I don't think you're ready for this jelly.
(As a point of interest, The Jungle nauseated its readers with accounts of the filthiness of meatpacking, based on Sinclair’s research. The one aspect of his descriptions never to be substantiated was that workers had been known to fall into the pork grinder and join their flesh with the pigs’, to be eaten by unsuspecting members of the public. Invention or not, the idea is irresistible simply because it finishes the picture, makes the missing link. In the grinder, “product” and labourer become one, as they are: in buying anything, we pay for the making as much as for the thing itself.)


There’s a flip side to my reluctance to compare humans and animals - there is a danger that in doing this animals are reduced to a metaphor for human suffering. But they are the real deal: helpless, with absolutely no potential to challenge their exploitation; totally unable to protect themselves from industrial structures; devalued. Almost no cruelty is considered beyond the pale in a meat industry whose ethical regulations are weak and go virtually unenforced. When it comes to suffering, animals are the real deal.


Another flip side (grease the pan, boys!): While I hate what they do, it would be unfair not to see the workers in the meat industry as victims. They’ve got to earn a crust, same as we all do (apart from my boss, a lazy fat-cat who sits on her arse all day). The work that they do is not just physically dangerous, and demeaning (toilets toilets toilets); it has been linked (by Jennifer Dillard) to Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, a disorder resulting in nightmares, flashbacks, paranoia, dissociation, amnesia. You can bang on as much as you like about how nature is red in tooth and claw, but most of us are not freakin’ White Fang; violence reverberates back on the perpetrator, in various psychological forms.

So, victims, yes. But Dillard also links the presence of meatpacking industries to increased local rates of violent crime. Cruelty to animals is a psychopathic trait signifying reduced empathy; meat-processing essentially hothouses violent behaviour. It follows that the effects of brutalisation within the industry will bleed out beyond its confines. Most meat-eaters are able to separate their personal kindness from the horrors of the production line; for those unfortunate enough to be on the factory floor, the reality must be much messier.