From the industry's point of view, they are ideal workers - cheap, largely interchangeable and disposable. One of the crucial determinants of a slaughterhouse's profitability is also responsible for many of its greatest dangers: the speed of the production line.
The typical line speed in an American slaughterhouse 25 years ago was about cattle per hour. Some line speeds now approach cattle per hour. Technological advances are responsible for part of the increase; the powerlessness of meatpacking workers explains the rest. When hundreds of workers stand closely together, down a single line, wielding sharp knives, terrible things can happen when people feel rushed. The most common slaughterhouse injury is a laceration. Workers stab themselves or stab someone nearby.
They struggle to keep up with the pace as carcasses swing toward them, hung on hooks from a moving overhead chain. All sorts of accidents - involving power tools, saws, knives, conveyor belts, slippery floors, falling carcasses - become more likely when the chain moves too fast.
Rita Beltran, a former IBP worker, told me: "I've seen bleeders, and they're gushing because they got hit right in the vein, and I mean they're almost passing out, and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops.
It never stops. Some of the most debilitating injuries in the meatpacking industry are also the least visible. The rate of repetitive-motion injuries is the highest of any American industry - about 33 times the national average. Making the same knife cut 10, times a day or lifting the same weight every few seconds can cause injuries to a person's back, shoulders or hands. Aside from a minute rest or two, and a brief lunch, the work is unrelenting. Even the repetition of a seemingly harmless task can lead to pain.
For unskilled, unschooled manual labourers, repetirive motion injuries such as disc problems, tendonitis and "trigger finger" a syndrome in which a finger becomes stuck in a curled position can permanently limit the ability to earn a decent income. Much of this damage will never be healed.
Repetitive-motion injuries may take months, or even years, to develop; other slaughterhouse injuries can happen in an instant. Raul Lopez worked as a carpenter in Mexico, making tables, chairs and head boards, before moving to the US in to do construction work in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He was 20 at the time, and after laying concrete foundations for two years, he moved to Greeley and got a job at the Monfort Beef plant, where the pay was higher. He trimmed hides, cutting off the legs and heads, lifting them up with mechanical assistance, and placing the hides on a hook: one of the most difficult jobs in the plant. Each hide weighed about 80lb, and he lifted more than of them every hour. He was good at his job and became a "floater", used by his supervisor to fill in for absent workers.
Lopez's hands and shoulders were sore at the end of the day, but for two years and two months he suffered no injuries. At about 7am on November 22, , Lopez was substituting for an absent worker, standing on a 4ft-high platform and pulling hides from a tank of water that was washing blood and dirt off them. The hides were suspended on hooks from a moving chain.
The room was cold and foggy, and it was difficult to see clearly. One of Lopez's steel-mesh gloves suddenly got snagged in the chain, and it dragged him down the line towards bloody, filthy water that was 3ft deep. Lopez grabbed the chain with his free hand and screamed for help. Someone ran to another room and took an extraordinary step: he shut down the line. Lopez's left arm, caught in the chain, was partially crushed. He lost more than three pints of blood and almost bled to death.
He was rushed to a hospital, endured the first of many operations, and survived. Five months later, Lopez was still in enormous pain and heavily medicated. Nevertheless, he says, a company doctor ordered him back to work. I visited Lopez on a lovely spring afternoon.
His modest apartment is just a quarter of a mile down the road from the slaughterhouse. Lopez now works in the nurse's office at the plant, handling files.
Every day he sees how injured workers are treated - given some Tylenol and then sent back to the line - and worries that ConAgra is now planning to get rid of him. His left arm hangs shrivelled and lifeless in a sling. When we spoke, Lopez was asking the company to pay for an experimental operation that might restore some movement to the arm.
The most likely alternative was amputation. ConAgra said that it was weighing the various medical options. Lopez is 26 years old and believes his arm will work again. After extensive surgery, no workers compensation, and a divorce, Kenny persevered through the agony and started his work again at the slaughterhouse. Monfort provided no assistance for Kenny which was an effort to discourage him from wanting to continue work at the plant.
Pain led to more pain as Kenny still willingly lifted forty to fifty pound slabs of beef, straining his feeble back. Each time his pain would become unbearable Monfort would transfer him to another sector.
In street clothes Kenny was forced to disinfect the plant with a dangerous chlorine chemical spray which made him ill and forced him to spend a month in the hospital. After all his ordeals he still felt loyal to the company that was pushing him to the breaking point so that he would quit since they technically could not fire him.
Although the meatpacking companies do not seem to be doing anything to benefit their employees, their blatant harassment toward Kenny is unprecedented by any moral standards. These companies thrive on having their employees quit so they may hire fresh ones. The older and more experienced workers build more a hatred toward the conditions of the plant than the oblivious fresh ones.
They even, in fact, knew each other growing up. Schlosser writes that both men were masterful at sales, and shared a love of conservative politics though, while Disney criticized government intervention, he relied on federal money to save his studio in the s and technology. Ray Kroc incorporated Schlosser presents the story of Kenny Dobbins, a worker in a slaughterhouse who was injured several times and then fired by his company, at the end of a chapter about slaughterhouse operations and how they work.
Schlosser puts this story at the end of the chapter to illustrate the personal effect that the industry has on workers like Dobbins, an illiterate man who destroyed his body working in a slaughterhouse. Chapter 4 is set up in a similar I have to write an essay with this argument in mind or based on this argument: "The global expansion of America's fast food industry poses a threat to the distinct cultural identity of countries around the globe?
After reading the excerpt from Chapter Five of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, do you think it should be required by the FDA that food flavoring and food coloring companies put all ingredients used in their flavoring and coloring agents on food labels? Why did General Motors want to buy trolley systems throughout the U.
Karcher's quote "I believe in progress"? What evidence does the author use to get his main point across? More Pages to Explore Alex died within five days. The use of anecdotes ultimately helps the author unveil the beast that is the fast food industry by pulling on the heartstrings of Americans.
The author displays the harsh actuality of the fast food industry through the use of ethos. For instance, Kenny is a man that is introduced in Chapter 8. Kenny worked for a meatpacking company and met with Schlosser for an interview.
Kenny, during the. Get Access.
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