Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (46 page)

160
roughly two-thirds of the workers at the beef plant:
Interview with Javier Ramirez, former president of UFCW Local 990, Greeley, Colorado.

A spokesman for ConAgra recently acknowledged:
Interview with Brett Fox, director of industry affairs and media relations, ConAgra Beef Company.

“There is a 100 percent turnover rate annually”:
Quoted in James M. Burcke, “1994 Risk Manager of the Year: Meatpacker’s Losses Trimmed Down to Size,”
Business Insurance
, April 18, 1994.

161
Arden Walker, the head of labor relations at IBP:
Quoted in “Here’s the Beef,” p. 11.

162
Picking strawberries in California pays:
For the role and the wages of Latino mi-grants in California agriculture, see Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields.”

refugees and asylum-seekers… homeless people living at shelters:
See “IBP; Meat Processing Plant Fails to Uphold Social Contract with Waterloo, Iowa; Crime and Homelessness Increase,”
60 Minutes
, CBS News transcripts, March 9, 1997; “IBP’s Hiring Reflects Evolution of Meatpacking Industry,”
Quad-City Times
, June 30, 1997; Marc Cooper, “The Heartland’s Raw Deal: How Meatpacking Is Creating a New Immigrant Underclass,”
Nation
, February 3, 1997; and George Rodrigue, “Packing Them In: Meat Processing Firm’s Hiring of Ex-Welfare Recipients Questioned,”
Dallas Morning News
, September 25, 1997.

a labor office in Mexico City:
See Laurie Cohen, “Free Ride: With Help from INS, U.S. Meatpacker Taps Mexican Work Force,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 15, 1998.

one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in Iowa:
Cited in “Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties with Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,”
GAO Reports
, p. 15.

Spokesmen for IBP and the ConAgra Beef Company:
Fox interview; interview with Gary Mickelson, IBP Public Affairs Department.

“If they’ve got a pulse”:
Quoted in Rick Ruggles, “INS: Undocumented Workers Face New Meat-Plant Tactics,”
Omaha World-Herald
, September 11, 1998.

In September of 1994, GFI America:
See Joe Rigert and Richard Meryhew, “Food Company Takes Hired Workers to Homeless Shelter,”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, September 14, 1994; Tony Kennedy, “International Dairy Queen to Review Its Relationship with Meat Supplier GFI,”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
, September 15, 1994; and “GFI’s Frugal Ways Led to Problems for Some Workers,”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
, December 9,1994.

163
“Our job is not to provide”:
Quoted in Rigert and Meryhew, “Food Company Takes Hired Workers.”

Mike Harper personally stood to gain:
Cited in “Capital Gains Exclusion Would Benefit Key Backers,”
UPI
, April 19, 1987.

164
called Harper’s demands “blackmail”:
See Limprecht,
ConAgra Who?
, p. 269.

“Some Friday night, we turn out the lights”:
Quoted in Dennis Farney, “Nebraska, Hungry of Jobs, Grants Big Business Big Tax Breaks Despite Charges of ‘Blackmail,’”
Wall Street Journal
, June 23, 1987.

164
after the revision of the state’s tax code:
See Henry J. Cordes, “Did It Prime the Pump? Report Questions Economic Incentives,”
Omaha World-Herald
, December 28, 1997. Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University, thinks the estimate of $13,000 to $23,000 is fair. Interview with Ernie Goss.

like giving his employees a 7 percent raise…“The move shows you how ungrateful”:
Quoted in John Taylor, “IBP’s Move Prompts Look at Tax Policy,”
Omaha World-Herald
, June 13, 1996.

a $300,000 loan:
See Kenneth B. Noble, “Signs of Violence in Meat Plant’s Lockout,”
New York Times
, January 18, 1987.

165
the highest crime rate in the state of Nebraska:
See Robert A. Hackenberg, David Griffith, Donald Stull, and Lourdes Gouveia, “Creating a Disposable Labor Force,”
Aspen Institute Quarterly
5, no. 2 (Spring 1993), p. 92.

the number of serious crimes doubled:
Cited in “Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties with Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,”
GAO Report
, p. 39.

the number of Medicaid cases nearly doubled:
Ibid., p. 36.

a major distribution center for illegal drugs; gang members appeared in town:
See Richard A. Serrano, “Mexican Drug Cartels Target U.S. Heartland: Officials Say Illegal Immigrants are Using Interstates as Pipeline to Bring Cocaine, Meth-amphetamines to Midwest and Rocky Mountain Areas Where Abuse Is Burgeoning,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 10, 1997; Jennifer Dukes Lee, “Meatpacking Towns Seen As Key Funnel for Meth,”
Des Moines Register
, March 7, 1999.

the majority of Lexington’s white inhabitants… the proportion of Latino inhabitants:
Lexington is the principal city in Dawson County, and in 1990, 4.7 percent of the county’s population was Latino, according to census figures. A recount in 1993 found the Latino population to be almost 30 percent and expected to reach 50 percent within three years. Cited in Lourdes Gouveia, “From the Beet Fields to the Kill Floors: Latinos in Nebraska’s Meatpacking Communities,” unpublished manuscript.

“Mexington”:
For some of the positive effects of the new immigration wave, see Edwin Garcia and Ben Stocking, “Latinos on the Move to a New Promised Land,”
San Jose Mercury News
, August 16, 1998.

“We have three odors”:
Quoted in Melody M. Loughry, “Issues Now,”
North Platte Resident
, January 15,1996.

the Justice Department sued IBP:
See Elliot Blair Smith, “Stench Chokes Meatpacking Towns,”
USA Today
, February 14, 2000; “U.S. Sues Meatpacking Giant for Violating Numerous Environmental Laws in Midwest,” press release, Environmental Protection Agency, January 12, 2000.

“This agreement means”:
Quoted in “Meatpacker Must Cut Hydrogen Sulfide Emissions at Nebraska Plant,” press release, Environmental Protection Agency, May 24, 2000.

166
The transcript of this meeting:
“Presenting IBP, Inc., to Lexington, Nebraska: A Public Forum Conducted by the Dawson County Council for Economic Development, July 7, 1988, at the Junior High School Auditorium,” transcription by the staff of the Lauby Law Office, Lexington, Nebraska.

This chapter is based largely on interviews that I conducted with dozens of Latino meatpacking workers in Colorado and Nebraska. I also interviewed a former slaughterhouse safety director, a former slaughterhouse nurse, former plant supervisors, and a physician whose medical practice was for years devoted to the treatment of slaughterhouse workers. All of these managerial personnel had left the meatpacking industry by choice; none had been fired; and their reluctance to use their real names in this book stems from the widespread fear of the meatpackers in rural communities where they operate. I am grateful to those who spoke with me and showed me around.

Deborah E. Berkowitz, the former director of health and safety at the UFCW, was an invaluable source of information about the workings of a modern slaughterhouse and the dangers that workers face there. Her article on meatpacking and meat processing in
The Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety
(Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization, 1998), cowritten with Michael J. Fagel, is a good introduction to the subject. Curt Brandt, the president of UFCW Local 22 in Fremont, Nebraska, described the various tactics he’s seen meatpacking firms use over the years to avoid compensating injured workers. Two Colorado attorneys, Joseph Goldhammer and Dennis E. Valentine, helped me understand the intricacies of their state’s workers’ comp law and described their work on behalf of injured Monfort employees. Rod Rehm, an attorney based in Lincoln, Nebraska, spent many hours depicting the conditions in his state and arranged for me to meet some of his clients. Rehm is an outspoken advocate for poor Latinos in a state where they have few political allies. Bruce L. Braley, one of the attorneys in
Ferrell v. IBP
, told me a great deal about the company’s behavior and sent me stacks of documents pertaining to the case. “Killing Them Softly: Work in Meatpacking Plants and What It Does to Workers,” by Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, in
Any Way You Cut It
, is one of the best published accounts of America’s most dangerous job. “Here’s the Beef: Underreporting of Injuries, OSHA’s Policy of Exempting Companies from Programmed Inspections Based on Injury Record, and Unsafe Conditions in the Meatpacking Industry,”
Forty-Second Report by the Committee on Government Operations
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), shows the extraordinary abuses that can occur when an industry is allowed to regulate itself. After the congressional investigation, Christopher Drew wrote a terrific series of articles on meatpacking, published by the
Chicago Tribune
in October of 1988. The fact that working conditions have changed little since then is remarkably depressing. Gail A. Eisnitz’s
Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997), suggests that many cattle are needlessly brutalized prior to slaughter. Nothing that these sources reveal would come as a surprise to readers of Upton Sinclair.

Page

172
The injury rate in a slaughterhouse:
In 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the injury and illness rate in the nation’s meatpacking industry was 26.7 per 100 hundred workers. For the rest of U.S. manufacturing, it was 9.2 per hundred workers. See “Industries with the Highest Nonfatal Total Cases, Incidence Rates for Injuries and Illnesses, Private Industry, 1999,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 2000; and “Incidence Rates of Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses by Selected Industries and Case Types, 1999,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, December 2000.

172
roughly forty thousand men and women:
The meatpacking industry now has about 147,600 workers, and at least 26.7 percent of them suffer workplace injuries and illnesses. See “Industries with the Highest Nonfatal Total Cases.”

Thousands of additional injuries and illnesses:
At some plants, as many as half of the workers may be hurt each year. You need spend only an hour or so with a roomful of poor Latino meatpacking workers to get a sense of how many serious injuries are never reported.

Poultry plants can be largely mechanized:
Despite the higher level of mechanization, workers in the poultry industry have one of the nation’s highest rates of injury and illness, largely due to the repetitive nature of the work and the speed of the production line.

173
roughly thirty-three times higher than the national average:
In 1999 the incidence of repeated trauma injuries in private industry was 27.3 per 10,000 workers; in the poultry industry the rate was 337.1; and in the meatpacking industry it was 912.5. See “Industries with the Highest Nonfatal Illness Incidence Rate of Disorders Associated with Repeated Trauma and the Number of Cases in These Industries,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, December 2000.

adds up to about 10,000 cuts:
According to Berkowitz and Fagel, some production jobs can require 20,000 cuts a day. Berkowitz and Fagel,
Enclyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety
, p. 67.14.

174
beef slaughterhouses often operate at profit margins:
According to Steve Bjerklie, the profit margin for slaughter is about 1 percent, with additional earnings from processing and the sale of byproducts. See Steve Bjerklie, “On the Horns of a Dilemma,” in
Any Way You Cut It
, p. 42.

widespread methamphetamine use:
Many workers told me stories about meth-amphetamine use. See also Lee, “Meatpacking towns seen as key funnel for meth.”

only one-third of IBP’s workers belong to a union:
Cited in Cohen, “Free Ride with Help from INS.”

176
awarded $2.4 million to a female employee…“screamed obscenities and rubbed their bodies”:
A federal judge later reduced the award to $1.75 million. See Lynn Hicks, “IBP Worker Awarded $2.4 Million by Jury,”
Des Moines Register
, February 27, 1999; Lynn Hicks, “Worker: Sexism, Racism at IBP,”
Des Moines Register
, February 3,1999; “IBP Told to Pay Attorney’s Fees,”
Des Moines Register
, December 30, 1999.

the company paid the women $900,000:
See “Monfort Beef to Pay $900,000 to Settle Sexual Harassment Suit,”
Houston Chronicle
, September 1,1999.

pressured them for dates and sex:
Ibid.

They are considered “independent contractors”:
As a result, the meatpacking firms are not liable for the work-related injuries of the slaughterhouse employees who face the greatest risks. When OSHA tried to penalize IBP for the death of a sanitation worker, IBP appealed the decision, with the backing of the National Association of Manufacturers, before a federal appeals court in 1998 — and won. Although the meatpackers own the slaughterhouses and the slaughterhouse equipment, they are not legally responsible for the immigrants who clean them. See Stephan C. Yohay and Arthur G. Sapper, “Liability on Multi-Employer Worksites,”
Occupational Hazards
, October 1998.

178
Richard Skala was beheaded:
See Jim Morris, “Easy Prey: Harsh Work for Immigrants,”
Houston Chronicle
, June 26, 1995.

Carlos Vincente:
See “Guatemalan Man Dies after Falling into Machinery of Beef Processing Plant,”
AP
, November 3, 1998; “Ft. Morgan Firm Faces $350,000 in OSHA Fines,”
AP
, May 4, 1999.

Lorenzo Marin, Sr.:
See Mark P. Couch, “IBP Told to Pay Damages to Family,”
Des Moines Register
, June 7, 1995.

Another employee of DCS Sanitation… The same machine:
See Jim Rasmussen, “Company Expecting Fines Today; Death at IBP Plant May Cost Ohio Firm,”
Omaha World-Herald
, October 7,1993.

Homer Stull climbed into a blood-collection tank:
See Allen Freedman, “Workers Stiffed: Death and Injury Rates among American Workers Soar, and the Government Has Never Cared Less,”
Washington Monthly
, November 1992.

Henry Wolf had been overcome:
See “Liberal Packing Plant Fined $960,”
UPI
, October 19, 1983.

179
its 1,300 inspectors:
See Kenneth B. Noble, “The Long Tug-of-War over What Is How Hazardous; For OSHA, Balance Is Hard to Find,”
New York Times
, January 10, 1988; and Christopher Drew, “Regulators Slow Down as Packers Speed Up,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 26, 1988.

more than 5 million workplaces:
Cited in “Here’s the Beef,” p. 4.

A typical American employer:
Cited in Susannah Zak Figura, “The New OSHA,”
Government Executive
, May 1997.

The number of OSHA inspectors:
See Noble, “The Long Tug of War”; and Drew, “Regulators Slow Down.”

a new policy of “voluntary compliance”:
See “Here’s the Beef,” p. 3.

While the number of serious injuries rose:
See Christopher Drew, “A Chain of Setbacks for Meat Workers,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 25, 1988.

“appear amazingly stupid to you”…“I know very well that you know”:
Quoted in Drew, “Regulators Slow Down.”

“to understate injuries, to falsify records”:
“Here’s the Beef,” p. 21.

180
every injury and illness at the slaughterhouse:
Ibid., pp. 3, 14.

the first log recorded 1,800 injuries… The OSHA log:
Ibid., p. 14.

denied under oath:
Ibid., p. 15. See also Philip Shabecoff, “OSHA Seeks $2.59 Million Fine for Meatpacker’s Injury Reports,”
New York Times
, July 22, 1987.

“the best of the best”:
Quoted in “Here’s the Beef,” p. 9.

as much as one-third higher:
Ibid., p. 9.

investigators also discovered:
Ibid., p. 21.

Another leading meatpacking company:
Ibid., pp. 21–22.

“serious injuries such as fractures”:
Ibid., p. 8.

180
“one of the most irresponsible and reckless”:
Quoted in Donald Woutat, “Meat-packer IBP Fined $3.1 Million in Safety Action; Health Problem Disabled More than 600, OSHA Says,”
Los Angeles Times
, May 12, 1988.

“the worst example of underreporting”:
Assistant Labor Secretary John A. Pender-grass, quoted in Shabecoff, “OSHA Seeks $2.59 Million Fine.”

difficult to prove “conclusively”:
“Here’s the Beef,” p. 19.

fined $2.6 million by OSHA:
Shabecoff, “OSHA Seeks $2.59 Million.”

fined an additional $3.1 million:
Woutat, “Meatpacker IBP Fined $3.1 Million.”

fines were reduced to $975,000:
See Christopher Drew, “IBP Agrees to Injury Plan,”
Chicago Tribune
, November 23, 1988; Marianne Lavelle, “When Fines Collapse: Critics Target OSHA’s Settlements,”
National Law Journal
, December 4, 1989.

about one one-hundredth of a percent:
According to Robert L. Peterson, IBP’s revenues that year were about $8.8 billion. “IBP’s Presentation at the New York Society of Security Analysts,”
Business Wire
, October 28, 1988.

a worker named Kevin Wilson:
My account of the Wilson case is based upon John Taylor, “Ex-IBP Worker Gets $15 Million in Damage Award,”
Omaha World-Herald
, December 3,1994; “Opinion,”
Kevin Wilson v IBP, Inc., and Diane Arndt
, Supreme Court of Iowa, no. 258/95–477, February 14, 1997; “$2 Million Punitive Award Won by Injured Employee,”
Managing Risk
, March 1997; and “IBP’s Appeal of $2 Million Punitive Award Rejected,”
Omaha World-Herald
, October 7,1997

181
The IBP nurse called them “idiots” and “jerks”:
Quoted in
Wilson v IBP and Arndt
, Iowa Supreme Court.

182
The company later paid him an undisclosed sum:
See Morris, “Easy Prey.”