Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 2002

In the 1980s large numbers of young men and women from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia started traveling to rural Colorado. Meatpacking jobs that had once provided a middle-class American life now offered little more than poverty wages.

Thousands of new migrants now travel north to work in the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants of the High Plains. These migrants come mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many were once farm workers in California, where steady jobs in the fields are now difficult to find. To farm worker who’ve labored outdoors, ten hour a day, for the nation’s lowest wages, meatpacking jobs often sound too good to be true.

To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It has recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away. IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.

The real costs of the migrant industrial workforce are being borne not by the large meatpacking firms, but by the nation’s meatpacking communities. Poor workers without health insurance drive up local medical costs. Drug dealers prey on recent immigrants and the large, transient population usually brings more crime.

The high turnover rate in meatpacking is driven by the low pay and the poor working conditions. Workers quit on meatpacking job and float from town to town in the High Plains, looking for something better. Moving constantly is hard on their personal lives and their families.

In 1990, IBP opened a slaughterhouse in Lexington. A year later, the town, with a population of roughly seven thousand, had the highest crime rate in the state of Nebraska. Lexington became a major distribution center for illegal drugs; gang members appeared in town and committed drive-by shootings; the majority of Lexington’s white inhabitants moved elsewhere; and the proportion of Latino inhabitants increased more than tenfold, climbing to over 50 percent. “Mexington” – as it is now called, affectionately by some, disparagingly by others – is an entirely new kind of American town, one that has transfigured to meet the needs of a modern slaughterhouse.

Work Safety

Meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States. Despite the use of conveyor belts, forklifts, dehiding machines, and a variety of power tools, most of the work in the nation’s slaughterhouses is still performed by hand. Poultry plants can be largely mechanized, thanks to the breeding of chickens that uniform in size. The birds in some Tyson factories are killed, plucked, gutted, beheaded, and sliced into cutlets by robots and machines. But cattle still come in all sizes and shapes, varying in weight by hundreds of pounds. The lack of a standardized steer has hindered the mechanization of beef plants.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the most important tool in a modern slaughterhouse is a sharp knife. Many slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift. If the knife has become dull, additional pressure is placed on the worker’s tendons, joints, and nerves. A dull knife can cause pain to extend from the cutting hand all the way down the spine.

The “IBP revolution” has been directly responsible for many of the hazards the meatpacking workers now face. One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line. The faster it runs, the more likely that workers will get hurt. The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle per hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle per hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour.

The unrelenting pressure of trying to keep up with the line has encouraged widespread methamphetamine use among meatpackers. Workers taking “crank” feel charged and self-confident, ready for anything.