Dying for a Job

Slaughterhouses abound with dangerous equipment that is often operated by immigrants and poor, rural Americans who can’t read the instructions and haven’t been properly trained. Sometimes training consists of little more than watching a video, and the up to 400 percent job turnover rate at some slaughterhouses means that plants are usually staffed with new people who run a much higher risk of being hurt or accidentally hurting someone else.^33,34 The animal-processing industry usually makes workers pay for their safety gear out of their own pocket, despite the fact that many of the workers are too poor even to feed their families.³⁵

As a result of the poor training and the industry’s blasé attitude toward employee safety, anyone who works in a slaughterhouse runs the risk of being hurt by the powerful machines that cut and kill animals. Maria Martinez, a worker at a Tyson plant, told CorpWatch about a man who lost an arm at the plant in 2003. “[He] cut off his arm with a hock-cutter [a machine that cuts through cows’ knee joints]. The company had taken off the arm guards from the hock-cutter and the machine wasn’t working right because of production. All they care about is production, not the safety of the workers.”³⁶

If the farmed-animal industry would invest more time and money into properly training and equipping its employees, many injuries and deaths could be avoided. But factory farms and slaughterhouses have not taken the appropriate steps to create safer working conditions because slowing down the lines or buying safety gear would cut into the companies’ bottom line. Human Rights Watch explains, “These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.”³⁷

Cleaners: ‘The Worst Job in the United States’

The people who come in at night to clean the slaughterhouses are especially at risk for serious injury—the air is heavy with fog from hoses that spray steaming water and chlorine onto the equipment, and the workers cannot see more than a few feet in front of them. Many of the killing machines are still running, and the cleaners have to climb onto them in order to clean off all the blood, grease, and feces that have accumulated from the thousands of animals killed that day. Inevitably, some of the cleaners are hurt or killed by the equipment that they’re trying to clean. An OSHA report notes some recent accidents involving cleaners:³⁸

• “Cleaner killed when hog-splitting saw is activated.”
• “Cleaner dies when he is pulled into a conveyer and crushed.”
• “Cleaner loses legs when a worker activates the grinder in which he is standing.”
• “Cleaner loses hand when he reaches under a boning table to hose meat from a chain.”

In his best-selling book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser lists some other fatal accidents involving cleaners in slaughterhouses: “At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente … was pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez … had his head crushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. The same machine had fatally crushed the head of another worker, Ben Barone, a few years earlier. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a blood-collection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried to rescue him. All three men died. Eight years earlier, Henry Wolf had been overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes while cleaning the very same tank; Gary Sanders had tried to rescue him; both men died …. The [OSHA] fine was $480 for each man’s death.” Schlosser concludes, “The men and women who now clean the nation’s slaughterhouses may arguably have the worst job in the United States.”³⁹

Read more about how the farmed-animal industry cheats workers.