Hard Times on the Killing Floor (brace yourselves)

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/colson12162006.html


Smithfield's Rotten Record


-snip-

In fiscal year 2006, Smithfield's worldwide operations generated sales of $11.4 billion and net profits of $172.7 million. Those profits, according to workers, union activists and human rights organizations, are built on a continued legacy of brutal conditions--including low wages, long hours, few benefits, dangerous working conditions, anti-union harassment and management-fostered racism.

According to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the base wage for workers at the nonunion Tar Heel plant is just $8.60 an hour for some of the most dangerous work in the country--and Smithfield has a reported yearly turnover rate of nearly 100 percent.

("most dangerous work in the country" "yearly turnover rate of nearly 100 percent")

-snip-

"Those of us in livestock report to work at a quarter to six and get started running hogs up into the kill floor of the plant," he said. "Of course, livestock is extremely messy, and it's made even worse because they've got drains in the pen area and where the hogs are stored at, which they refuse to unclog.

"So you get a pool of hog feces and urine and water building up, and that gets splashed on you when you're running the hogs up into the plant...There's constantly people getting hurt there. Every day, there are people getting hurt all over the plant."

The pace on the kill and cut floors is incredibly fast. In 1999, during an unfair labor practices trial, one Tar Heel plant manager testified that from the point at which a hog is first "stuck," or bled, to the point that its hair and viscera are completely removed, the fat pulled from its carcass and the animal flash-frozen is "between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on if was backed up." The remaining work of removing the skin and dismembering the animal into hams, loins, ribs and other cuts takes place in just five or six minutes more.

-snip-

"The company basically has an assembly line set up," he says, "and the human beings are treated like machines. They're sitting there for eight hours a day, and they don't even have the chance to wipe their brow, because they're covered in hog feces or blood. They're drinking from water coolers that other workers have been at who are covered in hog feces and hog blood. They're hard working people, and they are being abused and mistreated."

This disregard for workers' safety has had deadly consequences at Smithfield. In November 2003, 25-year-old Glen Birdsong was killed after being exposed to fumes from a vat of pig mucosa mixed with sodium bisulfite.

-snip-

SMITHFIELD'S TAR Heel plant runs primarily off the labor of minority workers. More than half of the workforce is Latino, many of whom are recent immigrants, and nearly 40 percent is African American.

Smithfield management has a long history of pitting workers against each other along racial lines.
-snip-
-----------------------


and they are anti union to the point of violence

go ahead and eat that pork from terrified pigs killed by exploited workers, all in a filthy situation.

continue to help Smithfield's suits rake in the money and live in splender.

[Clark2008]

1. I'm allergic to pork - and thankfully so after reading this.

:puke:

[flyarm]

2. DANG I DON'T EAT CHICKEN BECAUSE I GOT REALLY BAD CHICKEN

AND GOT REAL ILL FROM IT..I DON'T EAT MUCH BEEF.. i hate fish..and about all i ate was pork...now i am down to pasta!!

ahhhhhhhh..now i feel sick...going to puke.......

fly

[Fridays Child]

3. Is the meat-processing industry exempt from OSHA rules?

I didn't see OSHA mentioned anywhere in that article.

[rodeodance]

5. PBS had a good program about this plant just a few days ago. Intimidation

of workers is the rule of thumb (they are disposable is the theme).

Other workers have drank the koolaid (prob. because of the intimidation)

[itsmesgd]

4. what else can we eat?

The beef is bad, the chicken funky, the pork is swine, the veggies have ecoli.....

I'm down to granola bars, pop tarts, and beer. Soon my diet will be just beer unless I grow my own food or join a "clean" farming co-op.

Yo ho ho, a pirate's diet for me.

[LynzM]

15. Local stuff

You can still eat beef, chicken, pork, veggies... just get them from local places when possible, where you know the condition of the place. I know, easier said than done.

[lostnfound]

6. So glad I eat nothing from slaughterhouses.

I would kick the fish habit, too, if I was living alone.

[no_hypocrisy]

7. Think I'll go re-read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Seems like

redux of meat-packing factories of the 19th and 20th centuries.

[eppur_se_muova]

18. Available online here:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Sinclair/TheJungle/

(100th anniversary year, BTW)

[cosmicdot]

22. a k&r for your post n/t

[Fridays Child]

8. Smithfield's corporate social responsibility

There are actually social responsibilty and code of business conduct pages on their web site.

[uppityperson]

9. Time to grow my own or buy locally.

thank you for the article

[Double T]

10. I just permanently lost my appetite for ANY kind of meat....................

guess I'll have to stick to good ol' 'murkin grown E. coli infested veggies. It is sad America is going backwards.

[libnnc]

11. no words.

K&R

[peacetalksforall]

12. Without waiting for the other side of the story, I'm going to lean

towards believing what I'm reading.

So my first thought is - I wonder if their Christmas cards to their distributors and chain customers carried a sweet greeting? And did they have a holiday greeing on tv or in the media? Was it also sweetly americana?

Never forget the stockholders of companies like this one. The ceo's and cfo's always say they are duty bound to serve their stockholders - cost controls, efficiencies, tight management.

If any of us stand back and cannot see, hear, or smell the attitude emanating from these compananies to mere citizen employees, they must be a ceo or climbing vp of one of these companies themselves.

It's now time to thank all the well meaning ceo's and companies who do right by their employees - (not just the top levels).

[Rex]

13. Someone needs to check their books, the math smells as bad as the food.

How do you sell 11 billion dollars worth of product and only have 170 million to show for it?

[OneBlueSky]

14. "Pork's Dirty Secret" . . . Rolling Stone . . . (warning: disturbing photo) . . .

Pork's Dirty Secret: The nation's top hog producer is also one of America's worst polluters
America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters



Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

more . . .

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

[renate]

25. what a sad picture

Poor little pigs. If I wasn't already a vegetarian, that picture would do it for me.

After seeing "Babe" I can't imagine eating pork.

[leftchick]

16. Read "The Good, Good Pig"

an the latest Rollingstone article on Smithfield and that other white meat looks pretty damn bloody and disgusting. :puke:

http://www.goodgoodpig.com/




http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

[judaspriestess]

17. This is disgusting

I eat meat now but I have a personal struggle with it and reading this gives me all the more ammunition not to eat meat. I also believe when you eat meat you eat the final moments of that animal which is wracked with pain and anguish.


"Whites, Blacks, American Indians and "Mexicans"
they all have their separate stations


:grr: Not all Latinos are Mexican. I hate when stupid ignorant people say this.

[leftofthedial]

19. mmmm

bacon

[Straight Shooter]

20. Many years ago, when I ate meat, I refused to eat pork.

Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Sure, they have some bad habits, but they can be very lovable, too.

Rotten treatment for the workers in slaughterhouses is the norm. :(

[kdpeters]

21. Yet it remains a mystery why anyone would sell drugs on the street

... as opposed to working dangerous, unsanitary jobs for slave wage.

[Jennicut]

23. Okay, I think I will never ever eat pork again after reading this article

So gross, unsanitary and inhumane to the pigs and the workers. Terrible. I can't believe that this goes on in 2006. When was "The Jungle" put out? Anyone know? It seems like we should ahve improved since then.

[Raine]

24. I'm a vegetarian

and if I wasn't already one I would be after reading that. :puke: