The New 'Jungle'

__"The Jungle Revisited" by Keith Nunes, in Meat & Poultry (Dec. 1999), 4800 Main St., Ste. 100, Kansas City, Mo. 64112.__

In his muckraking 1906 novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair exposed the terrible working conditions in the Chicago Stockyards and accidentally stirred public alarm about contaminated meat, prompting Congress to quickly enact the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Today, the Chicago Stockyards are gone, the meatpacking plants in what is an $8.5-billion-a-year industry are mainly in smaller cities and towns in the western Corn Belt, and the modern operation is in many ways a far cry from what it used to be. But the industry still depends heavily on "the individuals who stand next to the conveyer belts and rend meat from bone with honed steel"— and for them, reports Nunes, associate publisher and senior editor of the trade journal Meat&Poultry, working conditions are still far from ideal.

"Sinclair paints a grim picture of how line workers were hired, injured, and essentially discarded.... Today," Nunes writes, "despite the progress that has been made by industry members, meatpacking still ranks as one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation." For every 100 full-time workers in meatpacking plants in 1997, there were 32.1 incidents of injury (or illness). Nor, despite advances in sanitation and food safety, Nunes points out, has the public threat of contaminated meat entirely vanished: E. coli and other microbial dangers have replaced tuberculosis.

"In some ways, working conditions are better today than they were in The Jungle," notes Deborah Fink, the author of Cutting into the Meatpacking Line (1998), who spent four months in 1992 working undercover in a Perry, Iowa plant owned by IBP, the industry’s largest employer. Workers today wear gloves and arm guards, and are at less risk of getting infections from cuts. "But [packers] have reduced entire jobs to a small set of motions," she says. "Twenty years ago it was considered a skill to be able to bone a ham. Now all workers do is make one cut all day." So, instead of infections, workers are prone to getting repetitivemotion injuries.

Worker turnover is high, "between 80 percent and 120 percent" for the major packers, says Nunes. While packers insist they want to reduce turnover in order to cut the expense of training new workers, critics strongly doubt it. "Employees stay for a limited time, earn no seniority, don’t retire, and have no access to paid vacations or, in many cases, health benefits," observes Donald Stull, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas.

In Sinclair’s day, the Chicago-based "Beef Trust" actively recruited workers from Ireland and Eastern Europe. Today, the "Big Three" packers (IBP, Cargill’s Excel Corporation, and Con-Agra’s Monfort), have turned to Central America and Asia. Last year, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service "shook the foundation of the industry," Nunes says, when it methodically reviewed the papers of 24,310 Nebraska workers and found irregularities in a fifth of them.

For all the dramatic changes in the industry, Stull says, The Jungle’s Jurgis Rudkis would be disappointed to learn how much in a 21st-century meatpacking plant remains sadly the same.