By the 1990s, meatpacking work changed. It was no longer a job that provided a well-compensated stable middle-class industrial job. Instead, it was a job for the working poor, who often lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions because their wages could no longer cover homeownership. They were increasingly immigrants, often undocumented, and women, groups perceived to be unlikely to organize and resist employers’ directives.
In those decades, workers suffered as owners imposed faster work speeds. Workers were required to handle more meat at higher risk. Injury rates soared throughout the 1990s before dropping afterward but still remaining higher than average for industrial work. Major meat corporations point to the declining injury rates since the 1990s as a sign of success — but unions say that workers are underreporting injuries out of fear of reprisals, making official reports of injuries inaccurate.
Wages have plummeted 50 percent since 1975, with current median earnings at $14 per hour. The historian Roger Horowitz provides a stark assessment of this process: “almost a century after Upton Sinclair’s pioneering expose of meatpacking, packinghouse workers in the United States have tragically returned to the jungle.”
By 2010, four meat-processing corporations produced half of the meat consumed in the United States, a return to concentrated production not seen since the Meat Inspection Act passed in 1906. In the mid-2010s, the U.S. meat industry became more consolidated and globalized with foreign firms now owning some of the major domestic corporations.
They have kept food costs low and generated savings for consumers. Between 1900 and 1970, food consumed at home took up nearly one-third of a family’s budget; currently it is less than 10 percent. During those same 70 years of the 20th century, consumers were constant supporters of the meatpacking worker and they formed a political alliance to ensure the passage of new laws like the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967, which expanded federal inspection to cover meat produced and processed for intrastate consumption. They were united by the idea that vigorous and strictly enforced federal regulations helped both workers and consumers equally.
Yet, as meat prices and workers’ compensation declined, so too did the alliance. As meatpacking workers faced an ever-increasing line speed and the injury rate spiked, they were unable to mobilize their former allies or garner enough sympathies to block the increases. The USDA had used this power in the past, making it plausible that a committed coalition of meat consumers and workers might have put pressure on the government to use its powers to slow production speeds, increase the distance between workers and ensure that workers had adequate access to sanitation and proactive equipment. No such alliance coalesced, however, because consumers became detached from laborers in the fight between workers and management in the meat industry.
Without such interventions, the Trump administration has continued this decades-long process, lifting regulations on pork slaughterhouses, allowing increasing line speeds for poultry and allowing for fewer inspectors.
But the costs of cheap meat have been exposed by the coronavirus, which may have broken the American food production system where it is weakest: the worker’s health. Because of the changes to the industry over the last four decades, these facilities have become hot spots for covid-19 outbreaks. While covid-19 is ravaging the rural meatpacking industry’s poor workers, it is these broader shifts in the industry benefiting consumers at the expense of workers that has facilitated the rapid spread of the illness.