Madeline GrandinENGL 444Ms. Haines

The Oppression of Mexican Worker by American Meat Packers

The root of the word “oppression” is an element of “press”. The press of the crowd;

pressed into a job; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button. Presses are used to

mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk. Something pressed is something caught be-

tween or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain,

restrict or prevent the things motion or mobility (Bennet-Alexander, par 4). The concept of a

press when referring to mechanical manipulation is readily accepted as a common daily occur-

rence, a mundane fact of life. Unfortunately, oppression is also a daily occurrence for some peo-

ple. Poor Mexican workers are pressed by the forces of the meat packing industry. The packing

industry is so large, it carries the ability to exercise authority in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust

manner, generating a form of immobility for this particular working class

The four largest US companies in the meat packing business; Tyson, JBS, Excel (a sub-

sidiary of Cargill), and National Beef target Mexican workers and take advantage of them

through a system of oppression. In this case, oppression enforced by racial barriers, economic

needs of the workers, and employment threats within the work environment. This oppression is

exemplified in worker segregations within the workplace, where the dominant white males most

often obtain the highest paying jobs, and the Mexicans are relegated to the lowest compensated

positions. These jobs often include long hard hours in the most dangerous conditions, enduring

the highest incident of injuries. The Mexican workers are reluctant to report injuries, which is a

direct result of the fear instilled in them through employers’ threats of deportation and no job se-

curity. This creates an economic advantage for the company, profiting off the employees hard

work and long hours, without having to pay for their injuries. The end result is a furthering of the

oppression of poor Mexican workers within the meat packing industry.

Tyson, JBS, Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill), JBS, and National Beef—control approxi-

mately 75 percent of the

meat packing market. As the

meatpacking industry has

grown more concentrated,

the corporations have be-

come more powerful, there-

fore the unions who support

their workers have grown

much weaker. According to Eric Schlosser, the author of, The Most Dangerous Job in America,

only half of IBP's workers belong to a union. This puts IBP, as a company, in a powerful posi-

tion, allowing them to set the industry standard for low wages and harsh working conditions. In

most American slaughterhouses, more than three-quarters of the workers are non-native English

speakers, falling under the status of illegal immigrants. A wage of $9.50 an hour seems incredi-

ble to men and women who come from rural areas in Mexico where the wages are $7 a day.

These manual laborers, long accustomed to toiling in the fields, are good hard workers. They're

unlikely to complain or challenge authority, to file lawsuits, organize unions, or fight for their le-

gal rights. Compared to native US workers, they tend to be poor, vulnerable, and fearful. From

the industry's point of view, they are ideal workers: cheap, largely interchangeable, and dispos-

able (motherjones, par 6). An Industrial viewpoint founded within the collusions of people and

Source: High Country News, 2011

the power of authority, in a way that keeps workers in the meat packing plants oppressed, due to

an ideology that says the poor working Mexican class is beneath the dominant middle class.

A poverty stricken culture results in desperation to provide financially for one’s family

which in turn, empowers business owners to take advantage of workers by lowering wages, cre-

ating harsher working conditions, and eliminating job security. This empowerment is reinforced

in a capitalistic society that all too often places profit ahead of human decency and fortifies a na-

tionwide perspective of superiority over minority classes. A perspective that originated in the be-

ginning of the industrial era, where, as new waves of immigrants came to America, they took

their position as the lowest man on the totem pole. The ability to oppress immigrant workers has

created a society that has grown to thrive from superiority, making money off of hard working

people that rarely get the chance to stand on an equal level. The United States is all too often, a

society characterized by the belittlement of hard working people. A sense of fear is instilled in

those who are the less fortunate, less educated, and hard working, often creating an environment

prime for acts of oppression, a form of power, through the ability of keeping others down. This

ideology results in perceived mental superiority over Mexican workers, and results in oppression

of this class of workers within the meat packing plants. The power and economic rewards the

corporations can gain through commerce and through the ability to push their employees to work

at low rates reinforces this vicious circle of oppression. A system that remains possible because

of a common negative perspective that has been adopted in our culture.

The meat packing industry is a corporation obsessed with outputting as much as possi-

ble, as fast as possible, with as minimum problems from employees as possible. Employers tar-

get workers who will suffer through the job quietly and are easily replaceable. Consequently, a

majority of these workers are Mexican immigrants that live in the poorest areas of the US and

have very limited legal options of earning money. Historically, the dominant ethnic group work-

ing within the slaughterhouse is the poor white male. Data shows that over recent years there has

been a growth in the hispanic ethnicity, over a twenty year period from 1980 to 2000, the percent

of Mexicans working in the slaughterhouse increased 20%. By 2008 Mexicans made up 45% of

the overall workforce in the slaughterhouses (kandel,13). This characteristic of this targeted

worker aligns perfectly with the needs of the meat packing corporations. The majority of Mexi-

cans working within the slaughterhouses have the reputation of being undocumented, and thus

are viewed as easy targets. The wages given are relatively low compared with native US work-

ers. The status of undocumented worker allows employers to instill fear through threats of depor-

tation. This fear results in a hard working class that underreports injuries and endures financial,

mental, and physical abuse.

Slaughtering animals and processing their flesh is an inherently dangerous industry where

corporations’ profits constantly take priority over workers’ most basic rights. The meat industry

is in pursuit of ever higher profits. The result is an environment management is positioned to turn

a blind eye to injuries, where injuries become a normal part of the process, and companies can

even go so far as extreme worker abuse. The profit margins in this industry are thin, so quantity

is necessary to make significant profits. The large packing companies run twenty four hours a

day, seven days a week. An average plants slaughter line speed on the kill floor is approximately

four hundred cattle per hour, or one every twelve seconds (boing, par 8). Factors including; the

rapid speed of the line, the unpredictability of animals, the use of dangerous machinery, long

shifts with limited breaks, and repetitious motions combine to create a potentially very hazardous

environment.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) estimates over 40,000

meatpacking workers are injured on the job every year. Mr. Compa, who is a professor of Indus-

trial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, spent over a year preparing the report, “ Blood

Sweat and Fear: Workers Rights in United States Meat and Poultry Plants.” Compa focused on

three companies: Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and Nebraska Beef. Within the report, he

states that “nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of serious injury

suffered from working in a meat and poultry plant” (Compa, 8). A list of accident reports, as

showing in Figure 1, filed by OSHA gives a sense of the dangers that workers now confront in

this nation’s meatpacking plants. The titles of these OSHA reports sound more like lurid tabloid

headlines than the headings of sober government documents:

Although the lacera-

tions and deaths are reported

to OSHA and documented,

the actual incidence of injury

apparent to the eye appears to

be much greater than the re-

ports reveal. Large corpora-

tions report fewer and fewer

injuries each year, which they

claim is an indicator of pro-

gressing towards a safer workplace. A three year Cohort Study of traumatic injuries in a mid-

western meatpacking plant, supports that not only is the line speed causing injury, but that a large

percentage of workers are not reporting these injuries. Based on 5,410 workers, in an adverse

workforce: Caucasian(56.6%), Hispanic(38.9%), African American(2.7%), Asian(1.1%), and

Native American(.8%). There were 1,655 employees with reported traumatic injuries during this

period. The overall incidence injury rate was 22.76 per 100 full-time employees per year(Culp,

9). This rate is three times that of a private industry (Tasker, 11).

If a company is forced to properly document all injuries and then take care of the em-

ployee who is injured, the repetitious injuries that occur within the slaughterhouses eat into prof-

its through lost production and high medical expenses. Thus corporations are motivated to target

poverty stricken Mexican workers who are vulnerable, and fearful. The Hispanic workers are a

group that do not report injuries in fear of losing their job, allowing the corporation to profit off

their labor without having to pay the expense of their injuries. In the three year Cohort Study, the

ratio of reported injuries was significantly lower in Mexican workers, compared to Caucasians.

These findings suggest that either Mexicans are very safe employees or they under report injuries

(Culp, 10). Although Hispanic is not the largest working ethnic group within the slaughter-

houses, the fact that they make up the majority of undocumented workers, allows employers to

use deportation as an incentive to keep problems, such as injuries and illnesses, hidden. The fear

for Mexican workers to report their injuries, demonstrates the effects of oppression by powerful

employers, a power that originates within societies negative perspective.

When referring to slaughterhouses, the focus generally revolves around the humane treat-

ment of animals, or sanitary conditions leading to larger societal health concerns, rather than the

horrific potential injuries that are a daily threat to the workers. The process and procedure used

on the kill floor would not be tolerated any other place in our society. Some workers have re-

ported having reoccurring dreams about the acts done in the slaughterhouses and many others re-

ported feeling reliant on drugs and alcohol to get them through the job. A former hog-sticker (an

employee who stabs the hogs to cause them to bleed to death) stated that, "a lot of the slaughter-

house hog killers have problems with alcohol. They have to drink, they have no other way of

dealing with killing live, kicking animals all day long. If you stop and think about it, you're

killing several thousand beings a day” (Soloman, par 18). One kill floor manager confessed, “the

worst thing, worse than the physical danger, was the emotional toll...Pigs down on the kill floor

have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them-beat them to

death with a pipe. I can’t care” (Dillard, par 14). The only way to cope is to become desensitized.

Studies have shown that blocking out emotion leads to domestic violence, social withdrawal,

drug and alcohol abuse, and severe anxiety for these workers. These symptoms are strikingly

similar to soldiers returning from battle with post traumatic stress disorder, which the US gov-

ernment spends incredibly large sums of money attempting to treat. Is it any surprise that the

slaughterhouse industry, compared to other industries has a more significant effect on crime in

communities due to the physiological changes of slaughterhouse workers? “This overwhelm-

ingly common aversion to killing suggests that the slaughterhouse employment causes a majority

of the employees to violate their natural preference against killing” (Cohidon, 1).

The mental effects of working on the floor are most predominantly seen within the Mexi-

can workers. This is due to the segregation within the the meat packing plant, where the white

males often get the higher paying, less gruesome jobs. Thus leaving the repetitious slaughtering

and dismembering to the Mexican workers. This constant association with killing, often links to

heavy drinking and violent problems outside of the slaughterhouse, thereby bringing greater dis-

tress and hardship, stemming from the employers dominance over this targeted Mexican workers

life.

The mental and physical abuse experienced by the Mexican working class within slaugh-

terhouses is a result of at best, the public preferring to turn a blind eye and remain ignorant, or at

worst a public carried ideology that, that class of people working in the slaughter house is be-

neath the rest of us. Either way, resulting in the collusion of the public with large corporate inter-

ests to run slaughterhouses, who oppress some of their workers through threats of deportation

and job security. This targeted work force experiences mass injuries unlike any other profession,

and earn the lowest paying wage in the industry. They work, receiving limited benefits, enduring

mental and physical damage, while their employers project a sense of superiority upon them.

This treatment and perspective has long reinforced a perception that Mexicans have the same

standing within American culture, as they do in the work place. Oppression instills a sense of

fear; fear of losing their jobs, or even being deported, due to the belief that they are interchange-

able and their hard work means nothing. This public carried ideology of the poverty stricken cul-

ture enables business owners to take advantage by paying low wages, maintaining dangerously

harsh working conditions, and providing no job security. This corporate empowerment stems

from a nationwide perspective of superiority towards the minority class and is reinforced by cap-

italism. It is an unfortunate example of how the United States as a society, has grown to thrive

from superiority, making money off of hard working people that will have to scratch and claw a

lifetime and may never get the chance to stand on a truly level playing field.

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