by Adam Kimble
Work knows no color, but employment practices do. It is somewhat ironic, then, that an industry of color-blind labor can so strongly shape small-town life. To what extent can we look at such a transformation positively? When must we stop celebrating multiculturalism to critique big business?
This week we set aside interviews to discuss the ways that the meatpacking industry has shaped all of the Midwest. On Monday, we went over two readings: Chapter 7 of Any Way You Cut It and “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse” by Amy Fitzgerald.
Chapter seven explored a potential conflict of interest in the meatpacking industry. USDA inspectors are employed by the plant, and therefore dependent upon it remaining open for their paycheck. Can we really expect everything needing reporting to make it into the system? In the past several years, federal and state legislations have loosened many of the laws surrounding the pork industry, creating an environment where pork plants are allowed to supervise themselves with essentially no governmental oversight. According to NBC News, two years ago the Trump Administration began allowing plants to “reduce the number of Department of Agriculture line inspectors assigned to them and run their slaughter lines without any speed limit.” Meatpacking plants can now slaughter as many animals as possible, as fast as they can. Doesn’t haste make waste?
Meatpacking plants can now slaughter as many animals as possible, as fast as they can. Doesn’t haste make waste?
In addition to a lack of oversight and accountability, many plants engage in questionable relationships with their workers. Some in the U.S., like the Long Prairie Packing Company in Alexandria, Minnesota, offer their new employees temporary housing. The president of American Foods, Steven Van Lannen, said that the company’s “small rooms do not work well for families. But it is a good recruiting tool for people new to the area or the meatpacking business.” It is plants operating with business practices like these, drawing their desirable workers in, single and male, and keeping them there for however long they want. In the case of the workers in Minnesota, that would be around 8-10 weeks before they “move to other homes.”
In some ways, the slaughterhouse is the heart of the community. Until this week, we had not examined the larger history of the industry. Scholar Amy Fitzgerald examines this and the general history of slaughterhouses in her article. Fitzgerald begins by classifying our relationship with animals into two categories: domesticity and post-domesticity. Domesticity refers to the years before 1970, where contact with the animals we eat and use was normalized, and post-domesticity refers to the years after 1970 when our contact with these animals was denormalized. As Fitzgerald puts it, while most people savor the results (beef, chicken) of routinized slaughter, they “paradoxically enjoy very close relationships with their pet animals.” This conscious choice to not investigate a practice in which we are complicit is “affected ignorance.”
The conversation over “affected ignorance” brought up some very intriguing questions. Is it a phenomenon reserved only for those who are not close to the production of the food? Conversely, is it possible to ignore the production when you live so close to it and likely know people who work in such a plant? What do people in Storm Lake think about the meat production process? Do they reckon with its morbidity? As Dr. Offenburger said in class on Monday in response to this question, “I’d love to just hit a button and send out a thousand surveys to people attached to Tyson, and see if they are vegetarian of some sort or another.” Would you be? Since we as students in Ohio do not live in Storm Lake, or any other meat packing town, for that matter, these questions are not ones we can answer ourselves. Fitzgerald talks about the history of the actual way we eat meat. It used to be customary to serve many animals, like a pig, with their heads still attached and with limbs intact. The pig looked like a pig when it hit your table. Today, however, this is rare. By the time of consumption, it is completely unrecognizable.
Fitzgerald goes into detail about the psychological effects of working in a slaughterhouse. She inquires about a direct link between working in a slaughterhouse or packinghouse and sustaining psychological trauma. There is a toll to being treated like an expendable product day in and day out by your boss, or by the company you work for; or cutting animals and bleeding them; or deboning them. Trauma can easily take hold. This conversation led us to ask how this increase in mental health problems plays out with the backdrop of Iowa’s broken mental health system. According to Stacey and Chris Cole, to get the help you need (if you cannot afford it on your hourly wages at the plant) you need to be in the criminal justice system. This is not to say, however, that there is a direct link between slaughterhouse work and an increased crime rate, as both Chiefs Prosser and Cole mentioned. Storm Lake is not getting less diverse; quite the contrary. Last year had the lowest number of calls placed to the police department out of any year on record by a margin of 30 per day. Less than half of those arrested in Storm Lake in 2020 were Hispanic (183 out of 519, or 35%, of total adult arrests), out of a town with an adult population that is 35% Hispanic.
Fitzgerald also discussed how many workers come to find themselves in the plants in the first place. This would be due to family ties and simply knowing others already in the workforce. As Matthew Marroquín mentioned, virtually everyone knows someone working in one of the plants. It is through these ties that people find themselves on the kill floor, or in the plant in some capacity.
Dr. Mark Grey focuses on these social connections in his article, “Turning the Pork Industry Upside down,” which we read for Wednesday. His work offers a glimpse of lives in the aftermath of Hygrade’s closure. Dr. Grey conducted oral history interviews with Storm Lakers, much the same as we are doing in this class, although with a different goal in mind. In one such interview, an informant said that working at the Hygrade plant felt like working with family. This juxtaposition of “feeling like working with family” to “I got a job with my uncle, cousin, and brother,” shows just how much the industry changed over the years, and the differences between the various employers at the plants. As some of you may remember, the jobs they had at Hygrade were never glorious, but they did pay well: $3 an hour above the average compared to other meatpacking plants.
The union, Local 191, worked hard to keep pay adjusted for a rapidly increasing cost of living, and workers had the chance to make up to one-third of total pay in quota bonuses. Hygrade’s productivity was unmatched at the time. By the 1950s, some industry executives were claiming that the Storm Lake plant was responsible for one out of every five hogs processed in the United States. All was well until the economic crisis of the 1980s, the new wave of environmental legislation of the 1970s, and the gas crisis all combined to make operating the plant with such benefits was no longer possible. The union and Hygrade entered negotiations. They failed, and the plant closed in 1981.
Among other things, Hygrade wanted the union to agree to a $3 an hour pay-cut, an amount above competitors’ pay. The union refused, and the plant to closed. IBP bought the plant in 1982, reopening and redoing many of the facilities. Instead of hiring returning workers with dozens of years of experience, IBP only hired back approximately 30 former Hygrade employees. What they did do, however, was hire the former Local 191 president and vice president as managers. This raised questions in our class about the integrity of the union, and whether or not its refusal to take a pay-cut was short-sighted. If the union bosses (who ended up with a job anyway) had handled things differently, would Hygrade still be around?
By the end of the week, our largest question focused on whether 1981-82 was really the historical turning point for Storm Lake, when Hygrade closed and IBP opened. Hygrade in fact had threatened to close in 1978, without effect. How can we blame unions, then, for not recognizing the real threat just three years later? Perhaps 1979 is the key year, when Governor Ray further opened Iowa to Southeast Asian refugees. Or could it be when Art Cullen won the Pulitzer in 2017 and brought all the big cameras to town?
Another pressing question: is there still a sense of family in Tyson plants? As Hunter Kolbus said in class on Wednesday, “I feel like if you ask workers now at Tyson, they definitely don’t feel the same way [as Hygrade workers].” Tyson’s high turnover rate would undermine this sense of community, though as Joey Puckett suggested, certain ties are in fact stronger, with families reliant upon each other for immigration.
Tyson’s high turnover rate would undermine this sense of community, though as Joey Puckett suggested, certain ties are in fact stronger, with families reliant upon each other for immigration.
This leads to an unsettling thought on whether it is “right” to be celebrating Storm Lake’s diversity when it is a result of exploitative corporate practices. Doing so might even serve and reinforce Tyson’s needs, of recruiting workers who have little choice but to accept low pay. By rightly celebrating diversity, are we unwittingly perpetuating exploitative business practices?
Adam Kimble is a history major with a German minor. He enjoys industrial and medieval European history, as well as the American West. After college, he plans to go on a year-long backpacking excursion along the Appalachian Trail, after which he will apply for law school.
