The killing zone | | The Guardian

The killing zone

Kenny Dobbins was hired by the Monfort Beef Company in 1979. He was 24 years old, 6ft 5in, and had no fear of the hard work in a slaughterhouse. He seemed invincible. Over the next two decades he suffered injuries working for Monfort that would have crippled or killed lesser men. He was struck by a falling 90lb box of meat and pinned against the steel lip of a conveyor belt. He blew out a disc and had back surgery. He inhaled too much chlorine while cleaning some blood tanks and spent a month in hospital, his lungs burned, his body covered in blisters. He damaged his left shoulder when a 10,000lb hammer-mill cover dropped too quickly and pulled his arm straight backward. He broke a leg after stepping into a hole in the slaughterhouse's concrete floor. He got hit by a slow-moving train behind the plant, spent two weeks in hospital, then returned to work. He shattered an ankle and had it mended with four steel pins. He got more bruises and cuts, muscle pulls and strains than he could remember.

Despite all the injuries and the pain, Dobbins felt intensely loyal to Monfort and ConAgra, its parent company. He'd left home at 13 and never learned to read; Monfort had given him a steady job, and he was willing to do whatever the company asked. He moved from Grand Island, Nebraska, to Greeley, Colorado, to help Monfort reopen its slaughterhouse there without a union. He became an outspoken member of a group formed to keep union organisers out. He saved the life of a fellow worker, and was given a framed certificate of appreciation. And then, in December 1995, Dobbins felt a sharp pain in his chest while working in the plant. He thought it was a heart attack. According to Dobbins, the company nurse told him it was a muscle pull and sent him home. It was a heart attack, and Dobbins nearly died. While awaiting compensation for his injuries, he was fired. The company later agreed to pay him a settlement of $35,000.

Today, Dobbins is disabled, with a bad heart and scarred lungs. He lives entirely off social security payments. He has no pension and no health insurance. He now feels angry beyond words at ConAgra, misused, betrayed. He's embarrassed to be receiving public assistance. "I've never had to ask for help before in my life," he says. "I've worked since I was 14 years old." In addition to the physical pain, the financial uncertainty and the stress of finding enough money to pay the rent each month, he feels humiliated.

What happened to Dobbins is now being repeated, in various forms, at slaughterhouses throughout the US. According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, meatpacking is America's most dangerous occupation. The meatpacking industry not only has the highest injury rate, but also has, by far, the highest rate of serious injury - more than five times the national average. In 1999, more than a quarter of America's nearly 150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness. The actual number of injured is most likely higher. The meatpacking industry has a well-documented history of discouraging injury reports, falsifying injury data and putting injured workers back on the job quickly to minimise the reporting of lost workdays. Over the past four years, I've met scores of meatpacking workers in Nebraska, Colorado and Texas who tell stories of being injured and then discarded by their employers. Like Dobbins, many now rely on public assistance for their food, shelter and medical care. Each new year throws more injured workers on the dole, forcing taxpayers to subsidise the industry's poor safety record.

A list of accident reports filed by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) gives a sense of the dangers that workers now confront in the nation's meatpacking plants. The titles of these OSHA reports sound more like lurid tabloid headlines than the headings of sober government documents: Employee Severely Burned After Fuel From His Saw Is Ignited; Employee Hospitalised For Neck Laceration From Flying Blade; Employee's Finger Amputated In Sausage Extruder; Employee's Finger Amputated In Chitlin Machine; Employee's Eye Injured When Struck By Hanging Hook; Employee's Arm Amputated In Meat Auger; Employee Burned In Tallow Fire; One Employee Killed, Eight Injured By Ammonia Spill; Employee Killed When Arm Caught In Meat Grinder; Employee Decapitated By Chain Of Hide Puller Machine; Employee Killed When Head Crushed By Conveyor; Employee Killed By Stun Gun; Caught And Killed By GutCooker Machine.

The most dangerous plants are the ones where cattle are slaughtered. In the age of the space station and the microchip, the most important slaughterhouse tool is a well-sharpened knife. Thirty years ago, meatpacking was one of the highest paid industrial jobs in the US, with one of the lowest turnover rates. After the second world war, labour unions had gained power in the industry, winning their members good benefits, decent working conditions and a voice in the workplace. Meatpacking jobs were dangerous and unpleasant, but provided enough income for a solid, middle-class life. And then, starting in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to revolutionise the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a new division of labour that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its methods - or go out of business.

Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as much as 50%. Today, meatpacking is one of the nation's lowest paid industrial jobs, with one of the highest turnover rates. The typical plant now hires an entirely new workforce every year or so. Staff shortages have become an industry-wide problem, making the work even more dangerous.

In a relatively brief period of time, the meatpacking industry also became highly centralised, giving enormous power to a few large agribusiness firms. Today, the top four - IBP, ConAgra, Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill) and National Beef - control about 85% of the market. While the meatpackers have grown more powerful, the unions have grown much weaker. Only half of IBP's workers belong to a union. Given the industry's high turnover rates, it is a challenge for a union simply to remain in a meatpacking plant, since every year it must gain the allegiance of a whole new set of workers.

In some American slaughterhouses, more than three-quarters of the workers are not native English speakers; many can't read any language, and many are illegal immigrants. A wage of $9.50 (£6.60) an hour seems incredible to men and women who come from rural areas in Mexico where the wages are $7 (£5) a day. These manual labourers, long accustomed to toiling in the fields, are good workers. They're also unlikely to complain or challenge authority, organise unions, fight for their legal rights. From the industry's point of view, they are ideal workers - cheap, largely interchangeable and disposable.

One of the crucial determinants of a slaughterhouse's profitability is also responsible for many of its greatest dangers: the speed of the production line. The typical line speed in an American slaughterhouse 25 years ago was about 175 cattle per hour. Some line speeds now approach 400 cattle per hour. Technological advances are responsible for part of the increase; the powerlessness of meatpacking workers explains the rest. When hundreds of workers stand closely together, down a single line, wielding sharp knives, terrible things can happen when people feel rushed. The most common slaughterhouse injury is a laceration. Workers stab themselves or stab someone nearby. They struggle to keep up with the pace as carcasses swing toward them, hung on hooks from a moving overhead chain. All sorts of accidents - involving power tools, saws, knives, conveyor belts, slippery floors, falling carcasses - become more likely when the chain moves too fast.

The golden rule in meatpacking plants is "The Chain Will Not Stop". Rita Beltran, a former IBP worker, told me: "I've seen bleeders, and they're gushing because they got hit right in the vein, and I mean they're almost passing out, and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops."

Some of the most debilitating injuries in the meatpacking industry are also the least visible. The rate of repetitive-motion injuries is the highest of any American industry - about 33 times the national average. Making the same knife cut 10,000 times a day or lifting the same weight every few seconds can cause injuries to a person's back, shoulders or hands. Aside from a 15-minute rest or two, and a brief lunch, the work is unrelenting. Even the repetition of a seemingly harmless task can lead to pain. "If you lightly tap your finger on a desk a few times, it doesn't hurt," an attorney for injured workers told me. "Now try tapping it for eight hours straight, and see how that feels."

For unskilled, unschooled manual labourers, repetirive motion injuries such as disc problems, tendonitis and "trigger finger" (a syndrome in which a finger becomes stuck in a curled position) can permanently limit the ability to earn a decent income. Much of this damage will never be healed.

Repetitive-motion injuries may take months, or even years, to develop; other slaughterhouse injuries can happen in an instant. Raul Lopez worked as a carpenter in Mexico, making tables, chairs and head boards, before moving to the US in 1995 to do construction work in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 20 at the time, and after laying concrete foundations for two years, he moved to Greeley and got a job at the Monfort Beef plant, where the pay was higher. He trimmed hides, cutting off the legs and heads, lifting them up with mechanical assistance, and placing the hides on a hook: one of the most difficult jobs in the plant. Each hide weighed about 80lb, and he lifted more than 300 of them every hour. He was good at his job and became a "floater", used by his supervisor to fill in for absent workers. Lopez's hands and shoulders were sore at the end of the day, but for two years and two months he suffered no injuries.

At about 7am on November 22, 1999, Lopez was substituting for an absent worker, standing on a 4ft-high platform and pulling hides from a tank of water that was washing blood and dirt off them. The hides were suspended on hooks from a moving chain. The room was cold and foggy, and it was difficult to see clearly. One of Lopez's steel-mesh gloves suddenly got snagged in the chain, and it dragged him down the line towards bloody, filthy water that was 3ft deep. Lopez grabbed the chain with his free hand and screamed for help. Someone ran to another room and took an extraordinary step: he shut down the line. Lopez's left arm, caught in the chain, was partially crushed. He lost more than three pints of blood and almost bled to death. He was rushed to a hospital, endured the first of many operations, and survived. Five months later, Lopez was still in enormous pain and heavily medicated. Nevertheless, he says, a company doctor ordered him back to work.

I visited Lopez on a lovely spring afternoon. His modest apartment is just a quarter of a mile down the road from the slaughterhouse. Lopez now works in the nurse's office at the plant, handling files. Every day he sees how injured workers are treated - given some Tylenol and then sent back to the line - and worries that ConAgra is now planning to get rid of him. His left arm hangs shrivelled and lifeless in a sling. When we spoke, Lopez was asking the company to pay for an experimental operation that might restore some movement to the arm. The most likely alternative was amputation. ConAgra said that it was weighing the various medical options. Lopez is 26 years old and believes his arm will work again. "Every night, I pray for this operation," he says.

The meatpacking companies refuse to comment on the cases of individual employees such as Lopez, and insist they have a sincere interest in the wellbeing of their workers. Health and safety, they claim, are the primary concerns of every supervisor, foreman, nurse, medical claims examiner and company-approved doctor. "It is in our best interest to take care of our workers and ensure that they are protected and able to work every day," says Janet M Riley, a vice-president of the American Meat Institute, the industry's trade association. "We are very concerned about improving worker safety. It is absolutely to our benefit."

The validity of such claims is measured best in Texas, where the big meatpackers have the most freedom to do as they please. About a quarter of the cattle slaughtered every year in the US - roughly nine million animals - are processed in Texas meatpacking plants. One of the state's US senators, Phil Gramm, is the industry's most powerful ally in Congress. His wife, Wendy Lee, sits on the board of IBP. The state courts and the legislature have also been friendly to the industry.

In the early years of the 20th century, public outrage over the misfortune of industrial workers who were hurt on the job prompted legislatures throughout the US to enact workers' compensation laws. "Workers' comp" was intended to be a form of mandatory, no-fault insurance. The meatpacking companies now have a vested interest in keeping workers' comp payments as low as possible. IBP, Excel and ConAgra are all self-insured. Every dime spent on injured workers in such programmes is one less dime in profits. Slaughterhouse supervisors and foremen, whose annual bonuses are usually tied to the injury rate of their workers, often discourage people from reporting injuries or seeking first aid. Getting someone to quit is even more profitable - an injured worker who walks away from the job is no longer eligible for benefits.

In Texas, meatpacking firms don't have to manipulate the workers' comp system; they don't even have to participate in it - a 1989 law allowed private companies to opt out of the system. When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, for example, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. It reads: "I have been injured at work and want to apply for the payments offered by IBP to me under its Workplace Injury Settlement Program. To qualify, I must accept the rules of the Program. I have been given a copy of the Program summary. I accept the Program."

Signing the waiver means forever surrendering your right - and the right of your family and heirs - to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign may receive immediate medical care under IBP's programme. Or they may not. Once they sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the worker's job-related medical treatment - for life. The company has said that the waivers are designed "to more effectively ensure quality medical care for employees injured on the job". Workers who refuse to sign the waiver risk being fired on the spot. In February 1998, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that companies operating outside the state's workers' comp system can fire workers simply because they're injured.

Today, an IBP worker who gets hurt on the job in Texas faces a tough dilemma: sign the waiver, perhaps receive immediate medical attention, and remain beholden, forever, to IBP; or refuse to sign, risk losing your job, receive no help with your medical bills, file a lawsuit, and hope to win a big judgment against the company some day. Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital in order to obtain an injured worker's signature. Karen Olsson, in an investigative piece for the Texas Observer, described the lengths to which Terry Zimmerman, one of IBP's managers, will go to get a signed waiver. When Lonita Leal's right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, Zimmerman talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the IBP plant in Amarillo, Zimmerman persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.

Federal safety laws were intended to protect workers from harm, regardless of the vagaries of state laws such as those in Texas. But OSHA is unlikely to do anything for meatpacking workers in the near future. It has fewer than 1,200 inspectors to examine the safety risks at the nation's roughly seven million workplaces. The maximum OSHA fine for the death of a worker due to an employer's wilful negligence is $70,000 (£49,000) - an amount that hardly strikes fear into the hearts of agribusiness executives whose companies have annual revenues that are measured in the tens of billions. One of President George W Bush's first acts in office was to rescind an OSHA ergonomics standard on repetitive-motion injuries that the agency had been developing for nearly a decade.

Rod Rehm, an attorney who defends many Latino meatpacking workers in Nebraska, believes that two key changes could restore the effectiveness of most workers' comp plans. Allowing every worker to select his or her own physician would liberate medical care from the dictates of the meatpacking companies. And more important, Rehm argues, these companies should not be permitted to insure themselves - if independent underwriters had to insure the meatpackers, the threat of higher insurance premiums would quickly get the attention of the industry and force it to take safety issues seriously.

Until such fundamental changes are made, the same old stories will unfold. Michael Glover is still awaiting payment from IBP, his employer for more than two decades. For 16 of those years, Glover worked as a splitter at the company's Amarillo plant. Every 20 to 30 seconds, a carcass would swing towards him on a chain. He would take "one heavy, heavy power saw" and cut upwards, slicing the animal in half. The job took strength, agility and a good aim. One after another the carcasses came at him, about 1,000lb each, all through the day. On the morning of September 30, 1996, after splitting his first carcass, Glover noticed vibrations in the steel platform beneath him. A maintenance man checked it and found a bolt missing, but told Glover that it was safe to keep working until the bolt was replaced. Moments later, the platform collapsed. Glover dropped about seven feet and shattered his right knee. While workers tried to find help, the chain kept going as two other splitters picked up the slack. Glover was taken in a wheelchair to the nurse's station, where he went into shock in the hallway and fell unconscious. He sat in that hall for almost four hours before being driven to an outpatient clinic. A full seven hours after the accident, Glover was finally admitted to a hospital. His knee was too badly shattered to be repaired; no screws would hold: the bone was broken into too many pieces.

An artificial knee was later inserted. Glover suffered enormous pain and a series of complications: blood clots, ulcers, plebitis. Nevertheless, he says, IBP pressured him to return to work in a wheelchair during the middle of winter. On snowy days, several men had to carry him into the plant. Once it became clear that his injury would never fully heal, Glover thinks IBP decided to get rid of him. But he refused to quit and lose his medical benefits. He was given a series of humiliating jobs. For a month, Glover sat in the men's room at the plant for eight hours a day, making sure no dirty towels or toilet paper remained on the floor.

The day of his accident, Glover had signed the waiver, surrendering any right to sue the company. Instead, he filed for arbitration under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Programme. In November 2000, Glover was fired by IBP. Twelve days later, his arbitration hearing convened. The arbitrator, an Amarillo lawyer named Tad Fowler, was selected by IBP. Glover sought money for his pain and suffering, as well as lifetime payments from the company. He'd always been a hardworking and loyal employee. Now he had no medical insurance. His only income was $250 (£175) a week in unemployment benefits. He'd fallen behind with his rent, and worried that his family would be evicted from their home.

In December, Fowler issued his decision. He granted Glover no lifetime payments, but awarded him $350,000 (£246,000) for pain and suffering. Glover was elated - briefly. Even though its workplace-injury settlement programme clearly states that "the arbitrator's decision is final and binding", IBP has so far refused to pay up. The company claims that, by signing the waiver, Glover forfeited any right to compensation for "physical pain, mental anguish, disfigurement or loss of enjoyment of life". IBP even refused to pay its own arbitrator, Fowler, for his services and informed him that the company will never hire him again for an arbitration.

Glover's case is now in federal court. He is a proud man with a strong philosophical streak. He faces the possibility of another knee replacement or of amputation. "How can this company fire me after 23-and-one-half years of service," he asks, "after an accident due to no fault of my own, and requiring so much radical surgery, months and months of pain and suffering, and nothing to look forward to but more pain and suffering, and refuse to pay me an award accrued through its own programme?"

There is no good answer to his question. The simple answer is that IBP can do it because the laws allow them to do it. Glover is just one of thousands of meatpacking workers who have been mistreated and then discarded. There is nothing random or inscrutable about their misery; it is the logical outcome of the industry's practices. A lack of public awareness, a lack of outrage, have allowed these abuses to continue, one after another, with a machine-like efficiency. This chain must be stopped

A paperback version of Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, including a new afterword, will be published by Penguin in April.

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