THEY'RE CUTTING MEAT, NOT DIAMONDS:

A Jungle For Meatpackers (Eric Schlosser, September 5, 2006, The Nation)

While visiting Chicago slaughterhouses for research in 1904, Upton Sinclair met Eastern European immigrants employed at dangerous, dirty, low-wage jobs. Union organizers and injured workers were being harassed and fired. The publication of The Jungle two years later caused a public uproar--about the widespread contamination of meat, not the mistreatment of meatpacking workers. The book helped President Theodore Roosevelt gain passage of two important pieces of legislation, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

But it didn't accomplish much for meatpacking workers. Conditions gradually improved in the nation's slaughterhouses, thanks to years of labor organizing. The industry fought hard against unions, pitting one Eastern European immigrant group against another and recruiting African-Americans as strikebreakers. By the 1930s, however, most of the industry was unionized. And by the 1950s meatpacking workers had one of the highest-paid manufacturing jobs in the United States. It wasn't always a pleasant job, but it provided a solid, middle-class income.

In 1970 the typical American meatpacking worker earned about 20 percent more than the typical factory worker. Today he or she earns about 20 percent less. Enormous changes have swept through the industry over the past thirty years, as big companies swallowed up small ones, moved slaughterhouses from urban areas (where unions were strong) to rural areas (where unions were weak), imported poor immigrants from Mexico and ruthlessly cut wages by as much as 50 percent. Today meatpacking workers have one of the lowest-paid manufacturing jobs in the United States--and one of the most dangerous.

Because of which, even illegal immigrants can afford 2000+ calories a day.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2006 8:21 AM