Meatpacking and Slaughterhouses

The meat industry has come to be dominated by a handful of huge corporations that slaughter and process most of the country’s meat at large centralized facilities. The volume and speed of production demanded at meatpacking and slaughterhouses often make for dangerous and unsanitary conditions that can lead to worker injury and contaminated product. The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees the industry, but a lack of funding and lax enforcement of existing regulations means that often the industry is left to regulate itself.

What Is Meatpacking?

Meatpacking refers to the process of turning livestock into meat, including slaughter, processing, packaging and distribution. These days, the top meatpacking companies do not just produce meat, they also control how the animals are raised long before slaughter: in the chicken industry, companies oversee the process from chick genetics through supermarket packaging; in the beef industry, cattle come under the control of the big meatpackers four to six months before slaughter.

The ownership of all parts of the supply chain is called vertical integration. It gives integrators – the companies who have integrated all the different parts under one umbrella – control over price and quality; and the economies of scale they have achieved have helped to drive down the consumer prices of meat. Vertical integration has also allowed the meat industry to become highly consolidated, controlled by just a few companies: As of 2019, the four largest companies in each sector controlled 85 percent of beef cattle slaughter, 67 percent of pork packing, and 54 percent of broiler chicken processing.¹² The slaughter and packing plants these few companies run operate on a tremendous scale: in 2022, half of beef cattle slaughtered took place in just 12 U.S. slaughter facilities (of the almost 776). These top 12 plants each process more than one million animals per year on average, which is approximately 2,800 cattle/day, 365 days/year.³

The Complicated History of Meatpacking

The history of the meatpacking industry closely traces the history of corporate power and consolidation in the U.S. Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 exposé, “The Jungle,” revealed the horrific conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking plants at the turn of the last century, laying blame on the consolidated power of the packing companies. The novel helped to catalyze changes in the industry, including the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

In the same period, antitrust laws aimed the stranglehold of big business in all sectors broke up most powerful players of the meat cartel. ⁴ Large-scale unionizing, along with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, improved wages and working conditions at meatpacking plants; by the middle of the twentieth century, meatpacking jobs were considered skilled labor, and workers could expect to rise to the middle class. This period of opportunity didn’t last long, however, as companies began to move the packing facilities out of cities into rural areas, to be closer to the animal stock and to have more control over their workers. Transition to a production line, where workers performed the same task repeatedly, meant unskilled workers could be hired at lower wages. Consolidation began to rise again, such that today meatpacking is one of the most concentrated sectors of the economy; with consolidation, conditions at plants have worsened severely.

Injuries from the cutting equipment, from falls on slippery floors and from exposure to chemicals and pathogens are common. Musculoskeletal disorders — injuries to the nerves, tendons and muscles — are especially prevalent. For example, the incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome in poultry processing is six times higher than the national average.⁹ On a chicken processing line, a worker can repeat the same motion as many as 20,000 times in a day, which can lead to permanent damage in the hands, arms, shoulders or back. In some slaughterhouses, workers are not allowed regular bathroom breaks, which can lead to severe health consequences, as well.

Workers are also poorly protected from infectious diseases like COVID-19, which spread easily in the cool, confined air of meatpacking facilities. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, meatpacking facilities successfully lobbied the government to stay open with minimal changes to their operations. Meatpackers’ refusal to implement effective disease prevention measures — which they argued would stall production and lead to shortages — led to the rapid spread of COVID in at least 581 meatpacking facilities and surrounding communities. Nearly 60,000 meatpacking workers got sick, leading to over 300 deaths.¹⁰

Many workers in slaughterhouses are immigrants and have been threatened with deportation or firing if they speak up about unsafe working conditions, are injured on the job, seek medical treatment outside the company or complain about work-related health issues. ¹¹

Food Safety

In 2021, USDA issued 47 recalls of contaminated meat products, including 12 million pounds that were contaminated by Listeria, Salmonella, Bacillus and various forms of E. coli.¹² Meat and poultry were responsible for 2.1 million illnesses in the U.S. in a ten-year period examined by Centers for Disease Control researchers — 22 percent of all foodborne illness.¹³ In 2014, Wolverine Packing Company recalled approximately 1.8 million pounds of ground beef products after 12 people were infected with an outbreak E. coli strains in four states. That same year, Tyson Foods recalled 33,840 pounds of mechanically separated chicken parts, some of which had infected nine people in a correctional facility in Tennessee with Salmonella. Baseline studies by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found that 26.3 percent of raw chicken parts in the U.S. tested positive for Salmonella and 21.4 percent for Campylobacter, two harmful bacteria.¹⁴

Bacteria can enter the food supply if proper care is not taken in slaughter and processing. Fecal matter from animal intestines or animal hides can spread to tables, tools or to the meat itself. The high speeds of production lines in many processing plants, however, make it difficult for workers to take the necessary care to prevent contamination.

While rates of documented contamination are relatively low given the scale of total annual U.S. meat production (54.9 billion pounds red meat and 52.1 billion pounds chilled and frozen poultry), even one instance of death caused by bacteria in the food supply is too many.¹⁵ Along with production line speeds, the centralization of slaughter and processing facilities is a major culprit in contamination outbreaks. Meat processed in one facility may end up in supermarkets or restaurants all over the country, making it difficult to trace the origin of the outbreak, and even harder to contain.

Federal Meatpacking Plant Regulations

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulates the safety of meat and poultry. Meat sold in the U.S. carries a USDA “Inspected and Passed” seal proving that government inspectors have verified only the effectiveness of the processor’s food safety systems, through the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Program (HACCP), not, however, that they have inspected every piece of meat. ¹⁶

The HACCP system, introduced in 1996, modernized meat inspection and introduced testing for some bacteria that make people sick. It was a major advance; but critics, including internal government oversight agencies, point to significant shortcomings. Audits of the system by the Office of the Inspector General and Government Accountability Office have repeatedly shown that meatpacking plants fail to properly identify potential hazards (including commonly tested pathogens like shiga-toxin producing E. coli and Salmonella) in their HACCP plans, and that FSIS has no procedure in place for approval of plants’ plans; this enables recurring violations of the protocol, with little consequence or corrective action, as well as other problems. ¹⁷ The HACCP system allows many inspection tasks to be carried out by the meat companies themselves, and actually reduces the involvement of USDA inspectors. ¹⁸ Finally, the system does not allow USDA to shut down a meatpacking plant that, through testing, is shown to have high levels of bacterial contamination in its products. ¹⁹ As a result of the landmark case Supreme Beef vs USDA, the agency cannot rely on the results of its testing alone to determine whether a meat processing facility is unsanitary and therefore also cannot on its own shut violators down. ²⁰

HACCP also impacts worker safety. A USDA rule, Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection, finalized in 2014, had initially proposed an increase in production line speed from 140 to 175 birds per minute. The increase was rejected in the final rule, but there has been no subsequent rulemaking by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to further protect meat or poultry workers. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center’s report, OSHA “has no set of mandatory guidelines tailored to protect poultry processing workers. Workers cannot bring a lawsuit to prevent hazardous working conditions or even to respond to an employer’s retaliation, if they complain about safety hazards or other abusive working conditions.”