Chapter+8

Patrick McHenry Zach Malec Haley Ryan Mrs. Vore AP English Language 29 February 2012 Chapter 7 Cogs in the Great Machine -How much waste do you think these cows produce? The average steer deposits about 50 pounds of urine and manure every day. *The amount of waste from the feedlots produce excrement than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis---combined.* (pg.150) -Before Greeley was a meatpacking town, it was a community of small farmer founded in 1870 by Nathan Meeker -A schoolteacher from Greeley named Warren Monfort, started the idea to feed cows with grains rather than let them eat grass because the meat of the grain-fed beef was fatty and tender, and unlike grass beef it did not need to be aged for a few weeks. -In 1960 Monfort and his son Kenneth opened a small slaughterhouse in Greeley near his already famous feedlots. At this time, they decided to sign a contract with the Amalgamated Butcher Workmenm which guaranteed workers great benefits. Working at the slaughterhouse was one of the most high paid jobs in Greeley. go west This section was really boring to read, so I figured I could explain it better than giving bullet points. -Most people thought that the location for such a huge slaughterhouse industry that was rising in popularity was strange; why Greeley? Most of the popular American cities had a meatpacking district with its own stockyards and slaughterhouses. Most people thought of Chicago as the meatpacking industry capital, because it was; not just for the United States, for for Europe as well since refrigerated sides of beef were shipped there. -The old Chicago slaughterhouses were usually brick buildings that ranged anywhere from four to five stories high. -”Cattle were herded up wooden ramps to the top floor, where they were struck on the head with a sledgehammer, slaughtered, then disassembled by workers. The animals eventually left the building on the ground floor, coming out as sides of beef, cans of beef, or boxes of sausage ready to be loaded into railcars.” (Schlosser 152) -Around this time this is when meatpacking was starting to get popular, and even investigated. Upton Sinclair wrote a book The Jungle which was published in 1960 which described the brutal working conditions that employees had to endure; not to mention the condition of the meat that was being produced. After this book was published Congress came up with mew laws to make the mean consumers eat more safe. -Harold Swift ran a meatpacking industry as well that had the highest wages, and good breaks and vacation times. -In 1960 Currier J. Holman and A.D. Anderson, who were former executives of Swift’s decided to start their own meatpacking company. Their company sold their meat to McDonald’s as it was just becoming popular. *Question for Mrs. Vore* I was confused on what the IBP actually was... -The new IBP plant had one structure with an assembly line that had each worker perform the same task over and over again. This was harmful to the workers because the conditions were not great, and the workers often got hurt. -IBP also put slaughterhouses in rural areas bags of money -During the 1970’s the business relationship between Monfort and the workers at the Greeley slaughterhouses came to an end. -Why? Monfort wanted to reduce the labor costs, but workers thought the wages should not be cut. -However, in 1979, Ken Monfort bought a slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, from Swift and his company. Example of logos: “In November of 1979 workers in Greeley went on strike.” (Schlosser 157) -Then Monfort made a deal with ConAgra, making him the top executive of the company, head of the ConAgra Red Meat division, and his family received about $270 million in ConAgra stock. -By purchasing Monfort, ConAgra became the biggest meatpacker in the world -Today it is the largest foodservice company supplier in North America -”ConAgra is a combination of two Latin words meaning “partnership with the land” the new industrial migrants -Monfort began to employ immigrants, many of which were illegal. This included large numbers of young men and women from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. -Two-thirds of the employs that work at the beef plant in Greeley do not speak English -Most of the workers live in trailer park type of situations. The example in the book was River Park Mobile Court which was described as “battered old trailers a quarter-mile down the road from the slaughterhouse.” (Schlosser 160) -Most of the workers share rooms in old motels, sleeping on mattress that cover the entire floor -”Health insurance is now offered to workers after six months on the job; vacation pay, after a year.” (Schlosser 160) -”Poor workers without health insurance drive up local medical costs.” (Schlosser 162) More evidence of logos, a quote found on page 164 states: “One study has suggested that after the revision of the state’s tax code every new job that ConAgra and IBP created there was backed by a taxpayer subsidy of between $13,000 and $23,000. Thanks to the 1987 legislation, IBP paid no corporate taxes in Nebraska for the next decade.” -This is a very powerful quote because you see how much money this company is making and yet the people that they hired are working under terrible working conditions and are still being underpaid. - The changes in Greeley, Colorado also occur wherever large meat packing plants operate. - Some of the most drastic changes occurred in Lexington, Nebraska - In 1991, one year after IBP opened a slaughterhouse in Lexington, the town had the highest crime rate in the state. - The smell of “burning hair and blood, that greasy smell, and the odor of rotten eggs.” In Lexington is even worse than the smell of Greeley. - The Justice Department sued IBP for violating the Clean Air Act by releasing as much as a ton of hydrogen sulfide (responsible for the rotten egg smell) per day. - In 1988, IBP held a public forum at a junior high school in Lexington. - They assured the people of Lexington that crime would not increase, they would employ a stable workforce, and no noticeable odor would result from the plant. - Example of pathos: “Towns like Garden City, Kansas, Grand Island, Nebraska, and Storm Lake, Iowa now have their own rural ghettos, drugs, poverty, rootlessness, and crime.” (164) Ch. 8 the most dangerous job - Schlosser is visiting one of the nation’s largest slaughterhouses in the High Plains - For the tour he is shown the chainmail used for safety by the workers and given knee high boots since he’ll be “walking through some blood.” (169) - Initially in the “fab,” (fabricating room) the images are not disturbing. - The kill floor, which is hot, humid, and stinks of manure, provides repulsive images of cattle being slaughtered and torn apart. (I’ll save you the gorey details) - Most of the workers perform the same task in the preparation process for eight and a half hours straight in the kill room. (for example one worker gets the job of killing all of the cattle entering the slaughterhouse) - Example of pathos: “As I walk along the fence, a group of cattle approach me, looking me straight in the eye, like dogs hoping for a treat, and follow me out of some mysterious impulse.” (172) sharp knives - Meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States - Ethos: “The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory. Every year more than one-quarter of the meatpacking workers in this country – roughly forty thousand men and women – suffer an injury or a work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond first aid. There is strong evidence that these numbers, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, understate the number of meatpacking injuries that occur.” (172) - Since cattle come in many shapes and sizes, most of the work in a slaughterhouse must still be done by hand. - Workers perform about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift leading to many chronic injuries. - The “IBP revolution” is the cause of most of the hazards the workers face. - The speed of the factory directly relates to the danger. In Chicago’s old slaughterhouses about 50 cattle were slaughtered per hour, in IBP plants up to 400 cattle are slaughtered per hour. - Unionized workers in the past could bargain to slow down the factories’ pace, but today only about one-third of slaughterhouse workers are in a union. - Supervisors encourage workers to not report injuries to their advantage and also exploit female workers by offering secure and easy jobs to them in exchange for sex. the worst - The most dangerous and unpleasant jobs in meatpackng are apart of the late-night cleaning crews. - “their work is so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it” (177) - Around midnight they arrive and everything must be cleaned by morning - To clean they primarily use a combination of water and chlorine at high temperatures from high powered hoses. - The section concludes with a description of cleaning crew accidents. - This provides powerful pathos and concludes “The fine was $480 for each man’s death.” don’t get caught - OSHA had only 1,300 inspectors for 5mil workplaces in when Regan reducred it by 20% - Regan made a law forcing inspectors to look at injury logs before entering companies and if the injuries were below national average, the ispectors had to immeadetly leave - This coluntary compliance policy encourgared employers to keep two injury logs - One companies injury logs had the first one recording 1,800 injuries and the second 160[a] - OSHA fined the company $5.7mil but that was soon reduced to $975,000 - Company nurses also helped in this by falsifying records, understating injuries, and requiring injured workers to show up everyday so they didn’t have to report a “lost work day.” - When a company safety inspector shut down a factory for drastic safety violations and 2 deaths in one week, the inspector was fired and the factory was reopened the value of an arm - Unions in the meatpacking industry struggle to gain support because of the high turnover rate - Many unions’ main goals are to provide adequete health care and medical insurance - To avoid worrying about high injury rate many companies are self insured - Companies only help those people with clear injuries (amputations) and ignore those workers wtih less visible but more severe injuries (trauma) - OSHA finally gained power and began to change under Clinton but was restricted again in ‘94 - This allows industries to be more lax to the point that one company chained all the emergency exits in a building. After a fire broke out in the factory, investigators found piles of bodies at the doors but OSHA still couldn’t inspect the rest of the company kenny - After several interviews, Scholsser realized that every worker is connected by similar struggles - Raoul was trying to remove a piece of meat from a machine when it turned on. After having most of his shoulder sewed together and recieving a torn tendon, he was forced to go back to work - Kenny had a 90lb box dropped on him from an upper story in the factory which threw him backwards into a conveyor belt giving him a massive gash in his back. - The company nurse said he had just pulled a muscle but after a second opinion he found out he had herneated disks and spent a month in the hospital. - When a union tried to form in his factory, Kenny fought against it to procect the company - Kenny was forced to clean a large part of the factory with a chlorine cleaner and had only a dust mask. His lungs were burnt and he recieved blister keeping in the hospital for a month - While on the job, Kenny was hit by a train and after two weeks in the hospital returned to work - Continuing, Kenny recieved many more injuries including a shattered ankle - One day in the factory Kenny felt a sharp pain in his chest. The nurse said he just pulled a muscle and sent him home. That night he was rushed to the hospital for a massive heart attack - While in the hospital, Kenny was fired but noone told him until he tried to pay his company insurance bill and couldn’t because it kept returning to him - Kenny no longer has an immune system, has a permently injured back, and coughs up blood. He is no longer able to work and only recieved $35,000 after a 3 year law suite - He now lives on social security and welfar, has a $600 a month health care payment, and when the book was writen in 2005, had been unemployed for 10 years -At this time Kenny was only 46 years old [b]
 * 1)  Greeley, Colorado
 * 2)  Greeley, Colorado was described as a place that you can smell long before you can even see the place. “The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food.” (Schlosser 149)
 * 3)  Greeley is a modern-day factory where the meat for many fast food restaurants are made.
 * 4)  In a time when the meatpacking industry was one of the nation’s best-paying manufacturing jobs into what is considered a very low paying job. Many of the workers are poor immigrants who have high injury rates, but keep working because it is the only option they have.
 * 5)  The ConAgra Beef Company runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex just a few miles north of Greeley.
 * 6)  To supply the slaughterhouses, ConAgra has feedlots that hold up to one hundred thousand cattle. Before these helpless animals are slaughtered they are fed not with blue grama and buffalo grass on the farm. No. Instead, these poor animals are fed with grains which are designed to fatten the cattle quickly, along with the anabolic steroids in their ear. This occurs three months before the execution date is determined. The grain is dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highways dividers and a typical steer, or cow, will consume more than three thousand pounds of grain just in the feedlot--just to gain four hundred pounds in weigh.
 * 1) the sweet smell