Killing for a Living: How the Meat Industry Exploits Workers

Killing animals is inherently dangerous work, but the fast line speeds, dirty killing floors, and lack of training make animal-processing plants some of the most dangerous places to work in America today. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly one in three slaughterhouse workers suffers from illness or injury every year, compared to one in 10 workers in other manufacturing jobs.¹ The rate of repetitive stress injury for slaughterhouse employees is 35 times higher than it is for those with other manufacturing jobs.²

The industry has refused to do what would be necessary to create safe working conditions for its employees, such as slowing down the lines or buying appropriate safety gear, because these changes could cut into companies’ bottom lines. In its 175-page exposé on worker exploitation by the farmed-animal industry titled “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch explains, “These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.”³

Employees who are injured at work—and most will be—are often fired if they take time off or try to file a health insurance or workers’ compensation claim. Human Rights Watch cites one slaughterhouse worker who reports: “They love you if you’re healthy and you work like a dog, but if you get hurt, you are trash. If you get hurt, watch out. They will look for a way to get rid of you before they report it. They will find a reason to fire you or put you on a worse job like the cold room, or change your shift so you quit. So a lot of people don’t report their injuries. They just work with the pain.”⁴ Another worker in a factory farm agrees, confessing: “I worry every day that I will break my hand or get hurt, but I never say anything for fear I’ll lose my job. No American would do this job. This is a shit job, for shit money.”⁵

The farmed-animal industry often lures immigrants far away from their homes with false promises of good jobs—one meat company even bussed workers from the Mexican border to a homeless shelter in Minnesota!⁶ In some slaughterhouses, two-thirds of the workers are immigrants who cannot speak English, and according to the former safety director for ConAgra, “[I]n some plants, maybe a third of the people cannot read or write in any language.”⁷ Factory farms and slaughterhouses set up shop in the poorest regions of the United States because they know that they can use poor and uneducated people in these areas to do their dirty work for low wages. The farmed-animal industry has also been condemned for exploiting children—kids in their early teens have even died while working in animal-processing plants, and Multinational Monitor magazine called Tyson Foods one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations” because it hires people in the U.S. who are too young to work legally.⁸

In addition to exploiting poor people, immigrants, and children and doing little to protect workers from workplace hazards, the farmed-animal industry has also been charged with union busting. When workers try to unionize, the industry uses illegal intimidation and harassment tactics to ensure that pro-union employees are silenced. According to Human Rights Watch, “Many workers who try to form trade unions and bargain collectively are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized for their exercise of the right to freedom of association.”⁹

One factory farm worker sums up his job this way: “We’re disposable to them. We’re like a machine. I don’t think they see us as real people. I need this job. I feed my family with this job, but it’s not right.”¹⁰ Read more about how the farmed-animal industry hurts workers.