a labor office in Mexico City: See Laurie Cohen, “Free Ride: With Help from INS, U.S. Meatpacker Taps Mexican Work Force,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1998.
one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in Iowa: Cited in “Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties with Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,” GAO Reports, p. 15.
Spokesmen for IBP and the ConAgra Beef Company: Fox interview; interview with Gary Mickelson, IBP Public Affairs Department.
“If they’ve got a pulse”: Quoted in Rick Ruggles, “INS: Undocumented Workers Face New Meat-Plant Tactics,” Omaha World-Herald, September 11, 1998.
In September of 1994, GFI America: See Joe Rigert and Richard Meryhew, “Food Company Takes Hired Workers to Homeless Shelter,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 14, 1994; Tony Kennedy, “International Dairy Queen to Review Its Relationship with Meat Supplier GFI,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, September 15, 1994; and “GFI’s Frugal Ways Led to Problems for Some Workers,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, December 9, 1994.
163 “Our job is not to provide”: Quoted in Rigert and Meryhew, “Food Company Takes Hired Workers.”
Mike Harper personally stood to gain: Cited in “Capital Gains Exclusion Would Benefit Key Backers,” UPI, April 19, 1987.
164 called Harper’s demands “blackmail”: See Limprecht, ConAgra Who?, p. 269.
“Some Friday night, we turn out the lights”: Quoted in Dennis Farney, “Nebraska, Hungry of Jobs, Grants Big Business Big Tax Breaks Despite Charges of ‘Blackmail,’” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1987.
164 after the revision of the state’s tax code: See Henry J. Cordes, “Did It Prime the Pump? Report Questions Economic Incentives,” Omaha World-Herald, December 28, 1997. Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University, thinks the estimate of $13,000 to $23,000 is fair. Interview with Ernie Goss.
like giving his employees a 7 percent raise… “The move shows you how ungrateful”: Quoted in John Taylor, “IBP’s Move Prompts Look at Tax Policy,” Omaha World-Herald, June 13, 1996.
a $300,000 loan: See Kenneth B. Noble, “Signs of Violence in Meat Plant’s Lockout,” New York Times, January 18, 1987.
165 the highest crime rate in the state of Nebraska: See Robert A. Hackenberg, David Griffith, Donald Stull, and Lourdes Gouveia, “Creating a Disposable Labor Force,” Aspen Institute Quarterly 5, no. 2 (Spring 1993), p. 92.
the number of serious crimes doubled: Cited in “Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties with Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,” GAO Report, p. 39.
the number of Medicaid cases nearly doubled: Ibid., p. 36.
a major distribution center for illegal drugs; gang members appeared in town: See Richard A. Serrano, “Mexican Drug Cartels Target U.S. Heartland: Officials Say Illegal Immigrants are Using Interstates as Pipeline to Bring Cocaine, Methamphetamines to Midwest and Rocky Mountain Areas Where Abuse Is Burgeoning,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1997; Jennifer Dukes Lee, “Meatpacking Towns Seen As Key Funnel for Meth,” Des Moines Register, March 7, 1999.
the majority of Lexington’s white inhabitants… the proportion of Latino inhabitants: Lexington is the principal city in Dawson County, and in 1990, 4.7 percent of the county’s population was Latino, according to census figures. A recount in 1993 found the Latino population to be almost 30 percent and expected to reach 50 percent within three years. Cited in Lourdes Gouveia, “From the Beet Fields to the Kill Floors: Latinos in Nebraska’s Meatpacking Communities,” unpublished manuscript.
“Mexington”: For some of the positive effects of the new immigration wave, see Edwin Garcia and Ben Stocking, “Latinos on the Move to a New Promised Land,” San Jose Mercury News, August 16, 1998.
“We have three odors”: Quoted in Melody M. Loughry, “Issues Now,” North Platte Resident, January 15, 1996.
the Justice Department sued IBP: See Elliot Blair Smith, “Stench Chokes Meatpacking Towns,” USA Today, February 14, 2000; “U.S. Sues Meatpacking Giant for Violating Numerous Environmental Laws in Midwest,” press release, Environmental Protection Agency, January 12, 2000.
“This agreement means”: Quoted in “Meatpacker Must Cut Hydrogen Sulfide Emissions at Nebraska Plant,” press release, Environmental Protection Agency, May 24, 2000.
166 The transcript of this meeting: “Presenting IBP, Inc., to Lexington, Nebraska: A Public Forum Conducted by the Dawson County Council for Economic Development, July 7, 1988, at the Junior High School Auditorium,” transcription by the staff of the Lauby Law Office, Lexington, Nebraska.
8. The Most Dangerous Job
This chapter is based largely on interviews that I conducted with dozens of Latino meatpacking workers in Colorado and Nebraska. I also interviewed a former slaughterhouse safety director, a former slaughterhouse nurse, former plant supervisors, and a physician whose medical practice was for years devoted to the treatment of slaughterhouse workers. All of these managerial personnel had left the meatpacking industry by choice; none had been fired; and their reluctance to use their real names in this book stems from the widespread fear of the meatpackers in rural communities where they operate. I am grateful to those who spoke with me and showed me around.
Deborah E. Berkowitz, the former director of health and safety at the UFCW, was an invaluable source of information about the workings of a modern slaughterhouse and the dangers that workers face there. Her article on meatpacking and meat processing in The Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization, 1998), cowritten with Michael J. Fagel, is a good introduction to the subject. Curt Brandt, the president of UFCW Local 22 in Fremont, Nebraska, described the various tactics he’s seen meatpacking firms use over the years to avoid compensating injured workers. Two Colorado attorneys, Joseph Goldhammer and Dennis E. Valentine, helped me understand the intricacies of their state’s workers’ comp law and described their work on behalf of injured Monfort employees. Rod Rehm, an attorney based in Lincoln, Nebraska, spent many hours depicting the conditions in his state and arranged for me to meet some of his clients. Rehm is an outspoken advocate for poor Latinos in a state where they have few political allies. Bruce L. Braley, one of the attorneys in Ferrell v. IBP, told me a great deal about the company’s behavior and sent me stacks of documents pertaining to the case. “Killing Them Softly: Work in Meatpacking Plants and What It Does to Workers,” by Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, in Any Way You Cut It, is one of the best published accounts of America’s most dangerous job. “Here’s the Beef: Underreporting of Injuries, OSHA’s Policy of Exempting Companies from Programmed Inspections Based on Injury Record, and Unsafe Conditions in the Meatpacking Industry,” Forty-Second Report by the Committee on Government Operations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), shows the extraordinary abuses that can occur when an industry is allowed to regulate itself. After the congressional investigation, Christopher Drew wrote a terrific series of articles on meatpacking, published by the Chicago Tribune in October of 1988. The fact that working conditions have changed little since then is remarkably depressing. Gail A. Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997), suggests that many cattle are needlessly brutalized prior to slaughter. Nothing that these sources reveal would come as a surprise to readers of Upton Sinclair.