Today an IBP worker who gets hurt on the job in Texas faces a cruel dilemma: sign the waiver, perhaps receive medical attention, and remain beholden, forever, to IBP. Or refuse to sign, risk losing your job, receive no help with your medical bills, file a lawsuit, and hope to win a big judgement against the company years from now. Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker’s signature. When Lonita Leal’s right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand, as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.
The recent purchase of IBP by Tyson Foods has created the world’s biggest and most powerful meatpacking firm, with the largest market share in beef and poultry, the second-largest in pork. The Tyson/IBP merger fulfills every independent rancher’s worst nightmare about being reduced to the status of a poultry grower — and portend even faster line speeds at meatpacking plants. In order to complete the purchase, Tyson Foods had to assume $1.7 billion in debt. As a result, the new meatpacking colossus will likely be under great pressure to ship as much meat as possible out the door.
Over the past year, the McDonald’s Corporation has proven, beyond any doubt, that it can force its meatpacking suppliers to make fundamental changes quickly. If McDonald’s insisted that the large meatpackers improve working conditions and reduce injury levels, these companies would do so. The cost of slowing down their production lines would be insignificant compared to the cost of losing their biggest customer. If McDonald’s can send auditors into slaughterhouses to monitor the ethical treatment of cattle, it can certainly do the same for poor immigrant workers. As to the company’s ability to influence this sort of behavior, I agree wholeheartedly with the American Meat Institute: “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect.” Unlike compliance with the FDA’s feed rules, which required an elaborate new system of paperwork and affidavits, it wouldn’t take weeks to make America’s slaughterhouses safer. If McDonald’s were to demand that the line speeds be slowed down, preventing untold misery and harm, it could be accomplished in an instant.
dog eat dog
AS OF THIS WRITING, about a hundred people have died from vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Although every one of those deaths was tragic and unnecessary, they must be viewed in a larger perspective. Roughly the same number of people die every day in the United States from automobile accidents — and yet we do not live in fear of cars. At the moment there is no cure for vCJD, and it is impossible to predict how many people will get the disease by eating tainted meat. A great deal of scientific uncertainty still surrounds various attributes of the pathogen, such as the degree of infectivity among humans and the size of an infectious dose. About 800,000 cattle with mad cow disease were unwittingly eaten by people in Great Britain. One crucial determinant of the eventual death toll is the average incubation period for vCJD. That statistic is currently unknown. If it takes about ten years for most infected people to develop the disease, then we are now in the middle of the epidemic, and perhaps a thousand or so will die. If the average incubation period is twenty, thirty, or forty years — as the latest science suggests — then the epidemic is just beginning, and hundreds of thousands may die. Time will tell.
Regardless of whether mad cow causes a small outbreak among humans or a deadly modern plague, it will haunt the beef industry for years, much as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl changed attitudes toward nuclear power. The spread of BSE in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures and led to some absurdities. The British decision to keep some of the most infective cattle parts (brains, spleens, spinal materials, thymus glands, and intestines) out of the human food supply was prompted not by health or agricultural officials, but by a leading manufacturer of pet foods. Worried by mounting evidence that mad cow disease might have the ability to cross species barriers, Pedigree Master Foods decided to keep cattle offal out of its products and told the Ministry of Agriculture that it was a good idea to do the same with food intended for human consumption. Meanwhile, British children were being served some of the nation’s cheapest meats — hamburgers, sausages, and mince pies full of potentially contaminated offal — because the 1980 Education Act had eliminated government subsidies for nutritious school meals.
A great many British pets were eating safer food than the British people, until November of 1989, when the government banned the sale of cattle offal and its use in the manufacture of ground beef. Seven months later, the worst fears of Pedigree Master Foods were confirmed; a Siamese cat named Max died in Bristol from a feline variant of BSE, after eating contaminated cat food. The death of “Mad Max,” as the tabloids dubbed him, proved that mad cow could indeed cross the species barrier. Nevertheless, the British government denied for six more years that the disease posed any risk to human beings.
Governments throughout Europe ignored the interests of consumers while protecting those of agribusiness. A recent report by the French senate found that from 1988 to 2000 the agriculture ministry in that country minimized the danger of mad cow and “constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures.” Health officials were repeatedly ignored in order to block decisions that “might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry.” Great Britain banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants in 1988, but continued to export animal feed potentially contaminated with BSE for another eight years — shipping about 150 million pounds of the stuff to dozens of countries and thereby turning a local outbreak of mad cow into one with worldwide ramifications. Other countries in the European Union imported the cheap British feed and then exported it to North Africa and the Middle East.