Food Worker Justice: The Human Cost of Industrial Animal Agriculture

What it is

The human workers who populate the industrial food animal system — slaughterhouse workers, meatpacking employees, poultry line workers, hog confinement operators — are among the most economically vulnerable and physically endangered workers in the American economy. Their experience is inseparable from the story of factory farming and is frequently omitted from discussions that focus exclusively on animals or the environment.

History & domestication

Upton Sinclair went to the Chicago stockyards to document the exploitation of immigrant workers; the meat — the contamination that outraged middle-class readers — was incidental to his actual subject. More than a century later, the workforce of industrial animal agriculture remains disproportionately composed of immigrants (many undocumented), refugees, and communities of color, concentrated in rural areas with few alternative employment options, working under conditions that have improved far less than the law requires.

Meatpacking and poultry processing are among the most dangerous occupations in the American workforce, with injury rates that consistently exceed national averages. The physical hazards are specific to the work: repetitive motion injuries from line cutting; lacerations from high-speed knife work; ammonia and hydrogen sulfide exposure in hog confinement buildings; noise-induced hearing loss; musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive tasks on cold, wet lines running at industrial speeds. The line speeds in modern poultry processing facilities — often 140 birds per minute or more — create ergonomic conditions that injury researchers have identified as among the most hazardous in any industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a brutal demonstration of the human vulnerability built into industrial food production. Meatpacking plants were among the earliest and deadliest COVID-19 clusters in the United States. The conditions of the work — close physical proximity on cold, humid production lines, shared transportation to and from facilities, housing in crowded worker dormitories or trailers — were near-optimal conditions for viral transmission. In the spring of 2020, outbreaks at JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, and other major processors killed dozens of workers and infected thousands, while the companies lobbied for exemptions from local public health orders and continued operating. Tyson Foods executives in Waterloo, Iowa, organized a betting pool among themselves on what percentage of workers would test positive — an episode documented in a lawsuit that resulted in settlements. The disproportion was starkly visible: plants where the workforce was predominantly Latino and Somali immigrant workers showed catastrophic spread while management worked remotely.

The Trump administration's invocation of the Defense Production Act in April 2020 to order meatpacking plants to remain open — at the request of the industry — placed the vulnerability of the food supply chain above the safety of the workers who staffed it, in a moment that many food policy analysts saw as a direct expression of the power relations embedded in industrial food production.

Reference notes

Cross-link to: Meatpacking Industry History, Food Worker Rights, Labor and the Food System, COVID-19 and Meat Supply Chains, Environmental Justice and Food Production.

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