Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In an interview with author Donald Stull,
“Peggy,” who worked on the “presenting and
trimming” line at a chicken slaughter plant,
said: “There is no bathroom break. You do not
leave that line. They will relieve you to go to
the bathroom, but you get in trouble for it. They
say you don't, but you do . . . because you do
those chickens or USDA shuts the line down.” 26
ployers often withhold compensation by denying that the injury
was indeed work-related.
The Congressional Research Service reports that line speeds
have been a consistent complaint among slaughterhouse workers
for over a century. At the world's largest pig processing plant, owned
by Smithfield Foods, approximately 5,000 workers a day labor “on
a maze of assembly lines that herd, pull, split, slice, de-bone, de-
fat and otherwise dismember hogs at a rate of up to 32,000 a day,
2,000 an hour, 33 a minute, or one hog every two seconds.”
Direct contact with animals who are still alive is one aspect of
animal slaughter that threatens worker safety: those who “are still
dying when they are hung on the line . . . may struggle and thrash
about wildly.” In poultry slaughterhouses, workers face the addi-
tional hazard of birds who begin their journey down the slaughter
line by being shackled upside down while still conscious, a process
referred to as “live hang.”
Birds comprise the majority of animals slaughtered in the United
States, amounting to more than nine billion birds annually. Ironi-
cally, the protections of the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter
Act are not extended to these animals. As a result, poultry slaugh-
terhouses are not required to render them unconscious before
they are hung upside-down in shackles.
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