Industrial production of food and by-products from animals
The William Davies Company facilities in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, circa 1920. This facility was then the third largest hog-packing plant in North America.
In the United States and some other countries, the facility where the meat packing is done is called a slaughterhouse, packinghouse or a meat-packing plant; in New Zealand, where most of the products are exported, it is called a freezing works.[1] An abattoir is a place where animals are slaughtered for food.
Pork packing in Cincinnati, 1873
The meat-packing industry grew with the construction of railroads and methods of refrigeration for meat preservation. Railroads made possible the transport of stock to central points for processing, and the transport of products.
History
United States
Postcard of pork dressing in Texas, undated
Before the Civil War, the meat industry was localized, with nearby farmers providing beef and hogs for local butchers to serve the local market. Large Army contracts during the war attracted entrepreneurs with a vision for building much larger markets.[2] The 1865–1873 era provided five factors that nationalized the industry:
The rapid growth of cities provided a lucrative new market for fresh meat.
The emergence of large-scale ranching, the role of the railroads, refrigeration, and entrepreneurial skills.
Cattle ranching on a large-scale moved to the Great Plains, from Texas northward.
Overland cattle drives moved large herds to the railheads in Kansas, where cattle cars brought live animals eastward.
Abilene, Kansas, became the chief railhead, shipping 35,000 cattle a year, mostly to Kansas City, Milwaukee and Chicago.
In Milwaukee, Philip Armour, an ambitious entrepreneur from New York who made his fortune in Army contracts during the war, partnered with Jacob Plankinton to build a highly efficient stockyard that serviced the upper Midwest. Chicago built the famous Union Stockyards in 1865 on 345 swampy acres to the south of downtown. Armour opened the Chicago plant, as did Nelson Morris, another wartime contractor. Cincinnati and Buffalo, both with good water and rail service, also opened stockyards. Perhaps the most energetic entrepreneur was Gustavus Franklin Swift, the Yankee who operated out of Boston and moved to Chicago in 1875, specializing in long distance refrigerated meat shipments to eastern cities.[2]
A practical refrigerated (ice-cooled) rail car was introduced in 1881. This made it possible to ship cattle and hog carcasses, which weighed only 40% as much as live animals; the entire national market, served by the railroads, was opened up, as well as transatlantic markets using refrigerated ships. Swift developed an integrated network of cattle procurement, slaughtering, meat-packing, and shipping meat to market. Up to that time, cattle were driven great distances to railroad shipping points, causing the cattle to lose considerable weight. Swift developed a large business, which grew in size with the entry of several competitors.[3] The Bureau of Corporations, predecessor of the Federal Trade Commission investigated the country's meatpackers for anti-competitive practices in the first decade of the 1900s.[4]
Because of the Chicago packers, ranchers in Wyoming and feedlot farmers in Iowa regularly found a reliable market for their animals, and on average received better prices for the animals they sold there. At the same time and for the same reason, Americans of all classes found a greater variety of more and better meats on their tables, purchased on average at lower prices than ever before. Seen in this light, the Packers' "rigid system of economy" seemed a very good thing indeed.[6]
In the early part of the 20th century, they used the most recent immigrants and migrants as strikebreakers in labor actions taken by other workers, also usually immigrants or early descendants. The publication of the Upton Sinclair novel The Jungle in the U.S. in 1906, shocked the public with the poor working conditions and unsanitary practices in meat-packing plants in the United States fictionally displayed, specifically Chicago.
Meat-packing plants, like many industries in the early 20th century, were known to overwork their employees, failed to maintain adequate safety measures, and actively fought unionization. Public pressure to U.S. Congress led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, both passed in 1906 on the same day to ensure better regulations of the meat-packing industry. Before the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, workers were exposed to dangerous chemicals, sharp machinery, and horrible injuries.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, workers achieved unionization under the CIO's United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). An interracial committee led the organizing in Chicago, where the majority of workers in the industry were black, and other major cities, such as Omaha, Nebraska, where they were an important minority in the industry. UPWA workers made important gains in wages, hours and benefits. In 1957, the stockyards and meat-packing plants employed half the workers of Omaha. The union supported a progressive agenda, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. While the work was still difficult, for a few decades workers achieved blue-collar, middle-class lives from it.
Though the meat-packing industry has made many improvements since the early 1900s, extensive changes in the industry since the late 20th century have caused new labor issues to arise. Today, the rate of injury in the meat-packing industry is three times that of the private industry overall, and meat-packing was noted by Human Rights Watch as being "the most dangerous factory job in America". The meatpacking industry continues to employ many immigrant laborers, including some who are undocumented workers. In the early 20th century the workers were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and black migrants from the South. Today many are Hispanic, from Mexico, Central and South America. Many are from Peru, leading to the formation of a large Peruvian community. The more isolated areas in which the plants are located put workers at greater risk due to their limited ability to organize and seek redress for work-related injuries.[7][8][9]
Mid-century restructuring by the industry of the stockyards, slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants led to relocating facilities closer to cattle feedlots and swine production facilities, to more rural areas, as transportation shifted from rail to truck. It has been difficult for labor to organize in such locations. In addition, the number of jobs fell sharply due to technology and other changes. Wages fell during the latter part of the 20th century, and eventually, both Chicago (in 1971) and Omaha (in 1999) closed their stockyards. The workforce increasingly relied on recent migrants from Mexico. [10]
Argentina
Argentina had the natural resources and human talent to build a world-class meat-packing industry. However, its success in reaching European markets was limited by the poor quality control in the production of its meat and the general inferiority of frozen meat to the chilled meat exported by the United States and Australia. By 1900, the Argentine government encouraged investment in the industry to improve quality. The British dominated the world shipping industry and began fitting their ships for cold air containers, and built new refrigerated steamers. When the Argentine industry finally secured a large slice of the British market, Pateros and trade restrictions limited its penetration of the Continent.[11]
China
Meat in China moved from a minor specialty commodity to a major factor in the food supply in the late 20th century thanks to the rapid emergence of a middle class with upscale tastes and plenty of money. It was a transition from a country able to provide a small ration of meat for urban citizens only to the world's largest meat producer; it was a movement from a handful of processing facilities in major cities to thousands of modern meat-packing and processing plants throughout the country, alongside the rapid growth of a middle-class with spending money.[12]
American slaughterhouse workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker.[13]NPR reports that pig and cattle slaughterhouse workers are nearly seven times more likely to suffer repetitive strain injuries than average.[14]The Guardian reports that on average there are two amputations a week involving slaughterhouse workers in the United States.[15] On average, one employee of Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in America, is injured and amputates a finger or limb per month.[16] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that over a period of six years in the UK, 78 slaughter workers lost fingers, parts of fingers or limbs, more than 800 workers had serious injuries, and at least 4,500 had to take more than three days off after accidents.[17] In a 2018 study in the Italian Journal of Food Safety, slaughterhouse workers are instructed to wear ear protectors to protect their hearing from the constant screams of animals being killed.[18] A 2004 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that "excess risks were observed for mortality from all causes, all cancers, and lung cancer" in workers employed in the New Zealand meat processing industry.[19]
The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time—that lets [sic] you kill things but doesn't let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that's walking around in the blood pit with you and think, 'God, that really isn't a bad-looking animal.' You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them—beat them to death with a pipe. I can't care.
The act of slaughtering animals or of raising or transporting animals for slaughter may engender psychological stress or trauma in the people involved.[21][22][23][24] A 2016 study in Organization indicates, "Regression analyses of data from 10,605 Danish workers across 44 occupations suggest that slaughterhouse workers consistently experience lower physical and psychological well-being along with increased incidences of negative coping behavior".[25] A 2009 study by criminologist Amy Fitzgerald indicates, "slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries".[26] As authors from the PTSD Journal explain, "These employees are hired to kill animals, such as pigs and cows that are largely gentle creatures. Carrying out this action requires workers to disconnect from what they are doing and from the creature standing before them. This emotional dissonance can lead to consequences such as domestic violence, social withdrawal, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and PTSD".[27]
Slaughterhouses in the United States commonly illegally employ and exploit underage workers and illegal immigrants.[28][29] In 2010, Human Rights Watch described slaughterhouse line work in the United States as a human rights crime.[30] In a report by Oxfam America, slaughterhouse workers were observed not being allowed breaks, were often required to wear diapers, and were paid below minimum wage.[31]
Another problem in this context is that the pharmaceutical industry obtains basic materials for its products from the meat-packing industry; for example, tissue extracts from slaughterhouse waste. In the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, this led to the paradoxical situation that mass slaughterhouses were infection drivers due to the bad labor conditions and at the same time suppliers of important therapeutics such as heparin, which subsequently became a scarce commodity.[32] Medical historian Benjamin Prinz has therefore pointed to the fragility of today's healthcare systems, which themselves participate in environmentally destructive and disease-causing production chains.[33]
Contemporary concerns about the meat industry within the American context have often been colored by the COVID-19 Pandemic and the resulting supply chain issues. Beyond the consumer perspective, workers were expected to drastically increase the rate at which they process animals. For instance, workers were expected to process 175 birds per minute up from 140 birds per minute.[34] In part this was due to shortages of workers. Workers within the industry were often in the news for large outbreaks within factories.[35] By its nature meat processing requires close proximity to other workers and exposure to a slew of bacteria and viruses. Additionally, workers often have to yell over loud machinery which increases the amount of contaminated droplets in the air.[36] More than 50,000 meat packing workers contracted the disease and over 200 died.[36] Disease is not evenly distributed throughout factories and all workers in a given factory are not at equal risk for exposure and negative health outcomes despite working the same job. In particular, the overlap of immigration status and workplace exposures can result in a variety of negative health outcomes.[37]
↑ Robert Greenhill, "Shipping and the Refrigerated Meat Trade from the River Plate, 1900–1930." International Journal of Maritime History 4.1 (1992): 65-82.
↑ Guanghong Zhou, Wangang Zhang, and Xinglian Xu. "China's meat industry revolution: Challenges and opportunities for the future." Meat science 92.3 (2012): 188-196.
↑ "Meatpacking". Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
↑ Eisnitz, Gail A. (1997). Slaughterhouse:: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry. Prometheus Books.
↑ Baran, B. E.; Rogelberg, S. G.; Clausen, T (2016). "Routinized killing of animals: Going beyond dirty work and prestige to understand the well-being of slaughterhouse workers". Organization. 23 (3): 351–369. doi:10.1177/1350508416629456. S2CID148368906.
Gordon, Steve C. "From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler: Cincinnati's Meat Packing Industry, Changing Technologies, and the Rise of Mass Production, 1825-1870." IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology (1990): 55-67.
Gras, N.S.B. and Henrietta M. Larson. Casebook in American business history (1939) pp 623–43 on Armour company.
Hill, Howard Copeland. "The development of Chicago as a center of the meat packing industry." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 10.3 (1923): 253-273. in JSTOR
Horowitz, Roger. Putting meat on the American table: Taste, technology, transformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006).
Horowitz, Roger. Negro and White, Unite and Fight!: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 (U of Illinois Press, 1997).
Kujovich, M. Yeager. "The Refrigerator Car and the Growth of the American Dressed Beef Industry," Business History Review 44 (1970) 460-482.
Skaggs, Jimmy M. Prime Cut: Livestock raising and meatpacking in the United States, 1607-1983 (Texas A & M UP, 1986).
Wade, Louise Carroll. Chicago's Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (U of Illinois Press, 1987).
Walsh, Margaret. The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry (1983), strong on pork'
Walsh, Margaret. "Pork packing as a leading edge of Midwestern industry, 1835-1875." Agricultural History 51.4 (1977): 702-717. in JSTOR
Walsh, Margaret. "The spatial evolution of the mid-western pork industry, 1835-1875" Journal of Historical Geography 4#1 (1978) 1-22.
Warren, Wilson J. Tied to the great packing machine: The Midwest and meatpacking (U of Iowa Press, 2007).
Barnes, Felicity, and David M. Higgins. "Brand image, cultural association, and marketing: 'New Zealand' butter and lamb exports to Britain, c. 1920–1938." Business History (2017): 1-28.
Lopes, Maria-Aparecida. "Struggles over an 'Old, Nasty, and Inconvenient Monopoly': Municipal Slaughterhouses and the Meat Industry in Rio de Janeiro, 1880–1920s." Journal of Latin American Studies 47.2 (2015): 349-376.
MacLachlan, Ian. Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain (U of Toronto Press, 2001).
Nützenadel, Alexander. "A Green International? Food Markets and Transnational Politics, c. 1850-1914." Food and globalization: consumption, markets, and politics in the modern world (Berg, 2008) pp: 153-73.
Perren, Richard. Taste, trade, and technology: the development of the international meat industry since 1840 (Ashgate, 2006).
Silver, Jim (2008-07-24). "The Origins of Winnipeg's Packinghouse Industry: Transitions from Trade to Manufacture". Prairie Forum. 19: 15–30. hdl:10294/262. ISSN0317-6282.
Woods, Rebecca JH. "From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible Building an Empire of Sheep in New Zealand, ca. 1880-1900." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35.1 (2015): 117-136.
Yeager, Mary. Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (1981)
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Meat industry.
In livestock agriculture and the meat industry, a slaughterhouse, also called an abattoir, is a facility where livestock animals are slaughtered to provide food. Slaughterhouses supply meat, which then becomes the responsibility of a meat-packing facility.
Gustavus Franklin Swift, Sr. was an American business executive. He founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car, which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and abroad, ushering in the "era of cheap beef." Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products.
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world", the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The yards became inspiration for literature and social reform.
Armour & Company was an American company and was one of the five leading firms in the meat packing industry. It was founded in Chicago, in 1863, by the Armour brothers led by Philip Danforth Armour. By 1880, the company had become Chicago's most important business and had helped make Chicago and its Union Stock Yards the center of America's meatpacking industry. During the same period, its facility in Omaha, Nebraska, boomed, making the city's meatpacking industry the largest in the nation by 1959. In connection with its meatpacking operations, the company also ventured into pharmaceuticals and soap manufacturing, introducing Dial soap in 1948.
The meat industry are the people and companies engaged in modern industrialized livestock agriculture for the production, packing, preservation and marketing of meat. In economics, the meat industry is a fusion of primary (agriculture) and secondary (industry) activity and hard to characterize strictly in terms of either one alone. The greater part of the meat industry is the meat packing industry – the segment that handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of animals such as poultry, cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock.
JBS USA Holdings, Inc. is a meat processing company and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brazilian multinational JBS S.A. The subsidiary was created when JBS entered the U.S. market in 2007 with its purchase of Swift & Company.
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), later the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, was a labor union that represented workers in the meatpacking industry.
Tyson Fresh Meats, Inc., formerly IBP, Inc. and Iowa Beef Processors, Inc., is an American meat packing company based in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota, United States. IBP was the United States' biggest beef packer and its number two pork processor.
The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 regulates meatpacking, livestock dealers, market agencies, live poultry dealers, and swine contractors to prohibit unfair or deceptive practices, giving undue preferences, apportioning supply, manipulating prices, or creating a monopoly. It was enacted following the release in 1919 of the Report of the Federal Trade Commission on the meatpacking industry.
Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a Chinese-owned American pork producer and food-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia. It operates as an independent subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate WH Group. Founded in 1936 as the Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph W. Luter and his son, the company is the largest pig and pork producer in the world. In addition to owning over 500 farms in the US, Smithfield contracts with another 2,000 independent farms around the country to raise Smithfield's pigs. Outside the US, the company has facilities in Mexico, Poland, Romania, Germany, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. Globally the company employed 50,200 in 2016 and reported an annual revenue of $14 billion. Its 973,000-square-foot meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, was said in 2000 to be the world's largest, slaughtering 32,000 pigs a day.
The Union Stockyards of Omaha, Nebraska, were founded in 1883 in South Omaha by the Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha. A fierce rival of Chicago's Union Stock Yards, the Omaha Union Stockyards were third in the United States for production by 1890. In 1947 they were second to Chicago in the world. Omaha overtook Chicago as the nation's largest livestock market and meat packing industry center in 1955, a title which it held onto until 1971. The 116-year-old institution closed in 1999. The Livestock Exchange Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
Cargill Meat Solutions is a subsidiary of the Minneapolis-based multinational agribusiness giant Cargill Inc, that comprises Cargill's North American beef, turkey, food service and food distribution businesses. Cargill Meat Solutions' corporate office is located in Wichita, Kansas, United States. Jody Horner is the division's president.
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing enterprise in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken, salmon, pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás.
National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stockyards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.
National Beef is a beef processor headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, that produces fresh, chilled and further processed beef and beef by-products for customers worldwide. The company is owned by the Brazilian multinational Marfrig. Its main focuses include branded box beef, consumer ready beef, portion control beef and wet blue leather. The company is considered one of the modern "big four" beef packers in the United States.
Labor rights in the American meatpacking industry are largely regulated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which regulates union organization. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulates the safety and health conditions applicable to workers in the American meat packing industry. According to scholars of the American meat packing industry, despite federal regulation through OSHA and industry oversight, workers in meat production plants have little agency and inadequate protections. Workers in the industry perform difficult jobs in dangerous conditions, and are at significant risk for physical and psychological harm. In addition to high rates of injury, workers are at risk of losing their jobs when they are injured or for attempting to organize and bargain collectively. Several studies of the industry have found immigrant workers—"an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry."
The Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Sioux City, in the state of Iowa in the Midwestern United States, was built in 1918–19 as a speculative venture under the name Midland Packing Plant. After going into receivership, it was acquired by Swift & Co. in 1924, and continued to operate until 1974. It was then purchased by a Sioux City businessman and converted to an enclosed mall, the KD Stockyards Station. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
The meat industry has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Outbreaks of the virus took place in factories operated by the meat packing industry and the poultry processing industry. These outbreaks affected dozens of plants, leading to closures of some factories and disruption of others, and posed a significant threat to the meat supply in the United States. The damage the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the meatpacking industry was unexpected and resulted in a sharp reduction of meat processing and capacity reduction of meatpacking companies.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, outbreaks of the virus took place in factories operated by the meat packing industry and the poultry processing industry. These outbreaks affected multiple plants, leading to closures of some factories and disruption of others, and posing a threat to the food supply in Canada.
The Golden Triangle of Meat-packing or Golden Triangle of Beef refers to the influence of meat-packing in three southwestern Kansas counties and their principal cities: Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal. While population decreased in many counties in western Kansas during the 20th century, these three cities and their environs experienced population increases from 1980 to 2020. The increases were primarily due to employment opportunities at four large slaughter houses and meat-packing plants. The large majority of the employees at the meat packing plants are Hispanics, most foreign-born and many presumed to be undocumented. Unlike the rest of the state, Hispanics by 2020 made up a majority of the population of these three counties plus one adjacent county.
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