Chapter 8: The Most Dangerous Job

Chapter 8
When reading this chapter, I couldn't put the book down! It was emotional, frightening, surprising! "The Most Dangerous Job" was about the distress that people working in the slaughterhouse had to go through to earn a living. About the pain and harsh environment they underwent.

The injury rate in meat packing is about three times higher than the rate in the typical American factory. Fourty thousand people suffer an injury or illness that brings them to the hospital each year.

There are tons of injuries that occur in the meatpacking plants. In this chapter, I read about amputations and trauma and diseases! Lacertations are the most common, however. This is where workers accidently stab themselves or another worker. "Trigger finger" is a disease in the finger, where it becomes frozen in curled position.

By speeding up the line in meatpacking plants, not only are over 400 cattle an hour slaughtered, but more and more workers are injuring themselves seriously. Fantastic job? I think not! The intense speed of the disassembly line is the blame for the insanely high injury rate. In order to keep up with the speedy-meat, workers neglect to sharpen their knives again. This forces them to add stress to their bodies when chopping the meat. "As the pace increases, so does the risk of accidental cuts and stabbings" (page 173-174) Even a former Monfort nurse says that she could always tell the line speed, due to the number of patients she had!

Workers don't complain about the safety conditions, however, because only 1/3 of IBP's workers belong to a union; they could be fired without warning at any time.

Supervisors' have a very important job. They must meet production goals, keep the number of recorded injuries low, and keep the meat flowing down the line without interruption. They have one other job, however. This job is to...report injuries. In order to seem like the best supervisor they can hire, injuries must be low. People do not find out what goes on in the slaughterhouse because the number of injuries that the supervisors report is a lie.

The author describes the most dangerous job as the late-night cleaning crews. He described how the work was "so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it." (page 177) The author discusses the water-chlorine mix (heated to about 180 degrees) high pressure hose that forms a thick fog, dropping visibility to as little as five feet. They have to clean the bloody muck and leftover scraps of meat. The whole plant heats up, "It's hot and it's foggy. and you can't see anything" a former sanitation worker described. (page 177) Headaches occur, amputations occur, and...death occurs. Carlos Vincente was dramatically pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt. This man was torn apart. People, such as Lorenzo Marin, Sr. slipped and hit their heads and passed away. Coworkers trying to save a fellow employee inside a thirty-foot tank died, along with the other employee. Its a tragety what happens to these hard workers, it really is.

Allowing plants to maintain injury logs caused several injuries not to be logged. Even though more and more people were getting injured, OSHA inspections decreased. The IBP beef plant in Dakota City, Nebraska kept two injury logs. One for OSHA visitors, and the log with every injury recorded.

At first OSHA had random inspections, making sure each and every slaughterhouse is clean. However, after individual injury logs were obtained, only certain slaughterhouses could be inspected.

Some problems with Colorado's workers' compensation law--from a worker's point of view, of course--involve the restrictions on workers' comp payments. The benefits were reduced, and some injured patients wouldn't get the right treatement just because the pain isn't visible. Kenny Dobbins, for example, was told he only had a pulled muscle, but ended up having to get back surgery. Eventually, Dobbins went through so much trauma he was half-dead by the age of fourty-six.

So basically, this chapter was screaming "YOU WILL GET AN EDUCATION, JUDI! YOU WILL GET A GOOD JOB, AND NOT HAVE TO WORK IN A SLAUGHTERHOUSE!" the whole time. :)