25/

Child Labor in the Meat Industry: "Conditions Are Dickensian"

https://vegnews.com/child-labor-meat-industry-conditions

<>
It’s hard to say exactly how many children are working in dangerous meatpacking plants right now, but Reid Maki of the Stop Child Labor Coalition estimates it’s a heck of a lot. “The US Department of Labor found earlier this year over 100 children, including some as young as 13, working in meatpacking plants in 13 facilities in eight states,” he told VegNews in 2023. “This might be the tip of the iceberg.”
</>

For those unfamiliar with migrant labor schemes, the entrepreneurial trick here is to externalize to contractors. Then those contractors externalize to other contractors. This labor ponzi scheme achieves a type of laundering of responsibility until you get to the bottom where the conditions are edging toward slavery. But lots of entrepreneurs make money at each level, of course.

In the end, the giant corporation, can claim plausible deniability because "it's not their fault, it's those sneaky contractors".

Opaqueness and transparency can both exist in this sector. I've mentioned in previous toots that child labor is feature of animal farming and pastoralism, it's an age old tradition. Even in richer places, the oh so precious "family farm" regularly tasks children with work, especially tasks around the care of domestic animals: cleaning up stables, delivering food, and going out with the animals on the grassland range. This last part, the herding part, is still famous now for slavery and it's a unique type of abuse as the young slave shepherds are coerced (usually with violence) into isolation; as they grow up, they remain deeply and profoundly ignorant and immature, as expected from being isolated and exposed to the elements for years with nothing but non-human animals to talk to (or worse). This is... *traditional family values*, something that's being promoted all over the world, including in the Global North. Of course, the rich family farms are the ones hiring illegal or underpaid workers. The hard work is beneath the young lords and ladies of the land.

The meat processing industry is an interesting coincidence in this context.

<>
When it comes to issues with meat production, much attention is rightly given to the environmental and welfare issues associated with the industry. But it’s important to highlight that human rights abuses are also seemingly rife. Last year, it was reported that Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms, two of the biggest meat producers in the US, were under federal investigation for alleged child labor violations.
</>

Upton Sinclair made this industry famous a century ago when it was less intensive, more extensive. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140 I won't attach photos, you can find them online. The animal murder yards and the slaughtering and packing facilities are obviously horrors at any scale, but this industry is much more murderous now.

So why are there children there? Well, the obvious answer is that it's because they can put children there. Like Oompa-Loompas. The slaughter and meat processing technology is so advanced that a child can operate it. There's no more need for muscly adults wielding large knives and axes like an indoor ancient war against fresh cadavers.

The people who've worked in these horror facilities do get paid enough. It's not enough to attract local "middle class" types, but it's enough to attract poorer workers. It's likely that these poorer workers, who usually have rural experience with animal farming when they're migrants, see it as acceptable to send their kids to the meat factories to work, just like sending them to work outside with animals is acceptable. And the factories comply with the usual "don't ask, don't tell" which we now see in action tied to the avian influenza outbreaks in cow farms. If we do see a wider epidemic of HPAI in humans, it will probably break out from these workers, thanks to the business of animal farming.

<>
According to Maki, while it is illegal for children to work in meat plants, there aren’t enough inspectors to crack down on the problem. “Wage and Hour has about 800 inspectors for 11 million workplaces,” he says. “That means each inspector is trying to safeguard about 200,000 workers. It’s just not possible.”
</>

To me, these examples and many others are a signal that the decriminalization of child labor is coming in the next years. The business owner class would rather see children work than pay adults properly, while they complain on Facebook "nobody wants to work anymore".