Please Write Letters: Cover Story by Eric Schlosser on Bad Meat in progressive magazine, The Nation

[Guest guest]

Dear Friends,

 

I am so excited to forward the news to you that there are two articles on meat

in the latest issue of " The Nation. " " The Nation " is a wonderful progressive

magazine, which is actually one of my favorite publications. It's very dense

weekly reading, and I had let my subscription lapse (feeling guilty

at all the unread articles) but was going through severe withdrawal. Learning

that the latest issue of " The Nation " has two articles on meat (one by " Fast

Food Nation " author, Eric Schlosser and the other on the disgraceful treatment

of labor at slaughterhouse plants) makes me all that more

enthusiastic to renew!!

 

The great failing of most progressives is, of course, that they (we!) terminally

point fingers outward and fail to look inward. So, you'll see that the articles

by Schlosser and Olsson are excellent pieces of fine investigative journalism,

placing the blame for poor worker treatment and compromised

food safety where it belongs, on the shoulders of animal agribusiness. However,

by refusing to accept personal responsibility, we also undermine our own power

(furthering the problem by becoming complicit). Neither article mentions

veganism as a means of divesting one's support from the abusive

practices against labor at slaughterhouses or the option of boycotting animal

products as a powerful means by which to protest our poisoned food supply.

Please send letters to the Nation: letters urging readers to align

their consumptive habits with their principles.

 

Thanks so much!

 

Best regards,

Alka

 

 

Two articles in the Nation this week (cover date is Sept. 16, 2002). The cover

story is " Bad Meat " by Eric Schlosser. A slightly longer piece, also plugged on

the cover, is The Shame of Meatpacking: Workers in the country's most dangerous

industry are struggling for safety, by Karen Olsson.

Bad Meat: <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020916 & s=schlosser>

The Shame of Meatpacking:

<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020916 & s=olsson>

Letters: letters

COMMENT | September 16, 2002

Bad Meat

by Eric Schlosser

In a summer full of headlines about corporate misdeeds and irresponsibility,

ConAgra's massive recall in July stands apart. The defective product wasn't

fiber optic cable, energy futures or some esoteric financial instrument. It was

bad meat--almost 19 million pounds of beef potentially contaminated

with E. coli O157:H7, enough to supply a tainted burger to at least one-fourth

of the US population. Unlike other prominent scandals, this one does not seem to

involve any falsification of records, shredding of crucial documents or

deliberate violation of the law. And that makes it all the more

disturbing. The Bush Administration and its Republican allies in Congress have

allowed the meatpacking industry to gain control of the nation's food safety

system, much as the airline industry was given responsibility for airport

security in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks. The

deregulation of food safety makes about as much sense as the deregulation of air

safety. Anyone who eats meat these days should be deeply concerned about what

our meatpacking companies now have the freedom to sell.

 

At the heart of the food safety debate is the issue of microbial testing.

Consumer advocates argue that the federal government should be testing meat for

dangerous pathogens and imposing tough penalties on companies that repeatedly

fail those tests. The meatpacking industry, which has been battling

new food safety measures for almost a century, strongly disagrees. In 1985 a

panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences warned that the nation's

meat inspection system was obsolete. At the time USDA inspectors relied solely

on visual and olfactory clues to detect tainted meat. After the

Jack in the Box outbreak in 1993, the Clinton Administration announced that it

would begin random testing for E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef. The meatpacking

industry promptly sued the USDA in federal court to block such tests.

E. coli O157:H7, the pathogen involved in both the Jack in the Box outbreak and

the recent ConAgra recall, can cause severe illness or death, especially among

children, the elderly and people who are immuno-suppressed. The Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that about 73,000

Americans are sickened by E. coli O157:H7 every year. An additional 37,000 are

sickened by other dangerous strains of E. coli also linked to ground beef. At a

slaughterhouse these pathogens are spread when manure or stomach contents get

splattered on the meat.

The USDA won the 1993 lawsuit, began random testing for E. coli O157:H7 and

introduced a " science-based " inspection system in 1996 that requires various

microbial tests by meatpacking companies and by the government. The new system,

however, has been so weakened by industry opposition and legal

challenges that it now may be less effective than the old one. Under the Hazard

Analysis and Critical Control Points plans that now regulate production at

meatpacking plants, many food safety tasks have been shifted from USDA

inspectors to company employees.

In return for such concessions, the USDA gained the power to test for salmonella

and to shut down plants that repeatedly failed those tests. Salmonella is spread

primarily by fecal material, and its presence in ground beef suggests that other

dangerous pathogens may be present as well. In November

1999, the USDA shut down a meatpacking plant for repeatedly failing salmonella

tests. The Texas company operating the plant, Supreme Beef Processors, happened

to be one of the leading suppliers of ground beef to the National School Lunch

Program. With strong backing from the meatpacking industry,

Supreme Beef sued the USDA, eventually won the lawsuit and succeeded this past

December in overturning the USDA's salmonella limits. About 1.4 million

Americans are sickened by salmonella every year, and the CDC has linked a nasty,

antibiotic-resistant strain of the bug to ground beef. Nevertheless,

it is now perfectly legal to sell ground beef that is thoroughly contaminated

with salmonella--and sell it with the USDA's seal of approval.

This summer's ConAgra recall raises questions not only about the nation's food

safety rules but also about the USDA's competence to enforce them. The USDA

conducts its random tests for E. coli O157:H7 at wholesale and retail locations,

not at the gigantic slaughterhouses where the meat is usually

contaminated. By the time the USDA discovers tainted meat, it's already being

distributed. On June 17 and 19, USDA test results showed that beef shipped from

the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado was contaminated. But the USDA

failed to inform ConAgra for almost two weeks. Meanwhile, the

bad meat continued to be sold at supermarkets, served at countless restaurants

and grilled at outdoor barbecues nationwide. Although the packages said " Freeze

or sell by 06 18 02, " Safeway supermarkets in Colorado held a two-for-one sale

of the questionable ConAgra meat from June 19 to June 25.

Four days later the USDA informed ConAgra that it had distributed beef

contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.ConAgra announced a " voluntary recall " of

354,200 pounds. Then health authorities noticed that people were getting

severely ill, mainly small children in Colorado. A common symptom was vomiting

and defecating blood. After consultations with the USDA, ConAgra expanded the

voluntary recall on July 19 to include an additional 18.3 million pounds of beef

processed at the Greeley plant between April 12 and July 11. About three dozen

illnesses and one death have thus far been linked to ConAgra's

meat. Based on previous E. coli outbreaks, perhaps twenty times that number of

illnesses occurred without being properly diagnosed or reported. According to

the most recent tally, less than one-tenth of the 18.6 million pounds of

ConAgra's recalled meat has been recovered. The rest has most likely

been eaten.

 

Throughout the recall, USDA officials praised ConAgra for how well it had

cooperated with the government, offering little criticism or explanation of how

this company had managed to ship thousands of tons of potentially contaminated

meat for months. The USDA also deflected criticism of its own role

in the outbreak; a Montana wholesaler had warned the agency in February that

beef shipped from ConAgra's plant in Greeley was tainted. Instead of imposing a

tough penalty on ConAgra, the USDA often seemed eager to shift the blame and

responsibility to consumers. " If people cooked their food

correctly, " said Elsa Murano, USDA under secretary for food safety, " a lot of

outbreaks would not take place. "

 

Although ConAgra apparently violated no laws, its behavior made clear where the

real power lies. The recall of its meat was entirely voluntary. In an age when

defective Happy Meal toys can be swiftly ordered off the market at the slightest

hint of a choking hazard, the government can neither demand

the recall of potentially deadly meat nor impose civil fines on companies that

sell it. ConAgra has refused to disclose publicly which restaurants,

distributors and supermarkets got meat from Greeley; federal law does not

require the company to do so. Colorado health officials did not receive a list

showing where ConAgra's meat had been distributed until the first week of

August--more than a month after the initial recall. Health officials in Utah and

Oklahoma did not receive that information from ConAgra until the third week in

August. " I know it's here, " an Oklahoma public health official

told the Denver Post at one point, referring to the recalled meat. " But without

knowing where it went, there's not a whole lot we can do. " In future recalls,

ConAgra now promises to do a better job of sharing information with state health

authorities--even though the law does not require the company

to do so.

ConAgra's meatpacking operations in Greeley are described at length in my book

Fast Food Nation, and I've spent a great deal of time with workers there. For

years they have complained about excessive line speeds. The same factors often

responsible for injuries in a slaughterhouse can also lead to

food safety problems. When workers work too fast, they tend to make mistakes,

harming themselves or inadvertently contaminating the meat.

America's food safety system has been expertly designed not to protect the

public health but to protect the meatpacking industry from liability. The

industry has received abundant help in this effort from the Republican Party,

which for more than a decade has thwarted Congressional efforts to expand

the USDA's food safety authority. According to the Center for Responsive

Politics, during the 2000 presidential campaign meat and livestock interests

gave about $23,000 to Al Gore and about $600,000 to George W. Bush. The money

was well spent. Dale Moore, chief of staff for Agriculture Secretary Ann

Veneman, was previously the chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef

Association. Elizabeth Johnson, one of Veneman's senior advisers, was previously

the associate director for food policy at the NCBA. Mary Waters, USDA assistant

secretary for Congressional relations, assumed the post after

working as legislative counsel for ConAgra Foods.

It would be an understatement to say that the Bush Administration has been

friendly toward the big meatpackers. During Congressional testimony this past

spring, Elsa Murano, USDA chief food safety advocate, argued that her agency

does not need the power to order a recall of contaminated meat. Nor

did it need, she said, any new authority to shut down ground beef plants because

of salmonella contamination.

The meatpacking companies don't want any of their customers to get sick. But

they don't want to be held liable for illnesses either, or to spend more money

on preventing outbreaks. The exemplary food safety system at Jack in the Box

increases the cost of the fast food chain's ground beef by about

one penny per pound. The other major hamburger chains also require that their

suppliers provide meat largely free of dangerous pathogens--and that requirement

has not yet driven the meatpacking industry into bankruptcy. Senator Tom Harkin

has introduced two pieces of food safety legislation that

would help fill some of the glaring gaps in the current system. The SAFER Meat,

Poultry and Food Act of 2002 would give the USDA the authority to demand recalls

of contaminated meat and impose civil fines on meatpacking companies. The Meat

and Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act would place enforceable

limits on the amounts of disease-causing bugs that meat can legally contain.

Harkin's bills embody a good deal of common sense. Companies that produce clean

meat should be allowed to sell it; those that produce dirty meat shouldn't. The

Republican Party's alliance with the big meatpackers does not

reflect widespread public support. The issue of food safety isn't like abortion

or gun control, with passionate and fundamentally opposing views held by

millions of American voters. When most people learn how the meatpacking industry

operates, they're appalled. The outrage crosses party lines.

Democrat or Republican, you still have to eat.

None of the recently proposed reforms, however, would prove as important and

effective as the creation of an independent food safety agency with tough

enforcement powers. The USDA has a dual and conflicting mandate. It's supposed

to promote the sale of American meat--and protect consumers from

unsafe meat. As long as the USDA has that dual role, consumers must be extremely

careful about where they purchase beef, how they handle it and how long they

cook it. While many Americans fret about the risks of bioterrorism, a much more

immediate threat comes from the all-American meal. Until

fundamental changes are made in our food safety system, enjoying your hamburgers

medium-rare will remain a form of high-risk behavior.

--\

--------------------------------

<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020916 & s=olsson>

FEATURE STORY | September 16, 2002

The Shame of Meatpacking

by Karen Olsson <file:///directory/view.mhtml?handle=olsson_karen>FPRIVATE

" TYPE=PICT;ALT=Picture (Metafile) "

<file:///directory/view.mhtml?handle=olsson_karen>

The strike began, Maria Martinez recalls, because a worker on the loin line

wasn't keeping up with the pace of production. When a supervisor pulled him into

the office, some thirty workers, Martinez among them, dropped their knives and

followed him there. " The superintendent said, 'You've got sixty

seconds to get back to work, or everyone's fired,' " says Martinez. " We didn't

move, and then he said, 'OK, you guys are all fired.' So we went outside, and

the next thing we knew there were hundreds of people outside. " This was in June

1999, at an IBP meatpacking plant near Pasco, Washington. Fed up

with plant conditions and stalled contract negotiations, close to 800 workers,

nearly all of them immigrants, rallied alongside the plant access road for five

weeks.

They returned to work discouraged. Though the new contract, narrowly approved,

raised starting pay from $7 to $8.50, it eliminated the old $1.50-an-hour

pension and did not include a provision allowing workers to stop the chain for

sanitary reasons, which workers had wanted. But for Martinez, now

principal officer of Teamsters Local 556 in Walla Walla, Washington, the strike

was a step forward. " We lost, but we also gained respect, we gained dignity, we

gained a lot of strength, " Martinez says. On the day they returned to work, she

says, " we parked our cars on the picket line, and we all

walked in together, chanting, 'The union is back!' "

In fact, IBP workers had made significant gains before the strike, organizing

themselves and voting to change the local's bylaws so they could elect their own

shop stewards. The following summer, Martinez and fellow strike leader

Melquiadez Pereya were elected to lead the local, replacing the older

Anglo officers who workers say failed to maintain a strong union presence in the

plant. And three years later, the union is back more than ever: The revitalized

Local 556 has made a dramatic impact on the shop floor, defending the interests

of individual workers while pushing for a safer, more

sanitary workplace.

The shouts of protest aren't just coming from Washington. Last September in

Amarillo, Texas, hundreds of workers walked out of another IBP plant to protest

low wages and chronic staff shortages that had made their already dangerous jobs

all the more stressful and hazardous. At an Excel meatpacking

plant in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, more than 400 workers conducted another wildcat

strike last February. And in Omaha, Nebraska, an Industrial Areas

Foundation-affiliated community group called Omaha Together One Community (OTOC)

and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) have teamed up to

organize workers in a dozen area packing plants. According to IAF organizer Tom

Holler, when OTOC began holding meetings in South Omaha in 1993, " It was clear

from day one that the major issue in the community was the conditions in these

plants. "

As readers of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (and of past reports in this and

other publications) are well aware, America's 150,000 meatpacking workers

perform the most dangerous job in the country, many of them making knife cuts

every few seconds. In 2000 the official illness and injury rate for

meatpacking workers was 25 percent. Given the chronic underreporting of injuries

in the industry, particularly when it comes to cumulative stress disorders, the

actual injury rate is probably much higher. In Walla Walla, the union examined

plant injury logs and found that 781 injuries had been

recorded in 1999 and 2000, while in a recent union-sponsored survey of just

under 500 workers, two-thirds said they had suffered a work-related health

problem in the past twelve months.

The reasons for this are no secret. Four giant competitors--IBP, ConAgra, Excel

(owned by Cargill) and Farmland National Beef--dominate the beef industry,

together controlling over 85 percent of the US market. Because profit margins

are much slimmer than in other manufacturing sectors, the companies

are especially intent on keeping labor costs as low as possible and volume as

high as possible--which translates into hiring cheap labor, discouraging unions

and maintaining intolerably high chain speeds, even if those things contribute

to the industry's astronomical turnover rates. Because so many

meatpacking workers are recent, non-English-speaking immigrants, some of them in

the country illegally, they are less likely to complain about unsafe conditions.

Meanwhile, inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration

dropped to an all-time low by the late 1990s. No one expects

that trend to be reversed under President Bush, who last year proposed cuts in

OSHA's budget and, in a move urged by the meat industry and other business

groups, repealed workplace ergonomics standards that had been under development

for ten years.

Trying to take on a giant meatpacker is not an easy task; in Amarillo more than

500 workers who walked out lost their jobs. (Some have since been hired back.)

And it's highly unlikely that a few revitalized union locals could, on their

own, force the powerful packers to slow down the breakneck pace

of production--the primary cause of the industry's stunningly high injury rates.

But after years of industry unionbusting and co-optation, the recent worker

actions cut promisingly against the grain.

" There are things that explain these explosions, " says David Levin, a Teamsters

for a Democratic Union (TDU) organizer, who has met with meatpacking workers in

Pasco and Ft. Morgan. " One is just the incredible speedup and pressure in the

workplace, and the safety hazards that come with that. Then

there is the really abusive and disrespectful treatment of workers. You're made

to work faster than you can safely, and then treated disrespectfully in this

often racist way by management. When people are facing these problems as

individuals, they seem insurmountable, but in combination it can be an

explosive concoction. "

Men and women from Mexico and Central America have long been making the trek

north to Washington's Columbia River valley, a lush farming region where

asparagus fields, orchards and vineyards provide seasonal work to immigrant

laborers. A job at IBP represents a step up, as it is one of the few local

year-round jobs available to a non-English speaker. Ninety percent of the

plant's workers are immigrants: Most are from Latin America, while a significant

minority are refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Bosnia.

Martinez, on the other hand, was born and raised in California, and applied to

work at IBP after moving to Pasco in 1988. Compared with her previous jobs, " it

was different, " she says. " It's hard, hard work. You go home and you are always

in pain. After three weeks, I was about to quit--I couldn't

handle the work. " It wasn't as if Martinez was unaccustomed to physical labor:

She grew up in Fresno, the eleventh of twenty-two children of farmworker

parents. A tomboy, she played football and boxed with her brothers, and

beginning when she was 14, she would pick plums and table grapes from April

to November. As a result she never finished school, and went on to a series of

factory jobs. Today, at 45, she is sturdy-framed and energetic, and as she

recalls her struggles with the company she slips easily from resoluteness to

laughter, pausing to relish a particular moment--say, the day when

the processing workers rattled the supervisors by loudly clanging their meat

hooks against the conveyor belts all at once--and to note that " It was neat, " or

" It was so neat. "

But meatpacking is indeed different, largely thanks to IBP. It was IBP that

redesigned the modern meatpacking industry in the 1960s, reorganizing production

to eliminate skilled labor, locating the plants in rural areas where unions were

not a threat, slashing wages and speeding up the chain. " IBP

set the trend and other companies have followed, " says University of Kansas

anthropologist Donald Stull, who has studied the industry for fifteen years.

" They are all locked in this dance together; they all have to do the same kind

of thing; and there really isn't any disincentive to keep doing them

from the government. " (Though to the extent that there are disincentives, IBP

has been at the receiving end of them: The same year Martinez started in Pasco,

OSHA proposed a $3.1 million fine against the company for safety violations in

its Dakota City, Nebraska, plant--the second-largest penalty in

the agency's history, though it was later reduced--and Congressman Tom Lantos

lambasted the company as " clearly one of the most irresponsible and reckless

corporations in America in terms of workers' health and safety. " )

Martinez stuck to her job, despite the pain and despite the fact that the

company had frozen wages at around $7 an hour years earlier, substituting small

quarterly bonuses for raises. Employees were nevertheless made to work harder

and harder. According to Ramon Moreno, who worked for twenty-one

years in slaughter, beginning in 1979, the chain speed more than doubled over

those two decades. The Pasco plant was cited repeatedly by state investigators

for safety violations. Although workers were members of Teamsters Local 556, it

was not a strong presence in the plant. " We didn't know

anything about the union, " recalls Maria Chavez, another longtime IBP worker.

Martinez's first foray into union activism was a disappointment: During contract

negotiations in 1992, she joined a group of Pasco workers in an ultimately

unsuccessful push for better pay and working conditions. " I swore I would never

get involved with a union again, " says Martinez. But in 1997, a

different set of workers wrote a letter to the Teamsters international to

complain about the local, and a Teamsters investigator, Joe Fahey, came to Pasco

and met with a large group of workers. " People were crying, talking about being

covered in diarrhea the entire shift because the supervisor

wouldn't let them go to the bathroom, " says Fahey, now president of Teamsters

Local 912 in California and co-chair of TDU.

" That was the day we got our voices back, " Pereya would say later. With help

from TDU, Martinez, Pereya and other workers began organizing the plant, setting

up a communication network inside and voting to change the local's bylaws. " We

did huge actions inside, " says Martinez, who was elected chief

steward after the bylaws change. " We used to walk into the manager's office,

during break, hundreds of us, with a petition over supervisor harassment. We

used to pack that office like sardines. " After the bruising contract campaign

and strike, the Teamsters international put the local under

trusteeship, removing Martinez from the steward's position. But she went to

court and won her position back and subsequently was elected to head the local.

Since then, the union has increased the number of shop stewards and initiated a

health and safety campaign; last year, workers won a $3.1 million judgment for

unpaid time putting on and taking off equipment; and this year they filed a

second such lawsuit. (The company appealed the first decision and

issued a memo advising that workers were no longer required to remove their

kill-floor frocks or other equipment in the cafeteria.) Workers went public with

a videotape showing cattle being slaughtered alive, animal-rights groups were

outraged and the state launched an investigation.

The union's biggest victory, says Maria Chavez, has been changing the climate

inside the IBP plant. " We were fearful before this woman came, " she says,

referring to Martinez. " There was fear that if we said anything they would fire

us. Now it's evident that the people aren't afraid. "

The gaining of power by Pasco's workers, heartening as it may be, still pales in

comparison with the concentration of power within the industry. Last year Tyson

Foods purchased IBP, making Tyson/IBP the Death Star of the meat business: It

controls 27 percent of the US beef market, 23 percent of the

chicken market and 19 percent of the pork market, with an annual revenue of

roughly $24 billion a year. " It's too early to tell " what effect the merger

might have on IBP's 32,500 production and maintenance workers, says the

University of Kansas's Stull, but given that Tyson has a checkered labor

record of its own, " I don't think things will get better. If anything, they'll

get worse. "

Certainly, it didn't help the workers who lost their jobs in Amarillo. The

Amarillo IBP plant is significantly larger than the Pasco plant, employing 3,000

production and maintenance workers, and accordingly the chain runs even faster.

Workers say the plant had been chronically understaffed for

months before the strike. Recalls José Vazquez, who worked at IBP for eight

years, up until the walkout, " When I started working there, there were fifteen

chuck-boners on each line, and 380 chain speed was considered fast; you had to

have sixteen or seventeen for that. Before we walked out, they

were doing 400 an hour, with thirteen or fourteen chuck-boners. " Last September,

a group of workers approached management, threatening to quit if the staffing

problem was not addressed, and asking that the company raise wages to the level

of two other area meatpacking plants in order to better

retain workers. When those discussions failed, the fifty or so workers involved

were asked to leave the building, and hundreds of others followed them outside.

IBP warned them to return to work or be fired and called the walkout " an

unsanctioned protest over wages. " The company fired them all

several days later. Because the strike did not occur during contract

negotiations, Teamsters Local 577 declined to sanction the walkout; local

president Rusty Stepp told reporters there was nothing he could do for the

wildcatting workers.

For several weeks, many of the fired workers installed themselves across the

road from the plant like so many Texas bedouins, in a long string of tents,

tarps, lawn chairs and pickup trucks. Yet their effort to put public pressure on

the company did not meet with significant community support. " IBP

just launched its public relations juggernaut and basically spun the walkout as

a dispute over wages, " says Jim Wood, one of a handful of Amarillo attorneys who

tried to help the workers. " Really the issue was worker safety, and people who

studied the issue saw that. Eventually the Catholic Church

of Amarillo came out strongly in support of the workers, but by then people's

minds were made up. " Because Amarillo is predominantly Anglo, and most of the

protesters were either Mexican-American or Asian-American, adds Wood, " there

wasn't a lot of contact between them and the Anglo community. "

Last October I spoke with workers outside the plant; it was clear that they were

angry, they wanted their jobs back and they wanted their working conditions to

improve. As had been the case in Pasco, Amarillo IBP workers were represented by

a Teamsters local that many viewed as ineffective. But

unlike in the Pasco strike, the Amarillo walkout had not been preceded by a

sustained organizing effort inside the plant, and the five workers who formed an

ersatz strike committee were not experienced leaders. Where Martinez and Pereya

had a worker communication network organized by production

line, the Amarillo workers had a bullhorn and a Peavey amplifier on the back of

a pickup truck.

Representatives from a Justice Department community relations office in Dallas,

the League of United Latin American Citizens and the union met with company

officials to negotiate a back-to-work agreement, but with no workers or strong

worker advocates present, the resulting agreement was weak,

stipulating that the company would rehire fired workers on a " case-by-case

basis, " and that rehired workers would not be entitled to their old shifts or

job-bidding seniority. " In my opinion they didn't negotiate anything, they just

agreed to what the company gave them, " says Vazquez.

Last April I returned to Amarillo and visited the offices of Medina y Medina

translating, a small storefront in a down-market shopping plaza, and

headquarters of Pioneros Para La Justicia, a group of current and former IBP

workers, formed last December. There, Pioneros collective member Sonia Campos

has been filing unemployment appeals and organizing meetings. She also fields

questions from former workers who call or stop by, like Alex Telles, who showed

up while I was there. Telles lost his job as a skinner because of the walkout,

after twenty-two years with IBP. Since then, he says, he's been

working temp jobs for Manpower, Inc. " It's been lousy, " Telles says. " I get

maybe three days of work a week from them. I've got applications all over town:

warehouses, truck stops. I went to get food stamps and they wouldn't help me. "

With a wife who works in a nursing home and two teenage sons,

says Telles, " we're just barely getting by. "

At an evening meeting of thirty former and current IBP workers at St. Laurence

Catholic Church, the stories were similar: People who'd been laid off were

struggling to pay bills and applying for public assistance. Those who had been

called back to work said that the company had hired more people,

but that many of the new workers were inexperienced.

The Amarillo workers' prospects for repeating the successes of the Pasco local

are less than rosy. Several years ago, Amarillo attorney Jeff Blackburn helped

convene a meeting between a group of IBP workers and TDU's Joe Fahey, but it

failed to spark the kind of internal organizing seen in Pasco.

" There's been a continuously self-defeating cycle of spontaneous anger that gets

expressed, " says Blackburn. " Leaders that really aren't leaders get thrown into

it, and then everybody gets demoralized. " For her part, Campos plans to

circulate a worker petition to decertify the Teamsters and

designate Pioneros Para La Justicia as their bargaining representative. It's not

hard to understand her disenchantment with the Teamsters--Local 577 president

Stepp, who earns $103,000 a year, seems to have little contact with the 2,000

members who work at IBP. But it is difficult to imagine

Campos's pioneers waging a successful battle against IBP with no institutional

support at all.

Stepp did not return phone calls for this story. The International Brotherhood

of Teamsters, which (unlike TDU) has not expressed support for wildcatting

workers in Ft. Morgan and Amarillo, provided a brief statement: " There were

problems that led to a wildcat strike with IBP at Local 577. The union

has responded to these problems and continues to proactively address them. " Last

spring, representatives from the Teamsters international flew to Amarillo to

meet with current and laid-off IBP workers. " They made promises, " says Campos,

" but after they left, they didn't return our phone calls. "

While the Teamsters represent only a handful of the packing plants nationwide,

the UFCW maintains by far the largest union presence in

meatpacking--representing roughly 60 percent of slaughterhouse workers,

according to UFCW spokesman Greg Denier. Individual locals vary, but in general

the history

of meatpacking unions during the second half of the twentieth century is a story

of sharp decline. Once the old unionized firms gave way to IBP, says labor

historian Roger Horowitz, the unions found themselves unable to organize the

new, nonunion packers, and by the early 1980s concessionary

bargaining was the norm: " The UFCW would persuade the company to sign a

closed-shop agreement and get things like health insurance, " but wages remained

low, while chain speeds got higher and higher.

If events in Omaha and Pasco are any indication, that trend doesn't have to

continue. But unions can't do it alone, says Martinez. " The humane-slaughter

people and the food-safety people should work together; they'd have a lot of

power, " she says. " In the meat industry, both issues have to do with

the chain. The chain goes so fast that it doesn't give the animals enough time

to die. People don't have enough time to wash their knife if it falls on the

floor. " And tens of thousands of workers are injured every year. " I've been

writing about it for fifteen years; a lot of people in the media

have said the things I've said, and things haven't changed, " says Stull.

Still, workers and industry critics hope that more consumers will come to

appreciate the link between food safety and a safer workplace. The union

campaigns in Pasco and the organizing drive in Omaha owe much of their success

to their efforts to involve the community--particularly churches and local

colleges--in their efforts. Home Justice Watch, a Texas-based group that works

on worker safety, human rights and animal rights violations in slaughterhouses,

has launched the Eat Rights campaign to focus consumer attention on these

issues. " The same things that contribute to the contamination of

the meat are what make it more likely that people are going to get hurt, " says

Eric Schlosser. " The only reason it's been allowed to continue is that people

don't know. Even if you have no compassion for the poor and the illegal in this

country, if you eat meat, or the people you love eat meat, you

should care. "

The way to change the industry is by " people being informed and spreading the

word to the public, " says Martinez. " The worst fear of IBP is workers being

united. Now we're here, and they know I'm not