Björn Jóhann Ólafsson

In 2010, Mauricio Garcia Pereira walked into a slaughterhouse. Seven years later, he walked out, a man forever changed.

During his time at the Limonges slaughterhouse in France, he became traumatised by the abuse at the hands of his employers and the relentless trauma of killing. He recounts instances in which he was screamed at to work faster, seeing his coworkers injured on the assembly lines, and the pervading smell of blood and death. But he couldn’t quit. Not if he wanted to put food on the table for his children.

Pereira’s story is the same as many others across the world: workers, desperate for money to feed their family, recruited into a brutal industry that thinks of them as nothing more than cogs in a machine. After the physical and psychological abuse becomes too great, they are discarded.

In the slaughterhouses, there is but one rule: kill as fast as possible.

Most slaughterhouses function like assembly lines, (although disassembly is a more appropriate word). Workers are quickly trained for specialised jobs (such as stunning the animal, tearing the flesh, or removing hooves), and then given a short amount of time to complete these tasks. After a minute or even less, the alarm rings and they move onto the next task. Fast workers are rewarded. Slow workers are not.

This speed comes at a human cost. Slaughterhouse workers suffer “extraordinarily high rates of injury”. According to this report, 5.4% of workers were injured in 2015 alone, with amputations and cuts being the most common injuries.

Image courtesy of Rendy Novantino on Unsplash

It’s more than the danger of whirring blades. Seemingly every possible violation of workplace and human rights is common within slaughterhouses. In their comprehensive report, the Human Rights Watch lists the ways that big meat companies harm their workers: from stifling unions, reducing pay, and refusing injury pay compensation, to failing to implement safety procedures and encouraging dangerous speeds of production. The numbers behind these abuses are as expansive as they are scary: 42% of workers suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, 57% have musculoskeletal symptoms, and factory workers are 32 times more likely to be carriers of antibiotic resistant E. coli. Workers feel compelled to push through the pain and danger, risking lifelong injury.

During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, slaughterhouses did virtually nothing to prevent infection, leading to massive outbreaks amongst staff. Employees, including immune-compromised individuals, were forced to work despite the dangers. “We’re modern slaves” says Tara Waters, a meatpacker who was forced to work throughout the pandemic, even while three of her long-time colleagues died of the coronavirus.

These violations are only a glimpse into the abuses inflicted upon factory workers. Meat companies pressure their employees to keep quiet about their mistreatment. Due to free speech restrictions imposed on animal rights activists, reporters are not allowed to reveal the true extent of human rights abuses.

Despite this imposed silence, The Food Empowerment Company successfully found evidence of workers being blackmailed into not reporting job-related injuries during a reporting visit. Sadly, there are undoubtedly countless more abuses that are yet to be uncovered. Thousands of stories of abuse suffered by the most vulnerable members of society, in service of the convenience of the most protected.

Victims of the meat industry are uniquely vulnerable individuals. 38% of slaughterhouse workers are immigrants, and an unknown but significant number are undocumented. This is by design.

Due to the horrific nature of the job, turnover rates in slaughterhouses can sometimes reach as high as 100% yearly (meaning that, on average, every single worker will have quit within 12 months). Rather than improving working conditions, the meat industry views employees as a product to be picked from the most vulnerable populations instead of improving working conditions. As a result, most employees are Black or brown, poor, or undocumented.

It’s a poorly kept secret that immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate amount of unpleasant agricultural work, especially animal agriculture. Most of the biggest chicken processing companies, including Tyson, are currently being sued for artificially lowering the salaries of their immigrant workers. They are accused of collaborating with each other to keep wages low, especially for workers who are not native English speakers.

The meat industry is aware of psychical, medical, and psychological danger inherent in their work. They know they pay pennies on the dollar. They prey on vulnerable individuals who have no other employment options, individuals who have no choice but to say yes.

“You learn to become numb to death and to suffering. . . It doesn't just make the job easier - it's necessary for survival.” – anonymous former abbatoir worker in an interview for the BBC

Slaughterhouses are horror shows. Slaughterhouse workers are forced to play a part in this horror, either committing or being witness to the violence. Killing an animal that doesn’t want to die is an inherent act of violence. And violence always takes a toll.

According to a 2016 study that interviewed 14 slaughterhouse workers, adjusting to work in a slaughterhouse is “inevitably traumatic” due to both the process of killing and the bloody and grotesque workplace conditions. When joining a slaughterhouse, most workers go through an initial period of shock, horrified by the carcasses, organs, faeces, and blood that makes up their workplace. Over time, many workers use dissociation as a method of coping. Others turn to alcohol or drugs to numb the pain. Others quit and are quickly replaced with a fresh-faced victim.

“You feel like part of a big death machine. Pretty much treated that way as well. Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. It's just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behaviour.” - Virgil Butler, former slaughterhouse worker in an entry on his activist blog

This terror has a name: trauma. More specifically, Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Stress, or PITS. According to psychiatrist Dr. Chi-Chi Obuaya, this form of trauma does not arise from a single event, but rather the forced repetition of monotonous, cyclical instances of trauma. PITS, compared to PTSD, is less likely to cause recurring ‘relivings’ of the event, and more likely to cause self-loathing and loss of identity, in conjunction with other symptoms.

One of the most gruelling aspects of Mauricio Pereria’s experience was this repetition. “Every day, I take the hooves off calves and suck out spinal cords,” he writes in his book, “hundreds of cattle, every day.”

The average person finds the idea of killing an animal that does not wish to die reprehensible. This is, of course, understandable: farmed animals are intelligent and kind creatures, most frequently seen in cute animal videos shared on social media. Cows, incredibly social and playful animals, are known to cry out for their young when they become aware of what is happening; Pigs are known to scream.

But ignoring the violence behind meat production doesn’t make it go away. Instead, the consumer pushes that burden of unwanted violence onto slaughterhouse workers, most of whom would be unwilling to do their job unless forced to. It’s an offset. A trauma offset.

“The worst thing, worse than the physical danger [of on-the-job accidents] is the emotional toll. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them – beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.” - Ed Van Winkle, former slaughterhouse worker speaking at a Tyson Shareholders Meeting

Unlike other industries with massive workplace abuse, like Amazon warehouses or sweatshops, Mauricio Garcia no longer believes the meat industry is capable of being reformed; the act of killing is too cruel to make it psychologically tenable for any workers. This is of course, without mentioning the ethical concerns of animal subjugation and the devastating environmental impacts.

The meat industry operates to feed consumer desire, but this desire can, over time, be redirected. In this way, there is power in consumerism. Individuals can lower or eliminate their meat consumption by switching to plant-based meat alternatives which are becoming more plentiful and cheaper by the day. They can also contribute to large-scale reform, such as Transfarmation (which seeks to assist agricultural workers as they shift from meat to plants) or Meeat (which helps meat processing plants pivot into, well, plant-processing plants).

Reform necessitates both a change in public perception about what is acceptable and a large-scale movement towards a more humane system. Both avenues are critical for improving the safety and well-being of workers in the agriculture industry, ensuring a more humane and equitable food system for all.

The human cost of working in a slaughterhouse