Enslaved to kill: migrant slaughterhouse and industrial farm workers Don’t like migrants? Read this. Alexandra Gonzalez Baldwin @alexandragonzalezbaldwinguardian Fri 18 Dec 2020 00.01 GMT
COVID-19 has put a swift halt to many norms this year, but it will not be stopping Christmas celebrations and family get togethers in the UK. The government will allow for families to form a “bubble” so that they may celebrate the special day. This means that traditional meals such as turkey, pigs in blankets, roasts, and whatever this diverse nation chooses to consume for their holiday meals will still be in high demand. The UK Animal Clock states that every year approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs, 80 million fish and 950 million birds are slaughtered for human consumption. Read that slowly and try to imagine this. Since I wrote the first last two sentences, The Animal Clock has recorded that 8,568 animals have been killed for food in the UK. Behind these numbers lie a dark reality of horror, slavery, and injustice. Where are all of these animals being killed? Who is killing them? Are these animals killed “humanely”? These are all questions no one truly asks. According to the Holi Dog Times, there are 317 approved slaughterhouses across the UK and the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) state that the industry employs 97,000 workers. The BMPA also published that, in 2020, 62% of the 97,000 workers were migrants. This means that more than half of the meat packing industry workers are not British. A survey from Finder found that, in 2020, 87% of the UK population consume meat which would equate to 58 million people. Yet, in a public briefing held in 2020 by The Migration Observatory regarding immigration in the UK, 44% of Brits stated they would like immigration to be reduced.
I interviewed a Conservative Brexit supporter, who asked to remain anonymous, on his viewpoints of immigrants and his knowledge on the meat industry. He feels that migrants should be reduced, as “they are taking away jobs from British nationals”. When I asked if he ate meat he said “yes, almost every day”. I then asked him if he had ever thought about where his meat comes from and who kills the animals. He said he had “never thought about it, but probably British people”. I then told him how 62% of slaughterhouse workers are migrants. I also asked him and a few other British meat eaters why they eat meat, and they all responded with “because it tastes good” and “because it is normal”. It is an extreme hypocrisy and/or ignorance for British meat eaters to dislike migrants. Ramos, a 36 year old Lithuanian who came to the UK for better pay, recounts his experience while working at a fruit and vegetable picking plant: “The locals hated us and we would get told to ‘F off’ home and stop taking jobs when we went into town. It made us laugh as we didn’t see too many of them wanting to do the work we were doing. While I don’t mind working hard it felt bad that we were looked down on when we were working so hard.” Tomas, a Polish 29 year old ex slaughterhouse worker for the UK, also says how him and his colleagues “were often made to feel unwelcome and a bit of a problem.” Migrant workers are treated as “disposable assets”. Eastern Europeans, in particular, like Ramos and Tomas come to the UK with hopes of attaining the “American British Dream”. When people are desperate and escape to an unknown country where they do not have reliable contacts or know how to communicate properly- they are put at risk of being taken advantage of. Kath, a member of one of the largest trade unions in the UK, states that “ the fact that overseas workers do not tend to know their rights make them easier to exploit”. This especially occurs for illegal workers in the country. Migrant workers do not always come to the UK legally, some of them are human trafficked. In 2019, news broke worldwide that 12 Polish nationals were arrested, in the UK, for creating the largest human trafficking circuit. This gang brought in around 400 people, over several years, whom prior were homeless and/or suffering from addictions. They lured these desperate people in by offering free housing and “well-paid” jobs in Britain. Instead, these immigrants were starved, crowded into seedy housing, forced to work hard jobs for long hours, and were robbed many times of their small wages. One of the victims, Mariusz Rycaczewksi, from Poland, described the conditions of his captivity to the BBC: “Every day we traveled 90 minutes to work. I was picking vegetables in the rain. No toilet facilities, no shower in the house. On Friday, the trafficker comes round and pays me sometimes £40, sometimes £25. The most I got was £75.” A European Union report from 2019 found that nearly half of trafficking victims were citizens of the bloc, with the largest numbers coming from Romania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria. Human trafficking with forced labor is happening worldwide. In 2017, The New Yorker published an article on how a chicken plant in the United States illegally employed and exploited
underage workers and illegal immigrants. Kath spent time in North Wales seeking to recruit workers from food processing companies to the union. She states that the trafficking is "Far worse than we think as the traffickers are always ahead of the ‘game’. The recent sentencing of the two men who transported the people who died in the lorry in Essex is an example of how widespread this abuse is. People being trafficked into the country is not uncommon we just don’t know the full extent as so many people go missing.” In the mainstream media, almost anywhere in the world, migrants are painted out to be violent, abusive, and unpredictable. It would be interesting to know what types of jobs those violent migrants worked for. A 2016 journal by Organization states, "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.” Another journal, published in 2009 by Organization and Environment, states that "slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries.” 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 and disassociate 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." Industrial farming began in the nineteenth century as a response to the rapid urbanization experienced during the Industrial Revolution. Fitzgerald states in her report, on the social history of the slaughterhouse, that there were not only concerns about food hygiene and disease but concern for the effect public killing had on both the butchers and observers, as the slaughter of animals publicly educated men in the practice of violence and cruelty. Abattoirs, away from the city centre, would conceal the violence enveloped through animal slaughter. The elimination of private slaughter was also supposed to impose a careful system of regulation for the “morally dangerous” task of putting animals to death. Meat packing millionaire Philip Danforth Amour’s invention of the “disassembly line” increased the productivity and profit margin of the meat packing industry. However, with the industrialized machinery and rapid circuit lines, there has been a concern for workers’ physical and mental health as well as ethical and environmental ramifications caused from slaughtering mass amounts of animals for meat. Working in a slaughterhouse is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. Ramos says, “I didn’t work in a meat processing plant although I know friends and acquaintances who did, and they tell me it was even worse. The conditions were poor, the animals were treated badly, and the accommodation they had to live in was dirty and overcrowded.” On average, slaughterhouse workers kill, for instance, 20 pigs an hour or 250 cows, each, a day. The job is labor intensive. Like Ramos, slaughterhouse workers work long shifts. However, unlike Ramos, slaughterhouse employees are in an environment of death.
Desperate cries of animals, mounds of heads, and blood spattered walls surround their work environment. In Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Green, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S Meat Industry, the author quotes a man who slaughtered young pigs: “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 let's [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.” In 2018, the Italian Journal of Food Safety publicized how slaughterhouse workers are instructed to wear ear protectors to protect their hearing from the constant screams of animals being killed. In 2020, the BBC released an article on the confessions of an ex-slaughterhouse worker. The ex-abattoir worker says “there were a lot of workers who wouldn't have been able to talk about their feelings to the rest of us even if they'd wanted to. Many were migrant workers, predominantly from Eastern Europe, whose English wasn't good enough for them to seek help if they were struggling”. Many workers become desensitized and display levels of aggression similar to prison populations. Between 2009 and 2016, the animal welfare group Animal Aid secretly filmed inside 11 randomly chosen slaughterhouses in the UK. In shocking scenes, they found workers stubbing out cigarettes in pigs’ faces, and animals being stamped on, beaten and punched. Innocent, terrified animals were kicked as they dragged themselves along the slaughterhouse floor. Sheep were smashed headfirst against solid structures. It is common for the workers to develop PTSD and the lesser known PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress), cognitive dissociation, depression, and suicidal thoughts. All of these mental illnesses can lead to further violent and aggressive behavior, drug and/or alcohol abuse, and sometimes murders or suicide. Tomas states that “It was hard, the hours were long, it wasn’t comfortable as we had breaks but in a small dirty room with limited kitchen facilities. It wasn’t very hygienic. The hours were long..and we always felt tired.. we spent a lot of time in the pub and drinking was a problem. We missed home, we didn’t eat well and did boring work. A lot of people suffered and suffered, both physically and mentally, after they left”. There are horrors for the workers’ own lives. The physical brutality of the job has caused loss of limbs and even death. The ex-slaughterhouse worker, whose story was published in 2020 for the BBC, states that “There were countless occasions when, despite following all of the procedures for stunning, slaughterers would get kicked by a massive, spasming cow as they hoisted it up to the machine for slaughter”. In 2018, iNews reported that in six years 800 UK abattoir workers suffered serious injuries, 78 required amputations, and four died while at work. Slaughterhouse employee Adrian Roberts was crushed to death as he was cleaning a machine used to strip cattle carcasses of their hide. An inquest heard that the 49-year-old died when a hydraulic arm on the machine activated and crushed him against a guard rail at the Drury & Sons slaughterhouse in Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. The large sharp knives, automated machinery, and large and terrified animals are a danger to the worker’s physical well-being. The horrors do not stop here. Migrant food workers are succumbed to live in small and cheap accommodations. Ramos recounts his days working as a fruit and veggie picker “ Our
accommodation was poor too; first we were five to a caravan then 8 to a house that was in poor condition. It was like that for everybody.” It is extremely common for migrant food workers to live together in tight accommodations with many others. Tomas adds that he “used to share a car to the processing plant”. In 2020, this is extremely concerning with the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been many outbreaks, worldwide, of food workers spreading COVID. In May of 2020, the CDC reported that more than 4,000 meat plant workers had contracted COVID-19. It is of no surprise, as these workers are given no rights. Kath says that “the [work] premises are cramped, unhygienic and not cleaned regularly. I think that is due to the fact that low paid jobs are rarely the best protected.” Meat plants can’t halt production or instill social distancing when the demand for meat remains. Ramos states: “With COVID it would be a nightmare. If you have 7,8,9 men living in one house with one-bathroom, toilet, kitchen, shared bedrooms then going onto a dirty cramped workplace then of course infection will happen. At least I was working outside.” It also is a hazard for the towns which house slaughterhouse workers. As the workers live in poor neighborhoods, usually among other migrants and minorities, it is an issue of the injustice of inequality. In a report published by Public Health England, it states that the risk of dying among those diagnosed with COVID-19 is higher for those living in the more deprived areas than those living in the least deprived; and higher for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups than in White ethnic groups. They also found a particularly high increase in all cause of deaths among those born outside the UK and Ireland. Migrant workers, usually, did not have appropriate healthcare in the past, putting them at future risk of falling into a high-risk category. With their long work hours, pre-existing conditions, close contact with others, and health illiteracy- migrant workers are prone to catching COVID and can become super spreaders. “No British person would want to work and live like this, that’s why I smile when I see them wanting to have Brexit to stop us coming !!”, says Ramos. There is a lack of skilled slaughterhouse workers and a lack of desire from UK nationals to work these types of jobs. Who would want to work long shifts outside picking fruits and vegetables or work in a cold, bleak, and death filled slaughterhouse- all for minimum wage? No one. It is only the desperate, who are usually non UK nationals. Trade Unions have difficulty protecting these laborers, as many of the workers are afraid or inapt to communicate the horrors that they are succumbed to daily. Kath states that relatively few slaughterhouse workers are protected, as many are worried about repercussions and feel that they do not have many rights. “They would like to have better conditions, protection, hours and pay but they have low expectations as they believe they are expendable.” Unbeknownst to all this, meat eaters feel as though them eating meat is causing no harm. Most are unaware of the unjustifiable and immoral acts that the, previously living, animals succumbed to in order to become dead meat for their consumption. And worse, little do they know what the
workers experience. Most importantly, they do not know that many migrant slaughterhouse workers are human trafficked. It is very shocking that this is being ignored. Allegations of human trafficking, horrible work conditions, and health dangers have been published but there has been no serious exposure or demand for interrogation into this industry. The fashion, beauty, and produce industries have been boycotted for their malpractices; yet the meat industry gets away with their inhumane actions. Why is this? The BMPA states that the meat industry brings in 8.2 BILLION pounds to the UK every year. There is the argument of not buying factory farmed meat. However, that is very difficult as in 2017 Civil Eats spoke with BIJ reporters Wasley and Davies who stated that 95 % of meat sold in the UK is grown indoors in industrial warehouses. 3.4% is the free-range market, and 1% is the organic market. For now, it seems that omnivores will not give up meat, included in their holiday meals, because it “tastes good”. It is curious how there are no ad’s on how delicious fruit and veggies, their byproducts, or meat replicas are. It is so easy to consume meat in a sandwich, curry, or even prepare it when it’s cut by a butcher, for instance; but think about who it once was, then who killed it, and how wrong and inhumane their environment was and still is. Someone should make a “True Cost” documentary on slaughterhouse and industrial farm workers. Maybe that would change their mind. I wonder if the 87 % of the UK population would stop contributing to industrial farming if they were to read this piece. Paul McCarney famously said “ If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”