Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia), April 23, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 Richmond Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)

April 23, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: GENERAL; Pg. A-4

HEADLINE: Is 'The Jungle' history?

BYLINE: By Sharon Cohen

DATELINE: OMAHA, NEB.

BODY:
Martin Cortez works in a world of long knives and huge saws, blood and bone, arctic chill and sweltering heat on the line as a meatpacker. It's no place for the squeamish, and it can be very dangerous. Cortez has been at it more than 30 years. He's seen workers slashed, burned or scarred. He doesn't recommend the backbreaking work. "You know what I like to say to newcomers?" he says. "They don't kill cows. They kill people." This, some would say, is The Jungle of 2006.
LOOKING BACK
It's not anywhere near as horrible as the world that muckraker Upton Sinclair surveyed 100 years ago in his sensational book "The Jungle." A harrowing portrait of an immigrant's oppressive life in meatpacking, the novel angered President Theodore Roosevelt, sent meat sales into a tailspin and inspired landmark consumer-protection laws.
Even the harshest critics acknowledge government regulations and inspectors have made meatpacking far cleaner and safer than it was when Sinclair described rats scurrying over piles of meat and sick animals stumbling to slaughter.
SOME SIMILARITIES
In 1906, there were accusations the meatpacking giants exploited immigrants, battles over unions and complaints of paltry pay for hazardous work.
In 2006, those problems persist - though the names have changed. The eastern Europeans who flocked to Chicago's bustling stockyards 100 years ago have been replaced by Mexican and Central American immigrants chasing their own dreams in the remote reaches of the rural Midwest and Southeast.
"It's not as bad as it was in the sense of the sheer brutality of 100 years ago - before labor laws and food safety laws," says Lance Compa, a Cornell University labor law expert who wrote a stinging Human Rights Watch report on the meat and poultry industry last year. "But for the times we're in now, the situation is much in line with what it was 100 years ago."
INDUSTRY CITES PROGRESS
The American Meat Institute, the trade group founded the same year Sinclair's book was published, dismisses those claims. It says wages (about $25,000 a year) are competitive, turnover is wildly exaggerated and safety has dramatically improved in recent years.
Institute President J. Patrick Boyle says in the last 15 years, there has been a new emphasis on partnerships - the union, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and companies collaborating to improve ergonomics and equipment and share ways to make the job safer.
It appears to have paid off: Federal figures show illnesses and injuries in the meat and poultry industry fell by half from 1992 to 2001 - from 29.5 to 14.7 per 100 full-time workers, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report.
A DANGEROUS WORKPLACE
Still, the number of workers injured in meatpacking is among the highest of any industry, and the GAO cautions injuries and illnesses still appear to be underreported. Immigrants may fear retaliation or job loss.
The risks are many: cuts and stabbings, burns, repetitive stress injuries and amputations. Hours are long, lines move fast and floors can be dark, loud, slippery or extremely hot or cold.
Turnover can exceed 100 percent in a year, the GAO said - a number the industry disputes.
ONE WORKER'S STORY
Jose Maria Montoya lasted just a year in his first stint in a plant. He deboned meat and says the repetitive cutting motions made his hands ache so badly, he lost all sensation in his fingers.
"I didn't say anything," he explains. "When you need something [money] for your family, you don't ask questions. You just do it. I don't have many choices. I don't speak English very well. I don't have much education."
His words are reminiscent of Sinclair's days when Lithuanians, Poles and other eastern Europeans crowded into the shadow of big-city slaughterhouses in hopes of building a better life. Their schooling counted for less than a strong back, a weak nose and willingness to sweat.
HARD WORK PAYS OFF
After he quit meatpacking, Montoya stayed in the Omaha area, working in a garment factory that, ironically, later moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages. Montoya picked up new skills, learned to drive a forklift, then returned to the same meatpacking company - this time in the shipping department.
At 37, Montoya has a mortgage, a stack of bills, a $12.50-an-hour wage and eight kids to feed. Though his wife works, their combined dollars only go so far.
"My dream now is for my kids," he says. Montoya says he urges his children to study hard and become teachers and doctors, lawyers and judges. And when they whine about school, he firmly silences them:
"You have no choice," he says. "You want to be like me and work like a donkey?"
BOOK PROVOKES A CENTURY LATER
In 1906, "The Jungle" shocked the nation - and President Theodore Roosevelt - with its depiction of meatpacking as a filthy, unsafe and grueling industry.
Its author, Upton Sinclair, was a young Socialist who came to Chicago in 1904 to write an exposé of abysmal working conditions in the stockyards. He lived among immigrant meatpackers and made clandestine visits to plants.
Within months after "The Jungle" was published, two landmark measures became law: the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. More legislation and improved technology followed over the decades.
A century later, scholars still debate the message of "The Jungle."
Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University in Mansfield, said Sinclair's words still resonate.
"Today, the meatpacking work force once again consists largely of vulnerable new immigrants, arriving from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, in contrast to the Eastern Europe of Sinclair's time," wrote Phelps, editor of a 2005 edition of the novel.
"Were 'The Jungle' written today, the name Jurgis Rudkus would have to be replaced by Jose Ramirez. Would much else need to be changed?"
But others have argued that Sinclair's Socialist politics colored his message.
In a February book column in The Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller, a National Review writer, said the descendants of Sinclair's "exploited workers" no longer are in meatpacking plants.
"Instead, they occupy better jobs as fully assimilated Americans," he wrote.
"They also eat safe meat, processed for them by a new generation of immigrant laborers from Latin America and Southeast Asia - people whose lives are no doubt challenging, but also full of the realistic optimism that one day they will be no longer tired, no longer poor, and breathing free."
INSIGHT
Hispanic workers in the meat industry - including poultry - account for about 35 percent of the work force, according to federal statistics. One federal official estimated as many as one in four workers in meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa might be illegal immigrants.
VIRGINIA FACILITIES
The USDA conducts inspections at five Virginia poultry plants and two pork plants. Another 44 meat-processing establishments are inspected by state inspectors under a cooperative program with USDA.
Another 17 establishments are under state inspection but cannot ship meat out of state, according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
- Greg Edwards

NOTES: A CLOSER LOOK . . . MEATPACKING NOW AND THEN 100 years ago, "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair exposed horrible conditions in American meatpacking plants. A century later, much has changed, but dangers remain.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO