Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, IA), April 23, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 Woodward Communications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, IA)

April 23, 2006 Sunday

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. b3

HEADLINE: Meatpacking still 'jungle' of controversy?;
Critics of industry see improvements since 1906, but they say safety remains an issue

BYLINE: SHARON COHEN

DATELINE: OMAHA, Neb.

BODY:
He works in a world of long knives and huge saws, blood and bone, arctic chill and sweltering heat. For Martin Cortez, this is life on the line as a meatpacker.
It's no place for the squeamish. Some workers can't stomach the gore - chopping up the meat and bones of hundreds of cattle, day after day. Cortez has been at it more than 30 years. It also can be very dangerous. Some workers have been slashed, burned or scarred. He has not.
Even so, Martin Cortez, a soft-spoken man with sad eyes, doesn't recommend the work. The thrashing animals, the heavy lifting ... all that goes into putting steak and hamburger on America's dinner tables, he says, makes for a backbreaking day on the killing floor.
"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.
It's not anywhere near as horrible as the world 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 the president, 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, sick workers spitting into processing vats and diseased animals stumbling to slaughter.
But 100 years later, the industry that produces the meat for America still faces some of the same tensions and troubles that Sinclair exposed.
In 1906, there were accusations that the meatpacking giants exploited immigrants. There also were battles over unions and complaints of paltry pay for hazardous work.
In 2006, the 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 The eastern Europeans who flocked to Chicago's bustling stockyards 100 years ago have been replaced by Mexican and Central American immigrants chasing their own dreams in the remote reaches of the rural Midwest and Southeast.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."
"It's extremely dangerous when it shouldn't be," he says. "Workers are exploited when they shouldn't be. The companies know it."
Others also say even with better regulation, if the meatpacking industry is judged against other workplace progress, it falls short.
"It's a new 'Jungle,' measured not against the standard of yesterday, but the standard of today," says Lourdes Gouveia, director of the Office for Latino/Latin American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
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 per year) are competitive, turnover is wildly exaggerated and safety has dramatically improved in recent years.
"It's a new world," says J. Patrick Boyle, the institute's president. "If Upton Sinclair walked through our plants today, he'd say he was a successful reformer. He'd be astonished and, I think, impressed with the changes that have occurred."
Some of those changes came soon after "The Jungle" was published. President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched investigators to Chicago and their report - detailing filthy conditions on the killing floors - was sent to Congress. Within months came two major reforms: the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. More legislation and improved technology followed over the decades.
Still, some people continue to draw parallels to "The Jungle." "I think they're living in a time warp," Boyle says.
Boyle says in the past 15 years, there has been a new emphasis on partnerships. The union, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and companies have collaborated to improve ergonomics and equipment while sharing ways to make the job safer, including more power tools, fewer knives and better-designed work stations.
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. (Still, that is among the highest of any industry.)
The GAO also cautions that progress might not be that dramatic because injuries and illnesses still appear to be underreported. Immigrants could fear retaliation or job loss, and supervisors might not report the problems or encourage workers to avoid doing so because some plants have incentives, such as money or other prizes, for maintaining a safe workplace.
Numbers aside, the GAO also says the industry still is plenty dangerous with knife-wielding workers standing long hours on fast-moving lines. Chemicals and animal waste also can lurk, with factory floors often being dark, loud, slippery or unbearably hot or bitter cold.
The risks are many: cuts and stabbings, burns, repetitive stress injuries, amputations and worse. Knife accidents blinded one meat worker and disfigured the face of another, the GAO said, citing OSHA records.
Oscar Montoya lost most of his left index finger in a 1999 accident using a huge split-saw to divide cattle carcasses. He had three operations, returned to meatpacking, then finally quit.
"It was just a lot harder than I thought it would be," he says. He's now a heat and air-conditioner repairman.
Turnover can exceed 100 percent in a year, the GAO said - a number that Boyle, the institute president, says is greatly overstated. He says meatpacking companies spent much time and money on training to ensure workers will stay.
Jose Maria Montoya (no relation to Oscar) lasted just a year his first time around at Nebraska Beef. He deboned meat and says the repetitive cutting motions, hour after hour, made his hands ache so badly, he lost all sensation in his fingers. He had night sweats. But he never complained.
"I didn't say anything," he explains, his voice rising with surprise by any suggestion that he would. "What can I do about it? 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.
The character who symbolized the struggle in "The Jungle," was Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant whose life was a nightmare. He was injured, lost his job, went to jail, his house was repossessed, his wife and son died.
"The Jungle" paints the most gut-wrenching possible portrait of those desperate times - designed to touch the nation's conscience. Today's real-life meatpacking story is far from that fictional horror, but parts of the book's message resonate in the here and now.
Thousands of immigrants still come, as they did a century ago.
Some are refugees from countries such as Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam; many more journey across the Mexican border and find their way to Nebraska, Kansas or other states where giant meat plants seem to have an inexhaustible need for labor.
Jose Maria Montoya left Mexico as a teen, hoping to make good money, then return home. It didn't turn out that way.
After he quit meatpacking, he stayed in the Omaha area, finding work in a garment factory. He says he was so good at cutting cloth, he more than doubled his $8-per-hour salary.
But the job fizzled out when, ironically, the company 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 grand ambition: He wants to start his own business making heavy-duty work uniforms. His slender, boyish face lights up just talking about it. "I love this kind of work," he says. "It's what I really want to do in my life."
He even has a name for his company: Del Valle Apparel.
But Montoya also has a mortgage, a stack of bills, a $12.50-per-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 so they can 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?"
Juan Valadez understands. When he arrived from Mexico 30 years ago looking for work, most doors were not open to him. Meatpacking was. He needed the check. The company needed him. It was a match.
Now, he says the rigors of the job have caught up with his 50-year-old body.
"The line never stops and you keep working and working and you get tired," he says. "You sometimes hope the line breaks so you can rest a little bit."
"It's the easiest job to get, but the hardest job to do. It kills you little by little."