Most of us who eat meat regularly would still rather not kill an animal with our own hands. So we have, for generations, delegated that work to others.
Jennifer Dillard, at Georgetown Law, authored a new paper looking at what that delegation costs the workers of industrial slaughterhouses. She argues that prolonged work on a kill floor exposes workers to the risk of psychological damage, including post-traumatic stress disorder, and that they should be compensated under O.S.H.A. for any ill effects they suffer.
Giving slaughterhouse workers therapy might also reduce another cost associated with the meat-processing industry: increased crime.
Writing for the American Sociological Association, Amy Fitzgerald finds a spill-over effect from the violent work of the slaughterhouse into the surrounding community. According to her research, U.S. counties that have slaughterhouses consistently have higher rates of violent crime than demographically similar counties that don’t.
(Hat tip: Upton Sinclair)
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I wonder whether there’s a difference between, say, beef slaughterhouses and chicken processing plants? I ask since I live near the latter but not the former.
I never thought of it like that, but I guess it could be true. I wonder how indepth her research was. I wouldn’t want to have that job, however I imagine there are some people out there that could handle it, without any side affects.
If they need the therapy and the compensation then I say give it to them. If this is a serious issue that has been over looked then it needs to be fixed.
Rachel
The baked blogger
http://bakedblog.com
“U.S. counties that have slaughterhouses consistently have higher rates of violent crime than demographically similar counties that don’t.”
Is it not possible that slaughterhouses, which are quite large, are located in lower-income areas? Would this account for the higher rate of crime surrounding slaughterhouses, and not the fact that slaughtering of animals is taking place in the neighborhood?
I would have thought that those chicken processing plants are pretty traumatic. Stuffing the newly hatched male (non-egg producing) chicks in to sacks so that they suffocate would certainly ruin my day.
Coincidently, I posted the other day in the ‘reading material suggestion’ blog about a book called “Gig.”
In it, a Slaughterhouse HR director talks about the extremely difficult working conditions for killing floor workers. She talks about worker turnover being astronomically high, due to such mentally scarring activities. It’s my understanding that the slaughterhouse has now become, along with farmhand work, the type of jobs casual American citizens are no longer willing to work, and are thus normally filled with immigrant labor, also often illegal. I in no way intend to say that this might be some sort of correlation, but simply to add an anecdote to corroborate Prof. Dillar’s work.
It seems that they would have a tough time, however, receiving OSHA assistance when the employment door seems to be a large rotating one, with lots of un- and under-documented workers on staff. Especially considering it’s not in the bosses economic interests to assist with counseling and PSTD work for workers who wont be under their employ a week after being hired.
First of all, while there might be a correlation, the cause and effect relationship is unclear. While industrial slaughtering of animals might lead to desensitization for killing living things, I think it is more likely that sociopathic individuals might be attracted to a job like this.
Perhaps the solution to this problem is for people to slaughter their own food…or have everyone volunteer for shifts at the plant.
I don’t believe “sociopathic individuals might be attracted to a job like this [slaughterhouse]” any more than pedophiles are attrached to the Catholic clergy – which is to say, there’s no proof, or reason to believe, any correlation.
Just my two cents – it’s a combination of the (1)positions providing low-wages that attracts those who can’t get other, better-paying, less-stressful jobs, and (2) slaughterhouses prefer to locate in low-rent areas, where the surrounding neighborhood is already crime-ridden.
david (#3)-
“Is it not possible that slaughterhouses, which are quite large, are located in lower-income areas?”
That’s what “demographically similar areas” controls for.