Exploiting Rural Americans

In addition to taking advantage of immigrants, the farmed-animal industry also systematically exploits poor, rural Americans. Factory farms and slaughterhouses often move to some of the most economically depressed areas of the U.S. because these areas are home to workers who are desperate for any job that they can get. As with poor migrant workers, the rural poor often lack marketable skills, formal education, and access to living-wage jobs. These conditions make them less likely to know their rights and to press them to accept low wages and a dangerous work environment.

Slaughterhouses tend to attract drop-outs and drifters who are more likely to use drugs or commit crimes, and towns across America’s heartland have seen an increase in criminal activity that corresponds with the arrival of massive animal processing plants. For example, a year after an IBP slaughterhouse opened in Lexington, Nebraska, the once-tranquil town of 7,000 people had become a rural ghetto with the highest crime rate in the state. Schlosser writes, “Within a decade, the number of serious crimes doubled; the number of Medicaid cases nearly doubled; Lexington became a major distribution center for illegal drugs; [and] gang members appeared in town and committed drive-by shootings.”⁶¹ This story of the crime, drug use, and poverty that follows slaughterhouses has been replayed in small towns across America’s heartland.

Exploiting Child Labor

In its continuous quest to find cheaper labor, the farmed-animal industry has also turned to exploiting children. Multinational Monitor magazine has labeled Tyson one of the world’s “Ten Worst Corporations” because of its use of child labor.⁶² Kids have even been killed while working in slaughterhouses in the United States—a 15-year-old died, and a 14-year-old was seriously hurt in separate incidents at Tyson’s animal-processing plants. “One teenager died and another suffered serious injuries because this company ignored the law,” the U.S. Labor Department noted. “It was illegal for either one of them to be employed in the kind of work Tyson’s hired them to do.”⁶³ The company was fined for using child labor, but the exploitation of children persists in the farmed-animal industry.

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