Cogs in the Great Machine

1. Cogs in the Great Machine By Brandon Pyle, Cory Mattingly, and Joe Boteler

2. A terrible menace! • The meatpacking industry has single-handedly destroyed countless towns. In an effort to respond to the demands of fast-food industries need of quickly produced meat, several factories – like the one in Greeley, Colorado – have cut wages, reducing a formerly good factory job to practically nothing. Often, factories will create migrant workforces, employing under skilled immigrants. Not only that, but because of lax safety regulations, factory workers have a serious chance of getting injured. Because of all of this, factories have created rural ghettos in American heartland.

3. Animal abuse! • Large scale slaughterhouses are notorious for mistreating the animals they are soon to kill. The ConAgra Beef Company, which runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex, earns more money every year from livestock products than any other country in the United States. Of course, this also means they have to have a large scale operation: which means that cows and sheep are often herded into pens that can barely contain such a large quantity. • Instead of being fed grass and other natural, wholesome feed, cows are forced to feed from a long, stone trough that is replenished daily with grain. Grain is often coupled with steroids that are put into a cow’s ear, so the cow will put on weight incredibly fast.

4. Animal abuse cont. • Due to the high volume of animals shoved into a fenced in area – and the feed that the cows are forced to eat – fecal matter is a huge problem. Instead of disposing of the waste in a bio-friendly way, the manure is shoveled into large pit called lagoons.

5. How it started • Slaughterhouses weren’t always disgusting. Before Greeley became a meatpacking town, it was a utopian community of small farmers. Nathan Meeker, a newspaper editor from New York City, wanted to create a city dedicated to agriculture. Eventually, Greeley, Colorado started to thrive because of the new business.

6. Go West • Slaughterhouses, and meat packaging companies were an incredibly corrupt part of the machine. They often placed their people in regulation agencies such as the IBP in order to hide discrepancies and achieve monetary gain. This is ultimately mob work and existed for the most part in New York and Chicago.

7. Bags of Money • This refers to the wages the slaughterhouses and meat packaging companies in Chicago pay their workers. They cut wages by 40% in order to obtain a profit ranging from 13.5 million to 14.5 million dollars. They are able to do this because of the Mexican immigrants coming to America in desperate need of work.

8. Burning Nose • The slaughterhouse in Lexington has a smell of three odors: burning hair and blood, a greasy smell, and the odor of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide is responsible for the rotten egg smell. This causes terrible headaches, respiratory problems, and permanent damage to the nervous system.

9. Burning Nose cont. • As much as a ton of hydrogen sulfide was released into the air each day. When the slaughterhouse was first opened, the CEO’s claimed that the smell of the factory would be a sweet smell and it would be “no different than that which you produce in your kitchen when you cook.”