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4. Labor, Injury, and Self-Preservation in the Slaughterhouse
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
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Having grown up in Mexico doing an assortment of odd jobs to help their families scrape by, and having kept afloat financially north of the border by laboring in the fields, orchards, or other areas of the informal economy, the immigrants we interviewed found their lives to be dramatically changed when they gained legalization and began working at IBP. With over 1,500 employees at its Pasco facility, IBP was much larger than any workplace these individuals had ever entered before. And more than just a source of income, it was its own world with its own culture—even its own popular mythology. Melquíades “Flaco” (“skinny guy”) Pereyra remembered the dread with which he anticipated his job there after opportunities in local canneries dried up as winter approached in 1987: I had heard a whole lot of talk about IBP. There were three guys living with me, and those three were working at IBP . . . they didn’t talk about anything else but IBP. About the work, and how their hands hurt; how their backs hurt. And—and it was horrible, really, to hear them talk. . . . The way they were talking , I imagined that this job was just for strong people. . . . They told me, “Don’t go; you won’t be able to do it. You’re really skinny; you’re just a little guy.” . . . I had no other option. I struggled for two months to get an easier job, where I could, but they were all gone, the time was up, and I had to go to IBP. I went to IBP; I applied. And when I arrived the person who interviewed me says: “And you, how much time do you think you’re going to last here?”1 I told him, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe a year; maybe two years. I don’t know.” . . . I started working at IBP. And I regretted it very much. I regretted it a lot; I regretted it because it was hell to work inside there.2 There was something all consuming about working at IBP, as Pereyra’s reminiscences about his housemates illustrate. There was also something frankly debilitating about it. Part of what made the job seem to colonize the rest of everyday existence was the relentlessness of the pain and exhaustion people experienced from working there. The job at IBP was a far more regular and formal kind of employment than 4. Labor, Injury, and Self-Preservation in the Slaughterhouse 111 these immigrants previously had obtained. Yet while it offered relatively greater economic stability, it also promised newly acute insecurity and vulnerability of a brutally physical nature. In exchange for dependable wages, benefits, and the chance to labor under a roof instead of out in the field, the workers urged us to see, they had to work in a state of constant crisis as they battled to stave off complete bodily devastation. After abandoning work in the fields and surviving the manifold anxieties of life in the illegal zone, individuals like Flaco Pereyra and his housemates had entered a new terrain within the biopolitical formation involving a fresh set of difficulties for immigrant workers. The meatpacking industry had constructed this social space for immigrant workers as part of the historic overhaul of its hiring practices, production methods, marketing priorities, and capital accumulation strategies —a process inaugurated, as journalist and author Eric Schlosser terms it, by “the IBP revolution” in the 1960s. IBP’s engineers designed an innovative, highly automated production process that used a variety of emergent technologies and enabled a much more thorough division of labor. IBP’s cattle “disassembly line” thus vastly reduced the company ’s reliance on skilled, unionized, U.S.-born workers while making possible much faster rates of production and far higher volumes of output. At the same time, IBP and the other beef industry giants cut production expenses (e.g., by lowering cattle transport costs) and reduced exposure to union pressures by relocating their facilities from major cities like Chicago to little country towns like Wallula, Washington , or Greeley, Colorado (Schlosser 2002, 153–54).3 Wages in the meat industry fell precipitously, losing 50 percent of real value in the last quarter of the twentieth century, with deunionization and the loss of union militancy as key factors in this shift (Apostolidis and Brenner 2005; Craypo 1994, 70–79).4 Immigrant workers, in turn, provided a logical and increasingly plentiful new labor source to take jobs that no longer compensated...