Greg Wimmer's Profile

spread of disease.
The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive
materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein
content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of the cattle
in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes-the rendered
remains of dead sheep and dead cattle-until August of 1997. They
were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year,
purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices
after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible
for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), also known as "mad cow disease." Nevertheless,
current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be
rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations
not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry
to be fed dead cattle. Americans who spent more than six months
in the United Kingdom during the 1980s are now forbidden to donate
blood, in order to prevent the spread of BSE's human variant,
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But cattle blood is still put into
the feed given to American cattle. Steven P. Bjerklie, a former
editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by
what goes into cattle feed these days. "Goddamn it, these
cattle are ruminants," Bjerklie says. "They're designed
to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs
for a reason-to eat products that have a high cellulose content.
They are not designed to eat other animals."

The waste products from poultry plants,
including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also
being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in Preventive
Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds
of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. According to Dr.
Neal D. Bernard, who heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, chicken manure may contain dangerous bacteria such as
Salmonella and Campylobacter, parasites such as tapeworms and
Giardia lamblia, antibiotic residues, arsenic, and heavy metals.

The pathogens from infected cattle are
spread not only in feedlots, but also at slaughterhouses and hamburger
grinders. The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate
meat are the removal of an animal's hide and the removal of its
digestive system. The hides are now pulled off by machine; if
a hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of dirt and manure
may fall from it onto the meat. Stomachs and intestines are still
pulled out of cattle by hand; if the job is not performed carefully,
the contents of the digestive system may spill everywhere.

A century ago, American ranchers found
themselves in a similar predicament. The leading sectors of the
nation's economy were controlled by corporate alliances known
as "trusts." There was a Sugar Trust, a Steel Trust,
a Tobacco Trust-and a Beef Trust. It set the prices offered for
cattle. Ranchers who spoke out against this monopoly power were
often blackballed, unable to sell their cattle at any price. In
1917, at the height of the Beef Trust, the five largest meatpacking
companies-Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy- controlled
about 55 percent of the market. The early twentieth century had
trusts, but it also had "trustbusters," progressive
government officials who believed that concentrated economic power
posed a grave threat to American democracy. The Sherman Antitrust
Act had been passed in 1890 after a congressional investigation
of price fixing in the meatpacking industry, and for the next
two decades the federal government tried to break up the Beef
Trust, with little success. In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson ordered
the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the industry. The
FTC inquiry concluded that the five major meatpacking firms had
secretly fixed prices for years, had colluded to divide up markets,
and had shared livestock information to guarantee that ranchers
received the lowest possible price for their cattle. Afraid that
an antitrust trial might end with an unfavorable verdict, the
five meatpacking companies signed a consent decree in 1920 that
forced them to sell off their stockyards, retail meat stores,
railway interests, and livestock journals. A year later Congress
created the Packers and Stockyards Administration (P&SA),
a federal agency with a broad authority to prevent price-fixing
and monopolistic behavior in the beef industry.

For the next fifty years, ranchers sold
their cattle in a relatively competitive marketplace. The price
of cattle was set through open bidding at auctions. The large
meatpackers competed with hundreds of small regional firms. In
1970 the top four meatpacking firms slaughtered only 21 percent
of the nation's cattle. A decade later, the Reagan administration
allowed these firms to merge and combine without fear of antitrust
enforcement. The Justice Department and the P&SA's successor,
the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA),
stood aside as the large meatpackers gained control of one local
cattle market after another. Today the top four meatpacking firms-ConAgra,
IBP, Excel, and National Beef-slaughter about 84 percent of the
nation's cattle. Market concentration in the beef industry is
now at the highest level since record-keeping began in the early
twentieth century.

Today's unprecedented degree of meatpacking
concentration has helped depress the prices that independent ranchers
get for their cattle. Over the last twenty years, the rancher's
share of every retail dollar spent on beef has fallen from 63
cents to 46 cents. The four major meatpacking companies now control
about 20 percent of the live cattle in the United States through
"captive supplies"-cattle that are either maintained
in company-owned feedlots or purchased in advance through forward
contracts. When cattle prices start to rise, the large meatpackers
can flood the market with their own captive supplies, driving
prices back down. They can also obtain cattle through confidential
agreements with wealthy ranchers, never revealing the true price
being paid. ConAgra and Excel operate their own gigantic feedlots,
while IBP has private arrangements with some of America's biggest
ranchers and feeders, including the Bass brothers, Paul Engler,
and J. R. Simplot. Independent ranchers and feedlots now have
a hard time figuring out what their cattle are actually worth,
let alone finding a buyer for them at the right price. On any
given day in the nation's regional cattle markets, as much as
80 percent of the cattle being exchanged are captive supplies.
The prices being paid for these cattle are never disclosed.

... In the 1980s large numbers of young men and women from Mexico,
Central America, and Southeast Asia started traveling to rural
Colorado. Meatpacking jobs that had once provided a middle-class
American life now offered little more than poverty wages. Instead
of a waiting list, the slaughterhouse seemed to acquire a revolving
door, as Monfort plowed through new hires to fill the roughly
nine hundred jobs. During one eighteen-month period, more than
five thousand different people were employed at the Greeley beef
plant-an annual turnover rate of about 400 percent. The average
worker quit or was fired every three months.

Today, roughly two-thirds of the workers
at the beef plant in Greeley cannot speak English. Most of them
are Mexican immigrants who live in places like the River Park
Mobile Court, a collection of battered old trailers a quarter-mile
down the road from the slaughterhouse. They share rooms in old
motels, sleeping on mattresses that cover the floor. The basic
pay at the slaughterhouse is now $9.25 an hour. Adjusted for inflation,
today's hourly wage is more than a third lower than what Monfort
paid forty years ago when the plant opened. Health insurance is
now offered to workers after six months on the job; vacation pay,
after a year. But most of the workers will never get that vacation.
A spokesman for ConAgra recently acknowledged that the turnover
rate at the Greeley slaughterhouse is about 80 percent a year.
That figure actually represents a decline from the early 1990s.

For more than a century, California agriculture
has been dependent on migrant workers, on young men and women
from rural villages in Mexico who travel north to pick by hand
most of the state's fruits and vegetables. Migrant workers have
long played an important role in the agricultural economy of other
states, picking berries in Oregon, apples in Washington, and tomatoes
in Florida. Today, the United States, for the first time in its
history, has begun to rely on a migrant industrial workforce.
Thousands of new migrants now travel north to work in the slaughterhouses
and meat processing plants of the High Plains. Some of these new
migrants save their earnings, then return home. Some try to establish
roots and settle in meatpacking communities. And others wander
the country, briefly employed in one state after another, looking
for a meatpacking plant that treats its workers well. These migrants
come mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many were
once farm workers in California, where steady jobs in the fields
are now difficult to find. To farm workers who've labored outdoors,
ten hours a day, for the nation's lowest wages, meatpacking jobs
often sound too good to be true. Picking strawberries in California
pays about $5.50 an hour, while cutting meat in a Colorado or
Nebraska slaughterhouse can pay almost twice that amount. In many
parts of rural Mexico and Guatemala, workers earn about $5 a day.

As in so many other aspects of meatpacking,
IBP was a trailblazer in recruiting migrant labor. The company
was among the first to recognize that recent immigrants would
work for lower wages than American citizens-and would be more
reluctant to join unions. To sustain the flow of new workers into
IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting
teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has
recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It
has recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York,
New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has
hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away.
IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican
radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates
a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service
estimates that about one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in
Iowa and Nebraska are illegal immigrants. The proportion at some
slaughterhouses can be much higher. Spokesmen for IBP and the
ConAgra Beef Company adamantly deny that they in any way seek
illegal immigrants. "We do not knowingly hire undocumented
workers," an IBP executive told me. "IBP supports INS
efforts to enforce the law and do[es] not want to employ people
who are not authorized to work in the United States." Nevertheless,
the recruiting efforts of the American meatpacking industry now
target some of the most impoverished and most vulnerable groups
in the Western Hemisphere. "If they've got a pulse,"
one meatpacking executive joked to the Omaha World-Herald in 1998,
"we'll take an application."