Tag Archives: workers

Capturing what really goes on

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Here’s a great idea from our friends in Canada. Why not install cameras on factory farms and slaughterhouses? Advocacy group Animal Justice is calling for legislation requiring cameras inside farms and slaughterhouses to improve transparency, accountability and the humane treatment of animals in the agricultural industry. If the animals are not being abused as the meat industry says then they have nothing to worry about.

It’s been said that if slaughter houses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians. It seems to us that installing cameras is a lot easier than making glass walls.  According to an Animal Justice spokesperson, “Right now, the lives of farmed animals are kept hidden from the public, as animals are mainly housed behind closed doors on private property. Consumers don’t have the right to visit the farms that supply their food, so there is a severe lack of transparency about food production,”

Installing cameras would also reduce the need for animal welfare advocates to surreptitiously document farm animal abuse. Recently, Animal Justice has secretly recorded video exposing shocking abuse on a hog farm. The video, which it says was shot between April and June this year, shows pigs enduring abuse, injuries and neglect.

Animal Justice is calling for legislation requiring cameras inside farms and slaughterhouses to improve transparency, accountability and the humane treatment of animals in the agricultural industry. We think it would also protect workers from abuse. We think this a great idea and wish we could have similar legislation on this side of the border.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls…

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Planted Foods factory in Switzerland

Paul McCartney, a former Beatle and longtime vegetarian, famously said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”

Although one of the most well-known quotes in the animal compassion movement, it took the team behind Planted Foods—a Swiss food tech company dedicated to ending animal suffering through tasty plant-based alternatives to meat—to run with the idea.

Convinced that the food industry needed to be more transparent about its cruelty-free ingredients and processes, Planted Foods made this quote literal by building an enormous glasshouse around their production in the heart of their Switzerland-based factory.

A slaughterhouse worker

Slaughterhouses are often miles away from urban centers, guarded by impenetrable walls and perplexing laws. To date, the primary means of drawing attention to the non-transparency of the industry has been through activists sneaking out footage of terrible conditions experienced by animals and practices the slaughterhouse workers endure.

Planted’s Co-Founder Pascal Bieri says, “Unlike the animal meat industry, we have nothing to hide.” Open, airy, and entirely transparent, their factory and ethos is a sharp contrast to the efforts of meat manufacturers to hide the harshness of their production processes from consumers.

Covid-19 harms both workers and animals

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Slaughterhouses kill more than just animals. Meatpacking plants, along with prisons, have become the nation’s leading hot spots for the spread of COVID-19 infections.

Thousands of meatpacking workers have fallen ill, many have died. Virus outbreaks at meatpacking plants have lead to the virus spreading more widely in surrounding communities, said Nicholas Christakis, director of Yale University’s Human Nature Lab and a specialist in how contagion travels through social networks.

While we wrote back in June 2020 about Covid 19 spreading in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, we now know so much more about how the virus spreads in these places. Slaughterhouses and meat processing plants are favorable environments for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The virus thrives in lower temperatures and in very high or very low relative humidity. Metallic surfaces retain live viruses. Aerosols, densely combining dust, feathers, and feces, are produced in the plants, and intense water use carries materials extensively over surfaces. Workers must speak loudly or shout over the noise, releasing more droplets and spreading them further. Workplaces are crowded, and social distancing is difficult. The plight of the slaughterhouse workers was already dire, but this just puts another layer on their hardship.

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Slavery in Seafood

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Thai fishing boat with peopleThe seafood industry in Thailand suffers from widespread worker abuse amounting to slavery, according to a recent report by the nonprofit organization Verité. Virtually all American and European companies that buy seafood from Thailand are at risk of receiving products tainted by slavery, according to this report, which was released on Monday. The report catalogs deceptive recruitment practices, hazardous working conditions and very severe violence on fishing boats and in processing factories.

Most of Thailand’s seafood workers are migrants from neighboring Cambodia or Burma, brought into Thailand illegally by traffickers, provided fake documents and often actually sold to boat captains, the report said. On fishing boats, these workers routinely face limited access to medical care for injuries or infection, work 16 hour days, seven days a week, endure chronic sleep deprivation, and suffer from an insufficient supply of water for drinking, showering or cooking, the report found. They are not free to quit or leave. Often they are “kept” for year or even extended periods of time. The evidence of abuse is often just buried at sea. One Burmese worker said, “When someone dies, he gets thrown into the water.”

We reported on this sad state of affairs two years ago with the hope that conditions would improve. The Thai ambassador to the US says they take the problem seriously, but while they have clamped down a bit, it’s still not nearly enough.

Other human casualties of the animal products industry include those who work in slaughterhouses. While there’s no suggestion of slavery, slaughterhouse workers also face well documented abuses and very dangerous working conditions.

While authorities try to improve these problems, the best answer is to go veg. You’ll not only stop supporting worker abuse, but you’ll help the animals and the environment as well.