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Comment by hkxer | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that “The Jungle” spurred a huge improvement in safety regulations. Why do you think the conditions are still bad?

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Along with improvements in factory safety, child labor laws came about in the aftermath of the era Sinclair wrote about.

Why do you think rolling back any of those hard-won regulations is a good idea?

Stories I’ve heard lately are that the meat packing industry has been steadily slipping back on safety by repeatedly lobbying for and winning the right to run plants faster and faster, which has increased injury rates.

John Oliver covered this two years ago: https://youtu.be/IhO1FcjDMV4

ProPublica has some consistently high-quality reporting on meatpacking as a an industry from all kinds of perspectives - the (mis)management of them during the pandemic, the hiring of children to work there, the horrid safety conditions, etc.

https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=meatpacking

I'm not sure if ProPublica has a free, public dataset on meatpacking plants but they generally have datasets that you can purchase that pertain to particular areas of reporting: Medicare and Medicaid overbilling / fraud; repeated pollution violators who keep paying fines instead of stopping polluting; etc. If anyone knows of a dataset on meatpacking plants, health and/or safety violations, etc. please do share the link to the dataset.

It's kind of ironic for some people in this thread to dismiss meatpacking jobs as "low value" when they have been crucial to keep the supply chain functional. Severe chicken shortages around 2020-2021 were mainly caused by workers in that industry falling ill, because the work conditions there are ideal incubators for respiratory illnesses (cold temperature, indoor environment, lots of people inside the same space, etc.). These jobs exist so anyone can walk into a grocery store and have an obscene selection of animal protein available for purchase without ever having to touch an animal. They are crucial to the modern consumer society and the way these workers have been mistreated have been awful enough without adding god damn child labour to the mix. We need far more regulatory pressure on the industry, not less.

The argument that more pay & benefits for these workers will make meat more expensive is also nothing but a scare tactic. There is already so much automation that the increased cost will hardly be noticeable when it is distributed among purchasing units at the consumer end.

Don’t worry, the TV said regulation is bad!

> Why do you think the conditions are still bad?

Since the jungle was published, more recent research has been published to show that simply having a meatpacking or butcher factory in the community causes more violent crime, sexual assault, and drug addiction.

Source?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816... - "Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From “The Jungle” Into the Surrounding Community"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34231439/ - "The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review "

In case you've been living under a rock for the past several decades, it's because Republicans are trying as hard as they can to roll back the clock on safety, government regulation, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, trans rights, unions, fair working conditions, health care, birth control, abortion, and equal pay.

Profit before human or worker rights? People working in these companies in Germany are fucked up because of all the killing and handling of dead animals.

And how do you need to be to want kids working in anything before they completed their education (minus a couple easy summer jobs). Some American legislators are scum.

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