Unionizing the World’s Largest Slaughterhouse
May 1, 2019
Capitalism has many victims, but few fare as badly as slaughterhouse workers. Every day, meatpacking workers risk life and limb to provide cheap meat for consumers. Despite this, political scientist Timothy Pachirat once described slaughterhouse work as a form of labor "considered morally and physically repellent by the vast majority of society that is sequestered from view rather than eliminated or transformed." Yet, slaughterhouses are the sites of some of labor's greatest triumphs. Lynn Waltz documents one such triumph in her book Hog Wild, which describes how meatpacking workers successfully established a union at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse in North Carolina. While Waltz focuses on the particular fight at the Tar Heel plant, the unionization success of the workers there provides important lessons for future labor struggles.
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