Jungle, Upton Sinclair Describes Horrific Conditions Within

¶ … Jungle, Upton Sinclair describes horrific conditions within the meatpacking plants, and writes of men falling into tanks and being ground up with animal parts and then made into lard (Sinclair pp). He writes that it was Jurgis's job to slide the cows into the trap, calves and all, and on the floor below they took out these slunk calves and butchered them for meat and even used the skins (Sinclair pp).

Sinclair describes that cattle that came in hurt, with broken legs, or had died from causes no one knew, were called 'downers,' and the packing house had a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds, where they were handled with businesslike nonchalance and eventually scattered here and there with the rest of the meat so that they could not be identified (Sinclair pp).

The author also described that there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime (Sinclair pp). Sinclair wrote that there was meat stored in piles in rooms, where water from leaky roofs dripped over it, and thousands of rats raced about it to the point that a man could run his hand over the piles and sweep off handfuls of dried rat dung (Sinclair pp).

He also wrote that the packers would put poisoned bread out for the rats and when they would die, the rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together (Sinclair pp). Moreover, when the meat would be shoveled into carts, the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one, and that there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tid-bit (Sinclair pp).

In "The Chain Never Stops" which appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of Mother Jones, Eric Schlosser writes that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meatpacking is the nation's most dangerous occupation (Schlosser 40). He reports that in 1999, more than one-quarter of America's nearly 150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness, and that not only does the meatpacking industry have the highest injury rate, but by far has the highest rate of serious injury, in fact, "more than five times the national average (Schlosser 40).

Schlosser writes that the official figures estimate that roughly 40,000 meatpacking workers are injured on the job every year, however the actual number is probably higher since the industry has a well-documented history of "discouraging injury reports, falsifying injury data, and putting injured workers back on the job quickly to minimize the reporting of lost workdays" (Schlosser 40).

According to Schlosser, thirty years ago, the meatpacking industry was one of the highest-paid industrial jobs with the lowest turnover rates in the U.S., yet today it is one of the nation's lowest paid industrial jobs with one of the highest turnover rates (Schlosser 41).