Schlosser condemns meatpacking corporations in speech
Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, criticized the meatpacking industry Monday in the semester’s third President’s Lecture Series address.
In his speech, Schlosser made references to Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, which condemned the meatpacking industry in the early twentieth century.
Schlosser said the meatpacking industry today is more centralized and concentrated than it was when Sinclair wrote The Jungle a century ago.
“At the height of the ‘beef trust,’ the top five meatpacking companies controlled 55 percent of the market,” Schlosser said. “Today, the top four companies control 80 percent of the market. … Over the past 25 to 30 years, this country has returned to the jungle.”
Schlosser said The Jungle caused President Theodore Roosevelt to pass laws placing restrictions on corporations. However, he said, the laws benefited consumers more than workers.
The formation of unions was the turning point for meat packers, Schlosser said. What had been a low-income job became a middle-class job, and there were waiting lists to get a job as a meat packer, he said. By the 1970s, the meatpacking industry was a competitive market with hundreds of competing companies, but this trend began reversing during that decade, Schlosser said.
He said that according to Human Rights Watch, the meatpacking industry systematically violates human rights.
“Corporations pay workers low wages, they fire people because of injuries, they harass people who attempt to form unions and workers are routinely injured on the job,” he said.
Schlosser said at least 40,000-50,000 U.S. meatpacking workers are injured at work every year.
“These [injuries] are called accidents,” he said. “But when 800-1,000 people are hurt roughly in the same way every week, that’s not an accident. That’s a crime.”
Schlosser said the misdeeds of the meatpacking industry raise broader issues
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