FEAR FACTORY
“I hung the live birds on the line. Grab, reach, lift, jerk. Without stopping for hours every day,” a slaughterhouse worker recalls, looking at his deformed hands.
“But after a time, you see what happens. Your arms stick out and your hands are frozen. Look at me now. I’m 22 years old, and I feel like an old man.”
Not unlike animals trapped in a cage, workers in American meat-processing facilities are bound to their positions on “the line.” They labor among high-speed automated machinery that moves carcasses past them at a pace hard to imagine—so fast it “doesn’t give the animals enough time to die,” one worker told international advocacy organization Human Rights Watch (HRW). Intense pressure from higher-ups to maximize production, with little regard to workers—and none to animals—only makes the living hell that is slaughterhouse work that much worse.
