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Much modern farming less resembles gardening than strip-mining |
Amid all the ICE raids which crisscrossed America last week, tipping into street protests in Los Angeles, the Omaha meatpacking raids got forgotten by the national media. This perhaps isn’t surprising. A substantially industrial city with limited glamour, Omaha often gets overlooked unless something catastrophic happens, like blizzards closing Interstate 80, or local darling Bright Eyes releasing an album.
Yet this raid speaks to an undercurrent in American policy. Specifically, since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation establishing the Department of Agriculture, American ag policy has focused on abundant yields and low prices. This has involved persistent overproduction of commodity crops, coupled with price supports, ever-improving technology, and efforts to create markets internationally.
As George Pyle writes, efforts to bolster production probably made sense in the middle 19th century, during a civil war, when threats to food supply were common war tactics. But conditions have changed markedly, and our central approach hasn’t kept pace. Agricultural technologies based on diesel-burning equipment and ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers have resulted in bloated yields, as Vaclav Smil writes.
Nick Reding describes how consolidation in the ag processing industry has cut wages so low, workers can only make rent by taking double shifts. Such marathon hours are often only possible when workers supplement themselves with illegal amphetamines. Though I broadly support drug legalization, amphetamines are so destructive that even I prefer they remain illegal. However, workers use them for one basic reason: to keep working, and get paid.
Nor are these outcomes unexpected. As Greg Grandin writes, President Clinton knew that subsidized American crops were artificially abundant and cheap. Before NAFTA went into force, he authorized what was, until then, the largest increase in Border Patrol manpower ever. Clinton knew that lifting trade barriers on subsidized American agriculture would cause food to hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing.
And he was right. Rural poverty in Mexico’s agrarian south quickly exceeded 70%, forcing workers, mostly men, to abandon ancestral farms and go anywhere that work existed. Something similar happened when Clinton forced Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to sign a free-trade agreement as a condition of American involvement in deposing Haiti’s illegal coup. Now, Mexican and Haitian workers comprise the largest number of America’s undocumented population.
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Pigs don't live in pens anymore; this is where your pork comes from |
Numerous White Americans remain invested in farming and agriculture, but primarily as owners or live-in bosses. Because much industrialized agriculture uses machine labor, full-time farmhands usually aren’t necessary. Workers remain necessary while planting and harvesting, but these aren’t full-time positions. This work mostly gets done by migrants—a condition few White workers would accept. Undocumented laborers mostly do this work.
That brings us full-circle to the meat processing plants which began this essay. Before 1990, meat processing was considered semi-skilled labor. The meatpackers in Upton Sinclair’s propaganda novel The Jungle were mostly White, first- or second-generation Eurpoean immigrants. But as Nick Redling describes, meatpacking industry consolidation after 1990 drove wages so low that workers with kids and mortgages can’t afford those jobs anymore.
Currently, America enjoys the cheapest food in world history; per George Pyle, most Americans pay more for packaging than for food at the supermarket. But food is historically cheap because it requires undocumented workers pulling abusive hours in Spartan conditions to plant, harvest, and process it. Workers with legal rights would complain to the NLRB under such conditions; undocumented workers have nowhere to complain.
Eyal Press claims that killing floor workers are among America’s most despised, doing work which consumers demand, but which offends our morals. We expect faceless strangers to kill, dress, and package our meat. Similar problems abound in related fields. Tom Russell notes that the Trump Administration wants a border wall built in regions where only Mexican migrants have the skills necessary for such epic construction.
Anecdotes of supervisors demanding long hours and dangerous work from meatpackers are legend. These demands come with the threat, either explicit or implicit, that we’ll call La Migra if you don’t perform. But like a nuclear warhead, this threat works only when unrealized. Once you drop your atomic bomb, literal or metaphorical, it’s expended, gone forever. And management is left with a vacant killing floor.
Donald Trump heard the threats of calling Immigration, and instead of recognizing them for the rhetorical device they were, he believed them. He authorized his administration to perform massive round-ups that look good on right-wing cable TV, but undercut employers’ labor pool. If this doesn’t stop, agriculture employers will have to start paying workers what they’re worth—and you’ll see it in your grocery bill.