Talk:Meat-packing industry/Archive 1

Untitled
I've heard, in the 1870s, Mike Cudahy intro refridgeration, if it helps... Trekphiler 05:26, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Original Research
Wikipedia articles must remain unbiased, and sources need to be attributed to all claims made. See WP:OR and WP:NPOV. Some of the discussion about labor disputes seems to be non-neutral. At the very least, these claims must be attributed to a reliable source. Nimur 02:47, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Removed a lot of anti-capitalism stuff
Some comments on my edit;

''Because no two animals are the same, the meat packing industry has not been able to automate to the same extent that some other food processors have and remains very labor-intensive. If the meat is to be processed in as cost-effective a manner as possible, labor costs must be minimized by paying the lowest wages possible and maximizing productivity from the workforce. This combined with the nature of the work makes conditions intolerable to many people. In many plants, fewer than one out of ten recruits remains beyond the probationary period.''

Wages need to rise to the level sufficient to retain staff. If the economy is growing, there will be competition for labour, and so wages will be forced upwards. If the economy is shrinking, there will be competition for jobs, and wages will be forced downloads. If an enterprise does not pay sufficient wages, such that in the local economic environment other work pays as well for less effort or discomfort, they will not retain staff.

The article states;

If the meat is to be processed in as cost-effective a manner as possible, labor costs must be minimized by paying the lowest wages possible and maximizing productivity from the workforce.

This is of course a general statement which is true for any industry.

This combined with the nature of the work makes conditions intolerable to many people.

I suspect it is actually simply the case that the work is extremely unpleasent. The unpleasentness of the work will increase the remuneration commanded thereby. People then have a choice, of a range of jobs, which offer pay in proportion to the work (the skill, difficulty, unpleasentness, etc, of the work contributing to the pay). Given the extreme unpleasentness of the work in question, people simply choose *not* to take the additional remuneration available to them and select a different job.

As such, I think this particular section is incorrect and I have heavily edited it.

For this reason, many meat packing plants in the developed world are unionized while those that are not are often prime targets for labor organizers.

I have modified the lead in to the next paragraph since it depends on the assertations made in the previous, now edited, paragraph.

All and all packing plants suffer from high turn-around, mainly hiring recent immigrants and having to hire 110% of the required staff for the day particularly in Alberta where abattoirs compete with oil for labor.

This of course acting to drive wages up, but this fact is salient in its omission.

The United States meat packing industry held a prominent focus in the 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which criticized the treatment of workers and the safety of the products themselves.

A similar view could perhaps be taken of most industries in 1906, compared to the modern day.

Toby Douglass 13:57, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

In the interest of eliminating bias this article has been carved down to a stub. I'm going to try to add back in some of the old content with better sourcing and more objectivity over the next week or two as I find citations to support my claims. Some good information that was there has been lost in the process. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.91.90.112 (talk) 07:38, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I've added some more text, but if you look at the citations a lot more could be added. As citations warrant, I'll try to extend the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.91.90.112 (talk) 02:20, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

New template inspiration
Perhaps a would be useful in organizing clean up on Wikipedia? --HalfSerious 06:13, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

New material
Parkwells: The material you added is not supported by any citations. I feel like your addition is a useful contribution, but given the reversion history of this page I'm sure someone will revert it if citations are not provided. Check out WP:Source. I'm adding notes indicating the need for citations and separating the cited material from the non-cited material. Special:Contributions/76.91.90.112|76.91.90.112]] (talk) 05:12, 18 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Hey I retract my previous comment, I'm stupid.  I totally missed the other 124 pages of the human rights watch report.  I do think we could use some more citations and that there might be issues of WP:NPOV, but I'm going to revert some of the changes I made.  I also rephrased a couple of sentences,  I think it makes the section a little clearer. 76.91.90.112 (talk) 06:39, 18 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Hey, fixed the link that led to Purdue University rather than Perdue Farms (as was intended). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.126.222.16 (talk) 21:10, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Actual Facts Are Needed
This article is devoid of what meatpackers actually do. It is also devoid of its early history.

For example, the earliest meatpackers in the US purchased pork and sheep carcasses (there were no beef cattle) from slaughterhouses during the late fall and winter, when the carcasses would not spoil. Then the meatpackers butchered the carcasses into large cuts of meat, packed the meat into barrels (thus "meatpackers"), and filled the barrels with cold salt water (brine). The chemical action of the brine with the meat killed pathogens and thus preserved the meat.

Before refrigeration, the major ways to preserve meat was brining, smoking (thus jerky) and canning.

The Green Bay Packers refers to the early meatpacking industry in Wisconsin.

The Wiki Article on the "Pork barrel" describes only the derogatory use of the term, so it has to be coordinated with this Article to clarify that the original "pork barrel" was a real barrel filled with brined pork. This was also called a barrel of salt pork. My guess (has to be verified) is that "pork barrel politics" refers to a bill that includes a hidden "goodie" inside, just as an ordinary oak barrel might contain a delicious cut of pork.

The Article has to be coordinated with the Article on slaughterhouses, because originally the function of the slaughterhouse was to skin and gut the carcass. The slaughterhouse sold the carcass and byproducts to specialized companies for further processing. Among those specialized buyers were the butchers (for fresh meat), the meatpacker (for barrels of salt pork), the canner, the lard maker (is there a term for that?), etc.

Someone (me eventually?) has to find good cites for these and include them in the article. Oconnell usa (talk) 19:47, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Is there a reason this article reads like a union advertisement?
75% of the article is dedicated to glorifying the history of meatpacking unions. What the hell is this? There's almost no information or details about the actual industry itself. Bravo Foxtrot (talk) 16:08, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Bias toward the US
Once again there cries that an article is lacking global perspective.

And once again there is a good reason for it. It was the US that took meat packing and turned it into an industry. Before Oscar Mayer, Swift, Hormel or Mather created the huge American packing industry, Europeans were still content with the same one man sauage shops and butchershops that had existed since the middle ages. Since the industry exists because of American business and grew because of American invention and the hard work and contribution of thousands of hardworking people in the US, why should it focus anywhere else?

This continually asking for a more global view only for articles someone thinks focuses too much on the US is getting very old, very fast! You don't see me complaining about the article on the Great Wall of China being too focused on China, or not enough referneces to the US in the article on rainforests. Everybody needs to deal with the fact that some topics are mainly going to be about one country. Articles about the French Revolution do not need to be from a global perspective. Articles about baseball and basketball can certainly have an American slant just as much as it would make perfect sense for the article on football (Soccer) to not mention the US at all. Articles about communism will not talk about every single attempt to organize a movement in every country in the world. Articles about democracy are probably going to focus more on Europe than Africea or the Middle East and articles about dictators and genocide will probably talk more about Africa than North America. Live with it. If Wiki is going to ever become a legitimate and accurate repository of history and facts, everyone needs to knock it off with all the politically correct revisionist history/geography and whatever else doesn't fit their own personal rose-tinted view of the world. 1.229.130.160 (talk) 10:23, 13 February 2014 (UTC)