Saturday 4 June 2016

Meat the Packers

It’s not much to my credit, but I’d never given a thought to the welfare of people who work in the meatpacking industry until recently, when I read this harrowing and gross article. It describes a stressful, abusive culture, where workers report being denied access to toilets during shifts. This industry has been notorious for its abuses for over a century - certainly since Upton “Funk” Sinclair published his hyper-depressing novel of alienated labour, The Jungle, in 1906 - though, I admit, this had passed me by.
Within the last decade, similar reports have been made about meat-processing firms in the UK (for clarity, meat-processing firms are the ones where animals go in, and denuded salmonella- and ecoli-ridden mislabelled polyfillered corpses come out, and you eat them, you weirdo). In 2010, the EHRC released a report that detailed exploitation of migrant employees, who are less likely to seek redress; health and safety violations; verbally and physically abusive working environments, and, again, refusal of toilet breaks during shifts. Seriously, meat-guys, just let people go to the toilet, sheesh.
More recently, in 2015, the Guardian published this report on the poultry industry, rehashing the old formula of punitive conditions, abuse of rights, poor hygiene, strain and exhaustion. Some poultry barons got in a flap, claiming this report was not representative, but the way that the same types of abuse recur over years and across continents suggests that these problems are endemic in an industry which relies on “the product”, as employees call it, being processed on a vast scale, extremely quickly.

(All this is without addressing the psychological damage done to workers by being made cogs in a killing machine, more on which later …. )

I’m chary of comparing humans to animals, mostly because people find it insulting & I am a woman of extraordinary politesse. But it’s hardly surprising that an industry for which sentient creatures are fodder should treat the dignity and well-being of its employees with equal indifference. They are fodder too. As Keston Sutherland writes in an analysis of Marx’s language, capitalism is cannibalism. Labour is reduced to Gallerte, a jelly of extraneous meat, bone and tissue: workers’ time and energy, “brains, muscles, nerves, hands,” are ingredients in the production process which must be obtained cheaply and used economically to maximise profit.
I don't think you're ready for this jelly.
(As a point of interest, The Jungle nauseated its readers with accounts of the filthiness of meatpacking, based on Sinclair’s research. The one aspect of his descriptions never to be substantiated was that workers had been known to fall into the pork grinder and join their flesh with the pigs’, to be eaten by unsuspecting members of the public. Invention or not, the idea is irresistible simply because it finishes the picture, makes the missing link. In the grinder, “product” and labourer become one, as they are: in buying anything, we pay for the making as much as for the thing itself.)


There’s a flip side to my reluctance to compare humans and animals - there is a danger that in doing this animals are reduced to a metaphor for human suffering. But they are the real deal: helpless, with absolutely no potential to challenge their exploitation; totally unable to protect themselves from industrial structures; devalued. Almost no cruelty is considered beyond the pale in a meat industry whose ethical regulations are weak and go virtually unenforced. When it comes to suffering, animals are the real deal.


Another flip side (grease the pan, boys!): While I hate what they do, it would be unfair not to see the workers in the meat industry as victims. They’ve got to earn a crust, same as we all do (apart from my boss, a lazy fat-cat who sits on her arse all day). The work that they do is not just physically dangerous, and demeaning (toilets toilets toilets); it has been linked (by Jennifer Dillard) to Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, a disorder resulting in nightmares, flashbacks, paranoia, dissociation, amnesia. You can bang on as much as you like about how nature is red in tooth and claw, but most of us are not freakin’ White Fang; violence reverberates back on the perpetrator, in various psychological forms.

So, victims, yes. But Dillard also links the presence of meatpacking industries to increased local rates of violent crime. Cruelty to animals is a psychopathic trait signifying reduced empathy; meat-processing essentially hothouses violent behaviour. It follows that the effects of brutalisation within the industry will bleed out beyond its confines. Most meat-eaters are able to separate their personal kindness from the horrors of the production line; for those unfortunate enough to be on the factory floor, the reality must be much messier.

Sunday 10 April 2016

The apersonal is the political (your Dave is problematic)

The ranks of the dead
   A sure-fire winner in any argument is to say, ‘I don’t care’. This sentiment remains frustratingly acceptable in debates about vivisection in particular (it’s the ultimate standpoint of Prof Tipu Aziz on this interesting radio programme), and pretty much defines media (non)coverage of most animal welfare issues.
   Even among really excellent, self-critical thinkers, there tends to be an assumption either that animals don’t matter at all, or that they are far, far down a priority list so long that it becomes binary, divided into what does and doesn't matter. This binary in turn becomes oppositional: anything that advances humans is good, and animal interests must not be allowed stand in its way; time and energy given to the protection of animals is time and energy taken away from a more worthy cause.
   As far as I’m aware, there’s no orderly shopping list of actions to eliminate suffering worldwide. The instrumentation of injustice tends to be systemic, and the effects intersectional*, and in many cases there is no opposition between animal welfare, environmental and humanitarian agendas. Mass livestock farming, for example, tortures and destroys animals on an oceanic scale, but the environmental devastation it causes is likely to get messy for humans in the near future, even here in the loveable west. Looking out for animals is an integral part of global progressive movements, not some kind of Marie Antoinette-ish dilettantism.
   But where there actually are competing interests of humans and animals (notably in the case of medical research, until science progresses) - I’d say that it’s bad to the point of evil to categorically dismiss any harm done to animals provided humans benefit. Forms and scales of suffering are comparable between species - pain isn’t an exclusively human property. I don’t deny that victims can be ranked and prioritised, nor do I question (for now) the social contract that compels us to value humans most. I’m just saying that animal concerns shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand - the scale and severity of harm felt should be given due weight, and thought given to whether humanitarian ends can justify cruelties that most of us wouldn't want to imagine.

   There are orders of suffering and, as discussed below, some are worthy of privilege. But this principle shouldn't be used in service of the binary outlined above, or in any other way to invalidate entire groups because they’re not top of our list.


“A Private Matter

   If you have the stomach for it, I’ve got some beef with a parallel and related binarization of suffering: that of the concrete over the abstract, the individual over the many, the case study over the graph. As much as I don’t care for “I don’t care” as a comeback, it’s not always better to reduce problems to what we are able to care about. 

This week, David Cameron has learnt to his visible discomfort that his privacy isn’t as sacrosanct as he thinks it should be. The fact that the prime minister initially thought of his dodgy tax-avoidance as meriting the electorate’s delicacy is symptomatic of his class arrogance, and also of a doublethink regarding politics and private finance that is not exclusive to members of the cabinet. The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
   Some of Cameron’s defenders have claimed, weakly but not implausibly, that he was trying to protect his family from embarrassment. Few have bothered to respond to this: Cameron’s family loyalty obviously cannot trump his accountability as Prime Minister. But I'm sure that Cameron would dogmatically put his family’s wellbeing, and privacy, above anything - and until now he has quite successfully presented this as a virtue, not a moral limitation.
   In fact, Cameron and his family have publicly lived through perhaps the most unspeakable of personal tragedies: the loss of a child. It feels and, probably is, incredibly vile to mention this at all, because in the ranks of suffering children have a special status. That kind of loss is untouchable, and it feels unacceptable to bring it into partisan discourse. Privacy serves here as a protection of the child and of the family’s grief - this is not public property
   But, uncomfortable as it is to attack him on this, Cameron has repeatedly brought his bereavement into his political statements, and used it to blur the neglectfulness of his government towards families who care for disabled children without the support of massive personal wealth. Cameron cannot be unaware of the way that his programme of austerity has targeted people with disabilities, including children. To pretend that he can relate to parents hit by his policies seems like the height of hypocrisy, but a hypocrisy which it feels like a violation to address. Reverence for individual examples of suffering is a silencer; this can be abused.


Je ne suis pas ...

   As a tad bit of a utilitarian, I’ve been thinking occasionally about what makes a child’s suffering worse and more important than an adult's. It’s one of those things that it seems stupid as well as a bit tacky to analyse, but here goes. It’s not just that children are helpless - so are many adults - and innocent, by which I mean a combined lack of understanding and power - which animals have par excellence. And it’s not simply that they have a lot of potential life left, and so their loss is greater when they die - it’s not like we lose sympathy for chronically ill children with shortened life-spans (unless we’re an old-school Nazi, which we aren’t). The privilege of their helplessness and innocence comes from the fact that it’s transitory: they aren’t adults, but they will be adults, and are valued for a positive absence. The special status relies on them being one of us, but not yet.
   I would not and could not for a moment dispute the special status of children, in life and in suffering. But in political discourse there’s an extent to which this regard itself has to be ring-fenced. The exploitation of the special status for children can lead to grotesque hypocrisy.

   When Alan Kurdi died many of the expressions around his death felt offensively tasteless, none more so than the adults who lay on a beach dressed as him. This was crass and presumptuous because though of course we should identify with refugees, who are dehumanised by distance and anonymity, we cannot ‘je suis’ the death of a little boy - we are not him. We don’t have that innocence. Another eyesore was a mawkish cartoon of his soul floating to heaven on angel wings, a child as cute as he is dead - this published in the Mail, that famous defender of migration rights. Why pity a child, when you can’t pity the adult that the child could have grown into? And why pity one child, when you can’t pity thousands? Why should greater magnitude drive tragedies further down our priorities list?

   Relevant, timely or conveniently bite-sized examples of suffering have their uses in forging the emotional responses that allow us to form ideas of justice, and shape our politics. But focusing on the particular can skew perceptions, and lead to woolly, self-indulgent thinking, and hypocrisy. Suffering should be contemplated in broad and utilitarian terms, weighted not according to who or what is suffering but, where possible, by scale and degree. The problem is the harm done, not the victim.



* I feel indebted to Ash Sarkar, who has been very pithy on systems underlying intersectionality