I wondered that not long after reading a Mother Jones piece about the still-incompletely understood spate of neurological disorders afflicting workers at a pig-processing plant associated with Hormel in Austin, Minnesota. The affected workers all spent time at or near the station where pigs' brains were flushed from the skull. The process aerosolized the brains and the inhalation of the vapors is suspected to have triggered autoimmune responses in the workers' bodies, since porcine neurological cells are so similar to humans'.
The trend of afflictions came to Minnesota public health officials' notice in the mid-2000s. However, the plant had operated with the brain-flushing equipment, "off and on, for more than a decade," begging the question of why the disorders were only first being seen in 2006 or so. The MJ writer speculates that increased demand for the plant's core product, Spam, led to four changes that greatly increased the risk for workers.
- Increased line speed, from 900 pig heads per hour in 1996 to 1,350 per hour in 2006, increased the hourly exposure.
- The machine actually flushing the brains from the pig skulls was changed, increasing the number of misfires and thus spatter.
- In late 2006, the increased speed of the line led to a pileup of pig skulls that cracked the plexiglass shield protecting some workers from the spatter.
- The plant's hourly wages were rather low, making overtime desirable for workers; meanwhile, overtime helped Hormel keep up with demand. Workers' daily exposure times thus were increased.
That's the way our industrialized capitalist system works. It is a system whose perceived benefits have been lionized for a century. We all know the mantra: increased production leads to lower costs, leading to increased purchasing power for the consumer, leading to increased sales for the company, leading to increased profits, leading to more money that can be spent on research to lower production costs, and so the machine spins on. It's supposed to be a virtuous circle for the company.
The consumer is himself a worker during another part of the day, though. Therefore, he is being paid by a company that produces something. At minimum, the worker needs to be paid enough to buy what he needs to survive (and what his kids need, too).
Here's where the mantra breaks down, though. Companies long ago realized that they could ship jobs to nations whose labor costs were much lower. That made a great deal of sense as far as lowering costs were concerned, and in fact the U.S. is often portrayed as a beneficiary of that disparity in costs. However, it broke the implicit and necessary bargain with domestic workers. More and more of those workers no longer make enough money to be good consumers.
Company management has less and less reason to care about this problem since the company is more and more interested and (literally) invested in a global market. If North American sales and profits decline, the company can make it up in Latin America and Asia. What's to happen to the managers' fellow citizens who can't buy the company's goods and services? Legally, it's not their problem, and morally, well, talk to shareholders. Managers are not being paid to worry about anything but the company's financial well-being.
Workers, meanwhile, increasingly fall into two categories: the well-paid and the barely-holding-on. The former are only as numerous as they must be, so their number doesn't increase significantly. More and more workers, then, live on a tight budget. They will search out the lowest price they can for what they need.
Meanwhile, shareholders demand growing profits. (Those who have money to invest need for it to grow or inflation will eat its value away over time.)
In the face of these twin pressures, how does Hormel respond? The way any company does: it tries to lower costs any way it can. Speeding up the processing line is an obvious tactic.
I see a death spiral. Companies in the U.S. can only remain competitive with their overseas rivals if they follow the cost-cutting spiral downward, but in so doing they cut the knees out from under their workers: wages or jobs decrease (often both). These workers are domestic consumers whose buying power has been slashed, so they look for the lowest price for goods and services. These socks made in Vietnam are cheaper than anything produced domestically? Good enough.
U.S. companies are overheated machines that aren't creating viable domestic jobs, just profits. And as others have pointed out, more and more of those profits aren't even reaching these shores except as insane compensation to corporate upper management.
The success of these companies -- in fact, their very survival -- imperils the entire U.S. economy.
The only end result I can imagine is a standard of living reduced to the lowest sustainable level, which at this point can probably be found in southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. That's where globalization will take us before we can ever hope to dig ourselves out (as a species, not merely a nation).
Eventually, a truly global economy might achieve equilibrium between wages and production costs. I don't see even the possibility of that happening in the next fifty years, though.
You advocate stopping global trade? Okay. How are the advanced industrialized economies to get some of the raw materials they need to sustain domestic production? As well-endowed as the U.S. is with raw materials, not everything is available here.
As scary as the meat-processors' neurological disorders are, I see them as a symptom of a systemic ailment that is grinding all of us down.
No comments:
Post a Comment