Dangers, tensions lurk in meatpacking industry

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Jose Maria Montoya lasted just a year in his first stint in a plant. He deboned meat and says the repetitive cutting motions made his hands ache so badly, he lost all sensation in his fingers.

“I didn’t say anything,” he explains. “When you need something (money) for your family, you don’t ask questions. You just do it. I don’t have many choices. I don’t speak English very well. I don’t have much education.”

His words are reminiscent of Sinclair’s days when Lithuanians, Poles and other eastern Europeans crowded into the shadow of big-city slaughterhouses in hopes of building a better life. Their schooling counted for less than a strong back, a weak nose and willingness to sweat.

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The character who symbolized the struggle in “The Jungle,” was Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who endured the loss of his job and the death of his wife and son.

“The Jungle” paints the most gut-wrenching possible portrait of those desperate times. Today’s real-life meatpacking story is far from that fictional horror, but parts of the book’s message resonate in the here and now.

Thousands of immigrants still come, as they did a century ago.

Some are refugees from Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam; many more journey across the Mexican border and head to Nebraska, Kansas or other states where giant meat plants seem to have an inexhaustible need for labor.

Jose Maria Montoya left Mexico as a teen, hoping to make good money, then return home.

But after he quit meatpacking, he stayed in the Omaha area, working in a garment factory that, ironically, later moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages. Montoya picked up new skills, learned to drive a forklift, then returned to the same meatpacking company — this time in the shipping department.

At 37, Montoya wants to start his own business making heavy-duty work uniforms.

But he has a mortgage, a stack of bills, a $12.50-an-hour wage and eight kids to feed. Though his wife works, their combined dollars only go so far.

“My dream now is for my kids,” he says. Montoya says he urges his children to study hard and become teachers and doctors, lawyers and judges. And when they whine about school, he firmly silences them:

“You have no choice,” he says. “You want to be like me and work like a donkey?”

From 1980 to 2000, the number of Hispanic workers in the meat industry — including poultry — increased more than fourfold to 35 percent, according to federal statistics, says William Kandel, a sociologist at the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Department.

The industry is believed to have large numbers of undocumented workers — one federal official said it may be as high as one in four in meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa, the GAO said, referring to its own 1998 report.

Both the meatpacking companies and the United Food and Commercial Workers union — which says it represents more than 50 percent of meat and poultry workers nationwide — have adapted to large numbers of foreign-born workers, offering, among other things, classes in English.

The union, fighting to bolster its ranks, also is making its pitch on a different landscape. In places such as Omaha, it has joined with community activists and church leaders to organize workers.

“It gives us credibility,” says Donna McDonald, president of the union’s Local 271 in Omaha. “There’s a level of comfort.”

Decades ago, meatpacking was centered in labor-friendly urban areas. But the giant stockyards of Chicago, Fort Worth and Kansas City are long gone. The industry built huge plants closer to the livestock — and in right-to-work states where unions are far less popular.

“If Sinclair were to write his book today, he would not go to Chicago. He’d go to Garden City (Kan.) or Lexington (Neb.),” says Roger Horowitz, a historian and author of three books on the industry, including “Putting Meat on the American Table.”

In the new meatpacking capitals, he says, paychecks have been shrinking. In 2004, the average annual wage for a worker in a slaughtering plant was about $25,000 — compared with $34,000 for manufacturing, according to federal figures.

Longtime workers such as Martin Cortez are stoic about the ups and downs.

At 55, he’s not about to change jobs. But he tells newcomers at the plant to get an education and do something else.

“Everybody says there’s an American dream. Some people get it. Some people don’t,” he says. “I’m not complaining. “We survive here. I don’t know how. But we do.”

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