"Most of us eat meat pretty much daily. But few of us know much about how our daily fare gets to our plate. Slaughterhouses work behind closed doors. In the early 19th century, they were exiled to the outskirts of towns, and later often confined to specific butchery areas or "shambles". From time to time the curtain of obscurity gets pulled by the prying eyes of film-makers exposing the – obviously unspeakable - conditions in which animals meet their end. But the slaughtermen less often attract the same compassion.
"Slaughterhouses are places of violence and death, of legal bloodshed and exposed flesh," writes Séverin Muller to explain the repugnance they arouse in people. In À l'abattoir. Travail et relations professionnelles face au risque sanitaire, the French sociologist presents the findings of a five-year investigation into two industrial slaughterhouses in the western French region of Deux- Sèvres, giving a graphically detailed account of what it is at best an unusual trade.
It is a world governed by the rules of industrial production, but in many respects frozen in centuries-old time. First is the cast of characters straight off the pages of a Zola novel: the "drovers" who unload and sort the cattle, the "haulers", "old sweats" who scorn new health standards, safety instructions and anything the bosses say. Then there are the "stunners" who render the animals unconscious, the "stickers" who bleed the animal, not forgetting the "meatcutters" (who remove the heads) and "splitters" (who cleave the carcass open and remove the innards before separating out udders and penises). Finally, there are the "jobbers" – itinerant butchers employed by outside firms paid on a piecework basis or per kilo of boned meat. Moving between slaughterhouses as they do, they have also earned the nickname "the gypsies".
It is a world with its own codes, vernacular, rites of passage and strict demarcations. "Not sticking with your workmates quickly excites suspicions of siding with the enemy," avers the sociologist. And potential enemies are everywhere at a time when problems filling vacancies are forcing management to hire contingent labour with a different profile – urban youth and women. Their advent "is seen by workers and supervisors as a threat and a challenge to the daily operation of the plant. This casualised workforce on temporary or training contracts foreshadows a deskilling of jobs", says Séverin Muller.
Despite these sociological changes and others that come with the industrialization of food production and the grip that supermarkets have on the meat sector, the Taylorist system of work organization has left only a superficial imprint on the sector. The difference comes from being based on a living, non-standard input that leaves little room for automation, what the author calls the "insurmountable diversity of the product, meat."
Here, unlike most mass production industries, the end product is the culmination of a disassembly process. "In a car plant, you take parts that are all the same, you assemble them, and that gives you something that moves. When you slaughter a cow, it's exactly the opposite – you take it to pieces. And where it gets complicated is that you only find out what the parts are like as you get into it", says a quality manager.
This singular situation gives crews some leeway to organize their work and meet management's objectives. "Production management tried to make the cutting station meet an hourly target, but the wide variety of tasks meant it was finally set per day," notes the author.
Carrying out his inquiry in the second half of the 1990s, Séverin Muller had direct experience of the impact of the "mad cow" or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) crisis. This public health scare found slaughterhouses having to introduce traceability at short notice in 1996 after scientists confirmed that the disease could cross the species barrier to humans through eating meat products.
Traceability meant reorganizing work at all stages of the production chain, from receiving the cattle to meat packing. So pressurizing are these that they often force workers to choose between keeping up the pace of work and keeping to health rules, says the author.
With the fear of a health scandal never far away, workers come under pressure from above through a subtle blend of guilt and accountability. Management take a line that "appeals to the worker's good citizenship (...) as being health-protecting (or life-saving) and may, in the event, be responsible for administrative closure and the prospect of layoffs."
It is interesting to note in this connection that what directs preventive measures is the preservation of safety in the food chain, not the protection of workers' health. In fact, workers are seen as nothing more than contaminants. "The risk management applied in slaughterhouses recognizes that the product has potential to contaminate the final consumer, whereas the worker who handles "hazardous material" falls outside the scope of endangerment: the fact that their chafed and grazed hands are in contact with brains or spinal cords is not characterized as a risk. Recognition of such a risk would mean having to award an allowance or regrading", says Séverin Muller bluntly.
With 262 work accidents per 1,000 workers compared to 54 per 1,000 in industrial activities, and three out of four new hires leaving before the end of their probationary period, it is high time the meat industry began to think hard about the working conditions in its slaughterhouses. — Denis Grégoire"

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