Workers in the Animal Product Industries

Occasionally, the animal rights movement will get called out by some human-rights activists or those concerned about workers rights as only considering the animals being affected, and not mentioning the workers and what they go through, working in slaughterhouses and meat-rendering.

The animal rights movement is primarily concerned with the suffering of animals that are incurred in animal agriculture, most Vegans do understand the serious problems that affect those who work in the industry, and it's not that we don't recognize it as important or deem it insignificant, it's that 99% of the harm is on the animals and the environment, and doing away with animal agriculture would naturally do away with these terrible jobs.

As discussed in our article on the Economic Arguments for Veganism, getting rid of animal agriculture doesn't mean these people are going to be permanently out of a job, as they will just be replaced by other jobs, ones that aren't traumatizing and uncomfortable.

Issues Faced By Workers

In Western countries, working standards for factory workers are exceptional, especially compared to how they were during the Industrial Revolution (and for that time, those working standards were a leg up compared to other jobs they could've been working), however, this can not be said for workers in the meat, dairy and egg industries.

The risks workers face range from physical to psychological, and represent a nadir of working standards for developed countries in the modern world.

Conditions

In animal agriculture, those who face the worst working conditions are slaughterhouse workers, and meat renderers, the latter of which makes up the majority of these jobs, who are in charge of preparing the meat before it is shipped, which involves cleaning out the organs, draining the waste, and cutting apart the meat.

Since the demand is so high in some factories, workers are often denied bathroom breaks, forcing them to wear diapers on the job.[1]

Psychological Problems

Being around death and tortured cries every day is not a recipe for psychological health, but that's unfortunately what slaughterhouse workers have to deal with for their jobs, sometimes more than eight hours a day and more than five days a week. Unsurprisingly, slaughterhouse workers are much more likely to develop mental problems including PTSD, SPD[2], depression, and anxiety as the more prevalent ones, along with being more likely to exhibit violent behaviors[3][4].

We are no longer in the dark ages of mental healthcare, and we well understand the harms of subjecting individuals to such psychologically unfriendly environments, and working in animal agriculture is an example of society neglecting the issue due to our own gluttony, at the expense of the workers.

Risk of physical injury and disease

When animals are confused and frightened, they are not harmless, and even though animal agriculture is extremely efficient at physically neutering livestock by slicing off their beaks, cutting off their horns, and sawing their teeth off, they often act erratically and can still seriously harm the workers, considering that many plants forgo bothering to stun the animals first. Along with that, workers are often carrying the knifes to slit the throat of the animals, meaning there's a chance of accidentally being stabbed while handling smaller animals such as chickens.

Other physical injuries range from minor carpal tunnel to more major problems such as neck and upper limb disorders[5].

Other bad standards

For all these poor conditions and risk of mental and physical illness, the average wage for a slaughterhouse worker in the United States is about $17 an hour, totaling about 35k a year[6], and meat renderers have it at about $14, or $27,000 a year[7], both well below the country's average income of roughly $55,000. [8] This amount of money is insultingly low for these work conditions and high risk to the workers.

Reaction from meat-eaters

From time to time carnists will attempt to deflect the moral issues with eating meat by trying to claim Vegans are hypocrites for claiming to want to care about being ethical consumers while also purchasing Sweatshop Products, which are also made by workers under horrible working conditions. Disregarding the fact that sweatshop jobs are huge net positives for the people who work in them, unlike workers in the meat-industry, workers in sweatshops often provide useful products, such as clothes and technology. Workers in the meat, dairy, and egg industries are producing products that not only involve inordinate amounts of animal cruelty, but are terrible for the environment and the people who consume them.

If someone really is concerned about the welfare of the workers above all else, they should STILL go Vegan because of these the horrible working conditions, which are very likely worse than the conditions faced sweatshop workers. Sweatshop workers don't have to work around death all day, and are much less likely to be injured and face psychological problems.

Why do people work these jobs?

Given all of these conditions faced by workers, it begs the question, WHY would someone choose to work in these horrible places? Why would someone want to work in such horrible, cruel, disgusting places? What type of person would be attracted to such jobs?

Aside from a handful of sadistic individuals who work these jobs just for the sheer enjoyment of legally torturing and killing other sentient beings, the simple truth is that these people take these jobs out of necessity. They are very often migrant workers and refugees who need to find jobs to support their families, since they are unable to work any other jobs[9]. They are often neither fluent nor literate in English, and find work in animal agriculture, since it requires little need for proper language skills.

So even though these jobs have such terrible conditions, workers often don't have any other choice. If there were no other alternatives for them, it could be viewed as a necessary evil as sweatshops are (although the other harms of animal agriculture would still far outweigh that benefit), but just because we get rid of animal products doesn't mean jobs will be permanently gone; A vegan world would mean these jobs are replaced by others, since the need for food won't disappear. We will still need people to harvest crops and manufacture mock meats and plant milks. These jobs are far less psychologically damaging, and carry little to no risk of developing mental disorders (unless someone is disturbed by the processing of plants but not animal flesh for some reason).

Should slaughterhouse workers take any blame?

On the topic of ethics, Vegans sometimes debate whether or not the people who work in the slaughterhouse deserve any blame for killing and abusing the animals. Some believe that they deserve a lot of the blame, others believe it's shared between the consumer and the worker, but overall in 99% of instances, the workers in these industries share little to none of the blame, and it's highly presumptuous to try eschewing your own responsibility of the situation by pinning it onto someone else.

It isn't the same as doing something like hiring a hitman; Hitmen are not only in incredibly low demand, but being a hitman is a highly skilled job, and carries serious legal risk on top of it. Slaughterhouse workers or meat renderers are in extremely high demand (thanks to consumers constantly buying animal products), takes little to no training, and is often encouraged by governments given the high subsidies. Since so many people need these jobs, if someone doesn't take it, or quits, another person will quickly fill that slot.

There are been some carnists who believe that they have little to no blame when it comes to animal cruelty; After all, they're not the ones doing the killing, they're just paying the industry to do so. That kind of sounds like a reverse Nuremberg Defense (I didn't kill anyone, I just gave the orders!).

That having been said, there are be instances where a worker in a slaughterhouse does take blame for abuse, which is when they are excessively cruel to the animals, beyond what is required. These people are either unusually sadistic, or don't think the animal feels any pain at all and therefore it doesn't matter how they're treated; In these instances, the worker IS in the moral wrong. Equally, a slaughterhouse worker who takes extra care to cause the least amount of pain possible to the animals and not yelling at them or causing unnecessary distress, is someone who deserves moral credit for trying minimize their suffering, as 99% of workers would just follow standard protocol, which is far less humane.