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.

Terrible Working Conditions

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 first world.

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[1], depression, and anxiety as the more prevalent ones, along with being more likely to exhibit violent behaviors[2][3].

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.

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[4], well below the country's average income of roughly $55,000. [5] 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.

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.

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.