Harms in the pork industry are legion and calls for regulatory reform are constant, but the situation for workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment only seems to get worse. Thus, we treated the pork industry as a case and sought to identify (1) how the industry came to be structured as it is, (2) how day-to-day operations run, and (3) what actions have most affected workers and communities involved in the industry. We focused on these dimensions with an eye toward identifying evidence of symbiosis or lack of symbiosis between the state and pork companies, in both recent actions and ongoing relationships (Tombs, 2012). This required attention to the actors, processes, institutions, and mechanisms involved, and a search for coherence and sequence among them (Stake, 2005).

To inform our case we compiled newspaper articles, magazine articles, blogs, non-profit organization reports, industry marketing, US Senate hearings, Presidential Executive Orders, US Chamber of Commerce communications, union press releases, and published survey research. We purposively sampled sources reflecting multiple vantage points and constituencies, including materials produced by the industry, unions, the state, interest groups, non-profit organizations, and journalists. We anchored our analysis in the historical patterns of the pork processing industry by integrating peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly and popular books, and the direct text of federal and state laws concerning the evolution of the US pork industry. In approaching each of these sources, we took a skeptical stance and attempted to verify all facts, audit the discourse of what was and was not emphasized, and assess how the totality of the evidence supported narratives and positions by various interest groups.

In what follows we present our analysis of the specific ways the highly profitable pork industry and the state have acted symbiotically to (1) consolidate the industry in anti-competitive ways, (2) administer inhumane working conditions, and (3) structurally configure the industry to repel unionization. We detail the regulatory theater enacted in these realms and use structural contradictions theory to explain why the state has allowed and facilitated these harms rather than enacting effective protections for workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment.

The harms of concentration

The slaughter, processing, and packing of hogs (hereafter, “packing”) has become a highly concentrated and powerful industry. The four-firm concentration ratio (CR4) is used as a measure of the combined market share of the largest four firms in an industry, and a CR4 above 50 percent in any market is considered uncompetitive (USDA, 2017). The CR4 for pork packing in 1976 was 32.9 percent; by 2016 it had more than doubled, to 71 percent (C. Ward, 2010; Woodall & Shannon, 2018). Although packing firms contend that consolidation brings efficiencies that save consumers money, the price of pork has increased with consolidation even as the prices these firms pay to farmers for pigs have fallen (Food & Water Watch, 2011).

Vertically, companies have been particularly aggressive in their acquisition of entire farming operations, the expanded use of CAFOs, and the rapidly diminished viability of small hog farmers. The monopolistic character of the pork industry (few sellers, many buyers) has been well studied (see Corey, 1950; Kolko, 1963; Virtue, 1920), but it is also relevant consider the industry’s internal monopsonist character (few buyers, many sellers). A monopsony is an anti-competitive arrangement through which a small number of highly concentrated firms (the buyers) actively construct a market of extremely limited selling options, in this case for small and independent pig producers.Footnote 3 Pork packing companies demand contractual arrangements that allow them to buy pigs without competitive bidding, because few other buyers actually exist that could compete at any stage of the supply chain. Mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts have eliminated any serious competition. The monopsony framework puts downward pressure on prices paid to farmers, and structurally incentivizes additional efficiency-maximizing practices to be used by those farmers in order to meet those rates (Food & Water Watch, 2011; Woodall & Shannon, 2018). The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (2021) argues that, “Fair negotiation is simply not a realistic option for small growers under these conditions.” The exploitative nature of contract and subsidiary arrangements has buried small, independent hog farmers, since the packing companies prefer to contract with large farms that can meet these price points and scales of production (Mock, 2020).

This monopoly/monopsony dynamic also applies to labor in the industry. CAFOs have increasingly located in areas where jobs are scarce and income levels are low (Wendee, 2013), so highly concentrated sellers of pork products also become the de facto consolidated buyers of labor. Not only are pig farmers beholden to the prices set by pork mega-corporations, but packing and processing workers have very few options other than the local pork plant to which they can sell their labor (Kandel & Parrado, 2005). Packing companies deliberately locate in just such areas (Warren, 2020). These are just some aspects of the pork industry’s anti-competitive structure that are protected and encouraged by the state through a range of executive, legislative, and judicial levers.

All branches of government are implicated in the regulatory theater that enhances this industry’s concentration. The legal frameworks that govern competitive market dynamics, for example, have failed to adequately mitigate the monopolizing tendencies of capital in the pork industry (Gunderson, 2011). Antitrust laws have been on the books for over 100 years, and yet, the “judicial embrace of efficiency and pro-competitive rationales for antitrust law” limits its effectiveness (Lauck, 1999, p. 453). The Federal Trade Commission was originally created to mitigate extensive profiteering and concentration in meatpacking, specifically. The agency issued a report in 1919 confirming the unlawfulness of the industry’s practices, to little effect (Federal Trade Commission, 1920). Calls for regulating stockyards and livestock as public utilities go back over a century (see Virtue, 1920), with corresponding legislation like the Packers and Stockyard Act of 1921, meant to directly curb meatpacking’s anti-competitive excesses. One hundred years later, concentration has worsened (Food & Water Watch, 2011).

While passing laws and creating regulatory agencies may seem like “victories” against industry-wide harms, the operationalization and enforcement of those laws exemplifies regulatory theater. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) joined with farmers and advocates in the early 2000s to get Congress to use the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act to approve clear criteria for determining the industry’s anti-competitive actions against farmers. This would seem to indicate that state actors can competently advance the interests of farmers, workers, and other constituents. Yet after decades, the criteria remain unapproved. As President, George W. Bush “essentially halted enforcement” of the Packers Act entirely; Barack Obama abandoned reforms to the Act at the end of his presidency; and Donald Trump worked with the USDA to fully and promptly discard the Act’s rules (Khan, 2012; Lilliston, 2017).

Confusing and inconsistent actions such as these by different state entities might suggest an ebb and flow to the state’s relationship to capital, or the proper functioning of checks and balances, presenting a challenge to the symbiosis argument. Still, evidence that this is merely regulatory theater lies in the final act, which is consistently repeated: the state’s actions rarely result in any real challenge to the underlying capital accumulation project. The state creates showy legal and bureaucratic frameworks to respond to specific conflicts, but harm continues as the state—across political parties—also provides favorable regulatory climates. Add to this the long ideological work involved in producing judicial decisions centered on efficiency instead of harm, and legislative language that allows packing firms to enact any “reasonable business decision that would be customary in the industry” (National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, 2021), and what is left is the distracting drama of performative governance. In what follows, we focus on two other areas where state-corporate symbiosis in this industry directly affects workers: working conditions and unions.

The harms of working conditions

The de-skilling of work in the animal disassembly line is intentional and consistent with best practices in industrial engineering, bringing a type of efficiency that allows employers to lower wages and decrease dependency on any single worker. By being structurally situated as readily replaceable, the laborer becomes an interchangeable and thus disposable input. Meatpacking jobs are among the most hazardous in the US, with the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations (Lander et al., 2010). Physical injuries are well-known, but workers, of course, watch and participate in thousands of gruesome animal deaths each week and also face psychological harm, including a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. An employee whose job is to slit the throats of hogs to cause them to bleed to death told a journalist about his fellow hog stickers’ problems with alcoholism: “They have to drink,” he said. “They have no other way of dealing with killing live, kicking animals all day long. If you stop and think about it, you’re killing several thousand beings a day” (quoted in Dillard, 2008, p. 397).

Further, workers are regularly exposed to pathogens known to increase the risk of disease infection, as well as to anti-microbials that can impair their immune system. For example, a “highly corrosive toxic chemical” called Peracetic Acid gets sprayed on carcasses in processing plants (NELP, 2018). This acid irritates workers’ eyes and skin, causing rashes, burns, and irritation to the respiratory system which results in coughing, difficulty breathing, and asthma – effects known even before the coronavirus pandemic. OSHA—the Office of Safety and Health Administration within the US Department of Labor—does not currently regulate or monitor the use of this acid in meatpacking plants, even while the agency acknowledges the “serious safety and health hazards” of this industry:

These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases. (OSHA, n.d.)

“These places are injury factories,” according to one former head of OSHA (Hiltzik, 2020). Precariousness and efficiency are nevertheless normalized in both occupational practice and state policies.

A further point of contention between workers and employers is “chain speed,” which is both central to a company’s profit and a consistent source of workplace injuries. One worker described the clash: “The line is so fast there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull, and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself” (Human Rights Watch, 2005, p. 24). Although injuries like this are not unusual or uncommon, chain speeds have only increased. The production lines at a Hormel plant in Minnesota, for example, ran 900 pigs per hour in 2002. By 2007 they ran 1,350 pigs per hour – a 50 percent increase in output with only 15 percent increase in labor (Genoways, 2014). Similarly, a Smithfield plant in North Carolina—the largest hog killing plant in the country—employed up to 5,000 workers and processed 25,000 hogs a day in 2003. By 2018 with the same number of employees it was processing up to 35,000 hogs a day (Human Rights Watch, 2019b).

The speed at which animals move past each worker has been federally regulated since 1981 (fully 75 years after the Jungle-inspired Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906) (Office of the Federal Register, 1981). Yet line speed is not set by an agency that oversees worker safety; it is set by the USDA, which regulates food safety. While worker safety and food safety would seem to be complementary concerns, the USDA claimed under the Trump administration to not have “authority” to “regulate issues related to establishment worker safety” (Safety & Health Magazine, 2019). In September 2019 the USDA issued a new rule to revoke any maximum speed limits, replacing them with an “optional New Swine Slaughter Inspection System.”

The National Pork Producers Council, which lobbies for pork companies and contributes money to congressional campaigns through its PorkPAC, lauded the new (and optional) system as an effort “to ensure a safe supply of wholesome American pork” (NPPC, 2020). The Council supports the new voluntary program, which shifts many of the inspection responsibilities to companies’ employees, who are not required to receive training (Food Safety News, 2020). Indeed, the new rule seeks to reduce the number of government inspectors in pork plants by 40 percent, saving the USDA up to $6 million per year (Levitt, 2019). Plants that voluntarily adopt the new inspection system are authorized to eliminate chain line speeds.

Workers and advocates do fight back, and always have. What’s more, “the state” also includes actors and organizations that seek to operationalize worker-centric concerns. In a dialectic process, there is resistance and contingency to the conflicts between capital and labor. Labor unions sued the USDA in December 2019 for refusing to address concerns about the impacts of this rule on workers. The lawsuit stated that, “In issuing the rule, USDA did not dispute the massive amount of evidence in the record showing that eliminating maximum line speeds would put the life and safety of thousands of workers at risk” (Safety & Health Magazine, 2019). The head the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service rejoined that claims like this from “special interest groups” reflect “emotion, hearsay,” and a “fear of change” (Food Safety News, 2020). A federal district court ruled in March 2021 that the USDA does, in fact, have to take workers’ safety into account in setting line speed limits (Fatka, 2021).

It can be tempting to lay chain speeds and injuries all at the feet of greedy pork packing corporations. The state, though, allows and demands that workers be faced with working conditions that even other state actors recognize as damaging to both the sustainability of the workforce and the legitimacy of existing worker protections. OSHA, which was created by Congress in 1970 to “ensure safe and healthful working conditions” for workers (OSHA, n.d.), has long documented the hazardous working conditions in meatpacking plants. This is performative, as such documentation has not translated into regulatory action. During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, when hundreds of meatpacking workers who were made to continue working in close quarters without protective equipment ultimately died (Ken & León, 2021), OSHA was constrained by the President from making anything more than “recommendations” for the industry. To our knowledge, no pork industry firm has been held liable for any worker’s COVID-related death (Grabell & Grabell, 2021). In fact, OSHA weakened the requirements for reporting workers’ deaths during the pandemic, and has reportedly “not inspected 26 out of the 65 meatpacking plants where reporters found at least one worker died of COVID-19” (Bagenstose et al., 2021).

The notions that a USDA head could call workers in these plants a “special interest group” and that OSHA would weaken regulations during a pandemic call into question the effectiveness of state agencies in protecting the workers who make these industries both possible and profitable, and the larger population who eats what they make. These agencies seem, in fact, to serve the accumulation-centered agendas of the industry in fairly plain ways, reflecting in part what criminologists have previously called “food fraud” (León & Ken, 2019).

It is tempting to view the activities of OSHA and the USDA as limited examples of regulatory failure – too few investigators, too little funding, not enough support from presidential administrations. In the context of structural contradictions theory, however, state regulatory agencies should not be understood to be the “police officers” of industry. As Tombs (2012, p. 173) explains, these agencies’ “relation to capital is not merely one of opposition and externality.” Instead, they “play a much more general role in reproducing the social conditions necessary to sustain a capitalist social order.” We further specify that this “role” requires a theatrical performance. Occasional concessions to labor can “foster an impression of good governance” through performative rituals, even when a regulatory agency has largely surrendered to capital (Ding, 2020, p. 536). Such rituals occur on highly visible stages where political and state actors must deliver on promises made to advance the material conditions of the electorate, which in turn augments the legitimacy of the state. But the trendline in the pork sector shows how state-corporate symbiosis, in material and ideological ways, provides enduring legitimacy to the project of accumulating capital even while it harms, injures, and kills workers at a rate that can be normalized as “part of doing business.” The labor movement may be best situated to resist this normalization, but as we detail below, the balance of power between labor and the capitalist state has grown more asymmetrical over time.

The harms of anti-union “success”

The current balance of power between employers and workers is a conflict where the rules and rewards are both mediated and defined by the state. The Iowa Beef Processes company (IBP) is widely recognized to have fundamentally altered the meatpacking industry starting in the 1960s when it restructured bargaining, deskilled jobs, and moved packing from urban to rural areas (Horowitz, 2002). Its anti-union actions would not have been possible without ongoing local, state, and federal support. Meatpacking companies’ move to rural communities was accomplished with tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans from states, modifications to sewer systems, and favorable water rates, among other amenities and incentives (Brueggemann & Brown, 2003). The mere existence of “right-to-work states,” which are designed to weaken collective labor power, is a state initiative. Further, as demonstrated above, the state has been heavily involved in coercing people to work under conditions that unions do not and would not support.

In one telling example from 1946, 215,000 meatpacking workers across the country went on strike. After eight days, with packinghouses sitting idle, “President Truman invoked the War Labor Disputes Act on January 24, seized the packinghouses, and instructed the workers to return to the plants” (Brueggemann & Brown, 2003, pp. 341–342). This Act had been passed to allow the executive branch to “seize” manufacturing facilities from employers during World War II, and “enable the Government to provide for changes in terms and conditions of employment” (Teller, 1946, p. 1025). “Instructing” workers to return to work—with the threat of force and the institutional capacity to deliver such force—on behalf of employers is a paragon of state-corporate symbiosis.

Still, not all arms of the state move uniformly. Executive actions carried out under this Act were interpreted by the courts more as suggestions than enforceable laws, so Congress one year later passed the Taft-Hartley Act to directly reduce union power. This legislation produced a full symbiotic mashup, allowing companies to seek court injunctions and permitting the government to sue union officials for violating their contracts with employers. Taft-Hartley also created the right-to-work infrastructure; “outlawed mass picketing, secondary boycotts, and closed shops; required a 60- day advance notice of strikes; and compelled union leaders to sign affidavits denying any association with communism” (Brueggemann & Brown, 2003, p. 342). This would be a precursor to wholesale efforts to conflate unions (i.e., threats to capital) with threats to the nation state itself.

To be clear, the threat and actual use of violence is a fundamental feature of the modern liberal state. When we claim that the state (in its highest executive offices and in its time-tested structures) has never fought alongside unions to secure dignified working conditions, we mean this literally. We are unfamiliar with any example where state forces (i.e., police, national guard) have exchanged gunfire with private security forces (e.g., Pinkertons) on behalf of worker’s rights. We do, however, know of plenty of cases where state forces have either directly killed or indirectly supported violence against workers as part of anti-union or anti-labor suppression.Footnote 4

It was the federal government—not the meatpacking companies, directly—impeding the union from gaining contract concessions from employers via the 1946 strike. More broadly, the courts barred picketing at some plants, which effectively reopened them, and striking workers “faced armed troops in many packing centers”: police in Chicago and the National Guard in St. Paul, Sioux City, and Waterloo, where—in “what can only be described as hand-to-hand combat”—troops broke through picket lines to escort scabs to the meatpacking floor (Halpern, 1997, p. 230).

Major strikes later in the twentieth century yielded similar results, the most notorious being the 1985 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota. After Hormel froze wages in 1977 and then called for a 23 percent pay reduction eight years later, one thousand workers walked off their jobs for six months. In response, the governor of the state eventually ordered 800 National Guard troops to secure access to the plant, and they stayed in place for over a month (Kuhle et al., 1992). “The union didn’t have the state on its side,” said one newspaper account. “The workers had the audacity to put their bodies on the line to shut down the plant for nearly six months, but once Democratic Gov. Rudy Perpich called out the Minnesota guard, the strike was over” (Perl, 1986).

Brueggemann and Brown (2003) have argued that legislation and court decisions were not as influential in de-unionizing the industry as the spatial impediments to labor organizing that came with the industry’s move to decentralized, rural locations. However, the ability of companies to secure tax breaks, loans, and infrastructural support from states and localities is—as much as federal laws, courts, and troops—a vital bit of state intervention that empowers corporations to enact and maintain domination over the labor market. The geo-political features of meatpacking, paired with the anti-union regulatory climate most favorable to employers, reinforce the conditions under which laborers are subject to both acute harms in the workplace and structural violence in the form of direct state action to undermine unions.

Anti-union activities are perhaps the epitome of state-corporate symbiosis, requiring much long-term “softening up” (Tombs, 2012) but also presenting themselves directly in the light of day. Whereas antitrust activity occurs at the level of line-by-line details of hundred-year-old legislation, the anti-union theater is quite visible: the state woos pork packing companies; the industry racks up incentives and sets “efficient” working conditions; and when workers protest, the state coerces them to abide by the industry’s terms. Addressed by Ken and León (2021)(2021, institutional racism also factors heavily into state-corporate processes of molding a low-cost and precariously replaceable labor force. Today about 25 percent of workers in meatpacking plants are Black, and in some plants more than 90 percent of workers are immigrants and refugees from Asia, Africa, and Central America (Cohen, 2017; Fremstad et al., 2020). De jure segregation, anti-Black and -immigrant labor practices, and asymmetrical immigration laws and policies have influenced the occupational features of meatpacking work sites. In symbiotic fashion, the white and propertied electorate reap the benefits of white supremacy and low-cost pork products, while corporate enterprises reap the profits and the capitalist state enhances its position.