This video is about how consolidation of the packing industry into concentrated corporate interests has created monopoly power allowing them to squeeze away most of the profits from the smaller farms and ranches that the raise cows, and is driving small family ranchers out of business. "I Almost Ended My Life Because Of The Corrupt & Rigged Beef Industry" | The Class Room - YouTube, More Perfect Union But take a guess what has been fueling the corporate takeover of the slaughterhouses. It's mass immigration and the cheap wages that follow. That is what has allowed the takeover. I posted a past thread about a similar phenomena happening: Immigrant labor decimates family owned farms in New Zealand (posted April 28, 2020 in Immigration section) All this is of course contributing to higher suicide rates in parts of the Midwest and Mountain West.
without desperate immigrants, oftentimes illegals, from Latin America willing to work for bare bone wages, the huge corporations would never be able to find American employees willing to put up with the horrendous working conditions in corporate slaughterhouses
~ This is exactly what the Biden-Harris administration wants. America is on the fast track to drive the middle-class independent business into bankruptcy. The result of " corporatism " — not Capitalism. Our elected officials can prevent this — but do nothing.
Yeah, what did the idiots who support Globalist Free Trade think China was going to do with all that money? Now that China owns the pork producing companies in the U.S. they can get all the pork they want (China has a ravenous appetite for pork) and not have to pay for it. Now they get their pork and none of that money will be flowing into the U.S. economy. (okay, not literally none of the money, but very little of it) Even most of the workers in these processing plants are not American citizens and send half their wages back to other countries in Latin America. When your country runs international trade deficits for a long period of time, eventually other countries own you. This use to be common sense and every country knew this, but then (in maybe the 80s or 90s) the ideology of "Neoliberalism" came along and a whole generation of politicians and businessmen swallowed the Kool-Aide.
Not to mention who knows what the hell kind of hormones and steroids and antibiotics they put in the feed. Long ago my father used to work for ConAgra in a packing house. I wouldn't doubt but that the Chinese own that company now.
I've heard stories from the 80s about workers being paid 26 dollars an hour in slaughterhouses and being able to provide for their families. Even though it was obviously a working class job. (by the way, adjusted for inflation that's the equivalent of 72 dollars an hour today!) But then by the late 90s, most of the workers were only being paid 5.65 dollars an hour. It became a job that they relied on illegal immigrants to do. Literally, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that from 1999 to 2006 the majority of workers in corporate slaughterhouses in the U.S. were not legally in the country and could not speak any English. It wasn't just the wages that went down. The expected pace of work became faster and the conditions became much worse. Because the corporation could get away with it. And that just became the expected new normal in the industry.
