Scalar Irresponsibility: Workplace Safety, Managerial Control, and Worker Coping in Small and Medium-Scale Meat Processing
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Hoffelmeyer, Michaela
- Graduate Program:
- Rural Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Elizabeth Ransom, Major Field Member
Kathleen Sexsmith, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Sam Tenorio, Outside Unit & Field Member
Heather Randell, Major Field Member
Clare Hinrichs, Major Field Member
Brian Thiede, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- labor
meat processing
scale
small
local - Abstract:
- Recent efforts to decentralize meat processing in the U.S., particularly in the wake of COVID-19, heighten the importance of research on smaller scales of production. While scholarship has shown that a decentralized food system results in positive economic outcomes for customers, farmers, and the environment, very little is known about whether and how workers experience better conditions at smaller scales of production. Through six months of ethnographic fieldwork split between two meat processing plants in Iowa, one small-scale and one medium-scale, entailing approximately 700 hours of workplace participation as a laborer and qualitative interviews with the employees and managers (n=25), I explore the following research questions: (1) How does the pace of processing, equipment, and other aspects of small and medium-scale meat processing shape labor conditions? (2) What aspects of workers' jobs generate feelings of unsafety? And what efforts do managers and owners at small and medium-scale meat processing plants make to prevent and treat injuries? (3) What strategies do managers and owners apply to discipline and control labor? (4) What strategies are available to workers to resist unequal power dynamics, and to what extent and how do they use them? In answering this question, I build from the theorization of "irresponsibility" (Veitch 2007) to develop the concept of scalar irresponsibility. Scalar irresponsibility demonstrates how scale—as an ever-shifting social construct—is a tool used to assign a social hierarchy of whose suffering matters and the worthiness of intervention in that suffering. I find that legal and social frameworks enable the production and reproduction of a form of slow violence. This violence is made possible through the legality that enables irresponsibility in workplace safety at these smaller-scale plants. This dissertation includes ten chapters. The first four chapters provide an introduction and background on the meat processing industry, methodology, and literature review. The bulk of the dissertation is divided into five empirical chapters. Finally, chapter ten returns to the concept of scalar irresponsibility to summarize findings. Chapter Five provides an overview of the labor conditions in small and medium-scale meat processing. This chapter orients readers to the study sites while providing details of meat processing labor conditions that are typically unavailable to the public or to researchers (Pachirat 2011). Chapter Six describes how workers at these scales experience pain, pace, and, to the extent allowed, recovery time. I find that, compared to the literature and to some of the workers' own experiences at large-scale plants, workers at smaller scales valued these labor conditions for their slower pace despite the effects on their bodies. Chapter Seven explains how workplace practices, infrastructure, and equipment surrounding injury prevention and treatment were inadequate and often left workers to deal independently with the precarity associated with injuries and pain. In the final chapter, I return to these working conditions as forms of emotional and physical "slow violence" (Nixon 2011) and explain how these forms of violence are essential underpinnings of scalar irresponsibility in smaller-scale meat processing. Chapter Eight explores how management sought to establish a reliable and indebted labor force through strategies of managerial control, including paternalism, harassment, de facto gender divisions of labor, surveillance, and wage theft. Drawing from the literature on paternalism and on large-scale meat processing, I explain how the smaller scale of these plants enabled these particular forms of labor control to be used. Finally, in Chapter Nine, I draw from James Scott's (1986) theorization of "weapons of the weak" to contrast micro-level acts of individual resistance, which were not always possible for workers, with individual strategies for coping with workplace conditions, such as drug use and playfulness. Throughout these chapters, I highlight how the only governmental inspection agencies that are consistently present in meat processing plants are those that enforce food safety regulations, and that worker health and safety inspections are rare. This dynamic is illustrative of scalar values; that is, workers' safety is deemed by meat processing companies to be of lower importance and to carry a smaller magnitude of risk in comparison to the safety of consumers. As such, companies largely elude responsibility for worker safety, leaving individual workers to learn how to prevent and treat injury mostly on their own. Bridging the sociology of food and agriculture, precarious labor, and critical geography, this dissertation recenters labor in the discussions about efforts to decentralize the industrial agrifood system. While decentralization, as it has occurred or been discussed to date, has clear benefits to consumers, farmers, and communities, a more transformational approach that also changes the legal systems that permit severe forms of slow violence and worker precarity at smaller scales of production is needed. I draw attention to how in meat processing, the smaller scale of production—and the social constructions and legal exceptionalism associated with that scale—enables a lack of accountability for violences committed against workers. The purpose of this research and of the concept of scalar irresponsibility is not to deny the existence and urgency of intervening in the injustices taking place in large-scale processing. Rather, scalar irresponsibility explains how and why forms of violence at smaller, more localized scales can be made illegible and how this obfuscation can and does facilitate continued worker suffering.