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“The New Industrial Migrants”

Part I

In the article “The New Industrial Migrants (part I)” Eric Schlosser wants to draw our attention on a big problem, which is the turnover rate in slaughterhouses. Every year the slaughterhouse hires about 5,000 workers from Mexico, Central America and Southeast Asia for meatpacking. The working conditions are so hard that the average person quits after three months. Most people that work at the beef plants are immigrants who don’t have any education and they don’t speak English. They live in bad conditions that often include sharing a room with a large number of people. Slaughterhouses offer health insurance and pay for vacations, but you need to work for them at least for six months, which for most of the employees seems to be impossible to accomplish. Most employers don’t care about people that work for them and they don’t even try to improve their working conditions as a result, each year the turnover rate at the slaughterhouse is about 80 percent.

The second part of the article is about how companies recruit migrants to work for the slaughterhouses. Since the job is very hard and they pay small amounts of money the companies have a big problem with employees because nobody wants to do work. Therefore, they are recruiting people who are very poor and desperate sometimes homeless. The slaughterhouses hire buses to bring illegal immigrants to work for them. Since they don’t have health insurance they sleep in shelters and nation meatpacking communities pay for this.  The Immigration and Naturalization service know about the procedure of hiring illegal immigrants, which the beef companies are denying and there is nothing they can do about it. Every time they find illegal immigrants they are sending them back home, but in their place there will be always be another one.

Part II

            In the article “ The New Industrial Migrants” Eric Schlosser states that owners of the slaughterhouses don’t care about the conditions the workers face. In my opinion if the workers would work in a better environment then they would work there for a longer time. If you work in a slaughterhouse your manager should offer you insurance since this is a risky job.

 Individuals from Mexico and Southeast Asia migrate to the United States in search for a better life. They are so desperate to earn money to help their families that they get tricked into working in harsh conditions that are life threatening.

            Many businesses would want to have a high profit with little money invested that’s why their employee demand is high and offer bad working conditions. There are many cases of deaths and injuries reported in these factories and the people that wanted to earn money to improve their life can end up dead or critically injured when faced with this job. A good example can be my dad’s friend. He came to the US to help out his family in Poland and didn’t understand or speak English. An agency offered him work in an asbestos manufacture. They didn’t tell him about the risks he would face later on. He earned big amounts of money a week and sent half the money to his family. At the age of 39 he decided to end his career and go back to his family in Poland. One year later he died because of lung disease.

This shows that people would do anything to improve their everyday life but at the end all that money goes to waste when they die from life threatening diseases.