A Thousand New Jobs!

Soon after the SOTH I read a few of SW's manifestos and one of her claims was that re-opening horse slaughter plants would bring 1,000 new jobs to the US. Good jobs, too, or so she claims.

This Elko article from June mentions it as well:

Of the two options for action laid out by GAO for Congress to consider: 1) return regulation and inspection in the U.S., or 2) permanently and completely outlaw the use of horses for food animals, the choice for Congress will be very clear.
The first way will improve the welfare of horses, will create over a thousand jobs practically overnight, restore a multi-billion dollar overall horse industry to its former vibrancy, and allow U.S. businesses to participate in a thriving worldwide market thus providing tax revenues and improving the economy.

Last week, while listening to NPR on the new Alabama legislation aimed at illegal aliens, one of the guests spoke about how, since the 1980's real wages for slaughter house work in Alabama had declined by nearly 45%. While I can't imagine how returning horse slaughter to the US would create 1,000 new jobs unless SW is planning to slaughter nearly a million horses a year ((remember Cavel slaughtered 60,000 horses per year with 70 (??) employees)) so a thousand jobs equates to 800,000 or 900,000 horses slaughtered every year). I guess she doesn't plan to let any animal die a natural death .. old, sick, injured, all need to be put out of their misery and if she happens to make a dollar or two along the way then who can blame her?

So, here is some fairly, lazy, Yahoo research on real wages and conditions in slaughterhouses. If Sue expects the plant owners to pay Americans more than they would pay an illegal for the same job, that is more than naive, well, it's just plain stupid.

I'll add to this entry from time to time as I find more articles. People can use them or not when speaking to legislators about the "jobs" that pro-slaughter people think be created with the return of sanctioned horse slaughter to the United States.


Would You Work the Graveyard Shift at a Chicken Slaughterhouse in Alabama?
By Bill Berkowitz

Excerpt below:

Mentally, the chicken plant was pretty depressing. One of my jobs was to tear apart chicken breasts by hand. It sounds pretty nasty, and it was: I would go through more than 7,000 breasts a shift. Chicken fat and blood is everywhere, and my coworkers would often have to point out pieces of chicken that were stuck to my face. Like how you would point out a piece of spinach lodged between a friend's teeth. I'd come home reeking each morning -- I worked the graveyard shift--and take a long shower to get the smell of chicken carcasses off me.

I've been a vegetarian for twenty years, so that was pretty gross. But the truth is that I got accustomed to it very quickly, because it is so monotonous and fast paced. That's what I learned by doing the work for a number of weeks -- the real difficulty isn't the grossness factor, but not going crazy due to boredom and pain. You're wearing earplugs to block out the noise, so you can't talk to people, and you're standing in place for hours making the same motion. Like one co-worker told me, "A trained monkey could do this work." After a week, half of the folks that went through orientation with me had quit.

More semi-current articles below:

Kansas

Nebraska:

From Yahoo:

How much do slaughter house workers get paid?
I was watching this video, and now I wonder - how much do these guys get paid to do all the disgusting things that they do on a daily basis for a living?

This is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfFr6TNMd…

According to internet (Simply Hired.com), they get paid an average of $14,000, which kind of really sucks.
1 year ago