Outline+for+Chapter+7

Ch 7

Chapter Summary: The chapter is about the movement of slaughterhouses from the Northeast and Chicago to the West, where companies like ConAgra ('partnership with the land) and IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) can take advantage of the cheap labor and weak unions. After WWII, slaughterhouses became mechanized and virtually eliminated the need for skilled laborers, allowing slaughterhouses to hire migrant workers to take the jobs. The new jobs had a high turnover rate, as IBP "found very little correlation between turnover and profitability" (161). As many as 2/3 of the workers cannot speak English in any factory, such as the one in Greeley, Colorado. Besides bringing crime, poverty and illegal immigrants, the slaughterhouse also brought a lingering stench from the wastes of the factory, destroying air quality and causing health problems.

It also outlined the harsh tactics of the corporations, especially IBP, such as their mob-breaking strategies, dealings with New York City mobsters, as they were "guided by a hard, unsentimental view of the world," (154).


 * Schlosser references Upton Sinclair's //The Jungle// several times, and seems to recreate its journey through the factories. This establishes ethos.
 * He also talks and tours a slaughterhouse with Ruben Ramirez, a once-skilled worker at a Chicago slaughterhouse before it went out of business. He lists his injuries and struggles on the job, establishing pathos.
 * He lists many facts and figures about jobloss,court cases, and labor forces (legal & illegal), establishing logos
 * Lexington, Colorado suffers 3 horrid smells from the slaughterhouse it holds, "burning hair and blood, that greasy smell, and the odor of rotten eggs," making the reader cringe and feel disgusted, pathos. Along with the smell came Latino workers, accounting for 50% of the population, and Lexington is now known as "Mexington... affectionately by some, disparagingly by others" humor and pathos.
 * The reader is outraged by the corporations' mob-breaking tactics, like hiring scabs and the mob to do dirty work and raise profitability and the minuscule litigation and consequences of their actions. Pathos and logos, when referring to figures in court cases.