|
Product Description
When Smithfield Foods opened its pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 1992, workers in the rural area were thrilled to have jobs at what was billed as “the largest slaughterhouse in the world.” However, they soon left in droves because of the fast, unrelenting line speed and high rate of injury. Those who stayed wanted higher wages and safer working conditions, but every time they tried to form a union, the company quickly cracked down, firing union leaders, assaulting organizers, and setting minority groups against each other.
Author and journalist Lynn Waltz reveals how these aggressive tactics went unchecked for years until Sherri Buffkin, a higher-up manager at Smithfield, blew the lid off the company’s corrupt practices. Through meticulous reporting, in-depth interviews with key players, and a mind for labor and environmental histories, Waltz weaves a fascinating tale of the nearly two-decade struggle that eventually brought justice to the workers and accountability to the food giant, pitting the world’s largest slaughterhouse against the world’s largest meatpacking union.
Following in a long tradition of books that expose the horrors of the meatpacking industry—from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation—Hog Wild uncovers rampant corporate environmental hooliganism, labor exploitation, and union-busting by one of the nation’s largest meat producers. Waltz’s eye-opening examination sheds new light on the challenges workers face not just in meatpacking, but everywhere workers have lost their power to collectively bargain with powerful corporations.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Hard Sell: Work and Resistance in Retail Chains
- Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (Wildcat)
- Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike
- Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy
- Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Ser.)
- Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont
- From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement
- Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Justice, Power, and Politics)
- Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
- No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
*If this is not the "Hog Wild: The Battle for Workers' Rights at the World's Largest Slaughterhouse" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Dec 26, 2024 21:16 +08.