The Chain Read online

  Participating companies responded angrily. The National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals filed a complaint with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, alleging that Kelly Wadding, CEO of Quality Pork Processors, had even pressured the local union in Minnesota to lobby upper-level officials to withdraw their objections to the reduced inspection model. (Had the charge stuck, it would have been a violation of fair labor laws.) The FLRA dismissed the complaint on a split vote in 2002. And eventually all parties reached an unexpected deal. If the meat inspectors’ union would not object to just three on-line inspectors in each of the five pilot plants—even fewer than the original proposal—then the USDA would fund additional relief inspectors who would work away from the line. More jobs for the inspectors’ union, less inspection for the packers: everyone was happy—except food safety advocates, who worried that consumers were being placed at risk. Nevertheless, the agreement was approved, and Hormel began training new quality-control managers right away.

  Nick Rinaker vowed never to work at Hormel Foods. His father had spent decades, forty-three years in the end, as a forklift driver at the plant in Fremont, starting before what Rinaker called “the big wage change” and staying on after, because he needed the money to take care of Nick’s mother, who suffered from lupus. But the younger Rinaker could never forgive the wage cut exacted by Hormel in the 1980s and instead started his own contracting firm, eventually persuading his father to leave the plant and join in the business.

  But in 1992, Nick injured his back on the job and needed a series of expensive surgeries. “The only company with halfway decent insurance in town was Hormel Foods,” he told me, “and they were hiring new cleanup people.” He took the job reluctantly at first, but hosing down equipment was easy enough, and the nighttime hours allowed him to continue picking up some cabinetry work during the day. Everything seemed to be going well, until the day another employee accidentally released a herd of hogs from a pen in the livestock area, badly trampling Rinaker’s foot. Nick was reassigned to tagging carcasses, considered light duty, but he sustained a fall there that left him with a shattered heel. He filed a grievance against the company, claiming an unsafe workplace. In return for dropping his complaint, Rinaker was offered one of the newly opened positions in quality control. He was given a six-week course in what he called “the basic can-and-can’t-do” on the line and trained on the HIMP directives.

  Under the new system, inspections started in the holding pens—with sick hogs, whenever possible, separated out before reaching the kill area. Inevitably, though, some hogs that should have been condemned slipped by. They were slaughtered and sent through the normal series of baths, shaves, and cuts. With reduced government inspection to identify them as they entered the cut line, it was now the job of quality-control auditors like Rinaker to assure that those sick hogs weren’t butchered and sent to market. The auditors stood at brightly lit viewing stations, where they could check viscera and glands in the head and throat for any signs of abnormality, even while the corresponding carcasses were being cut. If there was a problem identified in a bin of lymph nodes, the corresponding carcass was moved from the chain to a side rail (or “railed out”), where it was tagged and condemned. The pace was fast and the pressures were high, Rinaker told me, but at first, the system worked okay. The line was running 900 hogs per hour, and it was possible to conduct adequate inspections in the time allowed.

  But, little by little, the work grew faster. The line speeds were changed on Mondays, Rinaker said, and the mood before weekly pre-work meetings, when the new chain speed would be announced, grew tense as workers waited to see if they would be issued another increase. One week, the company would order a slight speedup, Rinaker explained, and then see what parts of the process began to break down under the strain. The speed would hold steady while new systems or equipment were developed, and then another increase would be ordered.

  Throughout every shift, a union-hired industrial engineer would walk the plant floor with a stopwatch around his neck, counting the cogs in the chain to make sure that Hormel wasn’t exceeding the allowable number of carcasses per minute. But Joseph Rezac, the chief shop steward in Fremont at the time, later explained, “There’s more to this than just getting the numbers.” Often when workers were objecting to line speed, he said, a time study would show the line in technical compliance; the real problem was dull knives or an undermanned workstation.

  To address each particular workflow problem, Hormel developed, patented, and installed new automated equipment designed to speed up cutting off heads, removing viscera, and halving carcasses. Hormel even patented a process for splitting skulls and harvesting brains and glands (noting on the patent application that “all animal tissue has some commercial value”). To allow workers making skilled cuts to keep pace, the company installed a conveyor system and humming automatic knives throughout the plant, and they broke up complicated tasks into single, repetitive motions. Union leadership rarely objected, because increased speeds provided a ready argument for additional hires, which in turn expanded membership and filled union coffers.

  And from that point forward, the chain virtually never stopped. “Before HIMP,” Rinaker said, “USDA had total control. If fecal was spotted, the line stopped while it was removed. After HIMP, Hormel just railed out affected hogs where they could be cleaned or reworked.” There was such resistance to stoppages that Hormel began issuing rewards to quality-control auditors if the line was off for less than ten minutes that day. Soon, the only limit on Hormel’s daily kill was the number of hogs they could acquire, so the company negotiated an arrangement with the state of Iowa that would allow them to invest in hog farms and further increase production. By the end of 2006, the line speed had risen from 900 heads per hour to as fast as 1,350 heads per hour—not only a 50 percent speedup, but also roughly 20 percent faster than any high-capacity plant under standard USDA supervision. The problem was simple, Rinaker told me: “Your ability to inspect is fine when you are viewing hogs at nine hundred per hour. Anything faster, you miss fecal.”

  To help keep up, Hormel increased the workforce in Fremont from roughly 1,000 people to about 1,200—but, without physical expansion of the plant, these new workers actually gave rise to dangerous crowding along the line. “Accidents happen often from someone overreaching,” Rinaker told me, exactly as had happened to Maria Lopez, when her finger was severed by the saw blade. But even in instances where workers were injured and meat had been contaminated by blood, the quality-control auditors were expected to keep the line moving. “Speeding up the line has caused all types of operator injuries,” Rinaker said. “Part of my QC duties was cleaning the human blood off surfaces to protect against blood-borne pathogens.”

  Rinaker complained to a supervisor that these procedures were harming the safety and quality of Hormel’s product. But this was no longer the family-owned business that his father had worked for, he told me; this was now the Hormel Foods Corporation. (Even in e-mail correspondence, Rinaker always drew a careful distinction between the old company, “George A. Hormel,” and the new company, “HFC.”) When he raised concerns about compromised quality, Rinaker said a supervisor told him, “I couldn’t care less about quality. Quality slows down production.”

  “All the employees are there for one purpose,” Rinaker explained, “to help the supervisor realize the dreams of the production manager—and his dreams are directed by Austin.”

  Thanks to HIMP, those dreams were fast made reality. Almost from the moment the HIMP program was finally implemented, the participating meatpackers saw huge benefits; in 2004, Excel and Hatfield achieved the largest production increases of any two packers in America. Meanwhile, the other three plants were all ramping up production for Hormel—not just the official Hormel plant in Fremont and Quality Pork in Austin, but also the Farmer John plant in California, which Hormel purchased outright at the end of 2004. With that acquisition, all three of Hormel’s cut-and-kill operations—the plants that still s
upply all 9.4 million hogs for its operation worldwide—were authorized by the federal government to run their lines as fast as they could.

  Supported by the USDA’s experimental program, Hormel’s CEO, Joel Johnson, adopted a corporate strategy that emphasized Spam and other value-added products. Asked later why he had pursued this path, Johnson explained, “There are the obvious things we read about over and over—working families, the lack of time for dinner preparation and so forth. But there are other issues that are harder to quantify. There’s no question that the cooking skills in American households have deteriorated, and I don’t see anything on the horizon that is going to turn that around. Publishers may be selling a lot of cookbooks, but I think consumers are using them like wallpaper—as decoration.”

  In addition to prepared food lines, Hormel began partnering with other brands, like Famous Dave’s, and buying up existing brands, such as Lloyd’s Barbeque, in order to get their company’s pork into a wider range of readymade products—and reap greater profits. In 2005, Johnson retired as CEO, and Jeffrey M. Ettinger, formerly Hormel’s corporate attorney, was appointed to take over. In the two years that followed, the company spent $7 million on a plant expansion in Fremont, $3.5 million on an expansion of Quality Pork in Austin, and another $6 million on building a sister plant to Quality Pork in nearby Albert Lea, Minnesota, under the name Select Foods. The expansion paid off. Ettinger soon announced that Hormel was generating $1 billion in annual sales from new value-added products.

  When the subprime mortgage crisis pulled the nation toward recession and other companies scrambled to introduce budget-friendly products, Hormel was already perfectly positioned. They had invested heavily in brands favored by women reentering the workforce. And they were able to produce vast quantities of low-cost meat—including old standbys Spam, Dinty Moore Stew, and Hormel Chili—for families that were suddenly without one income and struggling to make ends meet. In the first years of the recession, sales of Spam climbed by double digits. And those sales, in turn, drove overall profitability. Between 2006 and 2013, Hormel increased sales across the board by more than 43 percent—from $5.75 billion to $8.23 billion. As Hormel touted Spam as a good buy for penny-conscious consumers, they also promoted shares in the company as a recession-proof stock for investors looking for an opportunity in the midst of economic downturn.

  But Hormel’s cheap meat came at a high cost to its workers.

  Pablo Ruiz speaks with a heavy accent, but his English was good enough to make him an asset at Quality Pork, where he could communicate instructions from white supervisors to Hispanic line workers. And he had experience. Ruiz had worked for several years sorting cattle alongside USDA inspectors at the Swift & Company plant in Worthington, Minnesota, so when he moved to Austin and came on at QPP, he was promoted to process-control auditor after just eight months. It was his job, in essence, to stay one step ahead of the plant’s on-line USDA inspector, to keep an eye out for potential violations and troubleshoot before a problem got big enough that the inspector might order a line stoppage.

  On the processing floor, Ruiz floated between stations. Each hour he did ten checks of incoming carcasses for obvious physical defects, ten checks at the viscera table (looking for kidney abscesses and liver flukes), ten checks at the head table (looking for swollen lymph nodes that might indicate tuberculosis or other infection), and ten checks to approve completed cuts before they were sent to the cold side for packing. And each hour he stuck a thermometer into collected bins of brains and ovaries and pancreases to be sure that they were within approved temperature ranges.

  Ruiz told me that, by 2006, the chain was running so fast that QPP’s lone government inspector sat in a chair alongside the line, because he only had time to do visual inspections. “We just check at the head,” Ruiz told me. “We check the lymph nodes, the glands, the brain to see any type of sickness.” Ruiz said that he didn’t think it was enough government oversight. Under ordinary USDA guidelines, inspectors are required to check the tail, head and tongue, thymus, and all viscera of each hog. They palpate the lymph nodes of the large intestines and lower abdomen to check for tuberculosis nodules, feel the intestines themselves for parasites, and turn over every set of kidneys to check for hardness due to inflammation or hidden masses. At QPP, Ruiz said, the inspectors just visually double-checked the work of process-control auditors. “But that’s why the line goes so fast. When I was there, it was 1,305 per hour. This means ten thousand hogs achieved every eight hours. That’s money in the bank—easy, quick.”

  But in late 2006, after the latest speedup, the line got going so fast that hog heads started piling up at the opening to the plastic shield that guarded head table workers against spatter from the brain machine, and the force of the conveyor belt pressing the heads forward cracked the Plexiglas. Ruiz recorded the needed repair but, in the meantime, attempted to patch the fracture. “I put up plastic bags to protect the people there,” he said, but every day or two, the wind whipping through the plant would rip and fray the bags. So Ruiz would put up new bags, fixed in place with tape. In the midst of all this, he noticed that Matthew Garcia, the scrawny kid who ran the brain machine, was missing days of work, and then was gone altogether.

  “I thought, Oh, maybe he’s quit or got another job, but then after maybe four months, I saw him back to work.” But instead of running the brain machine, Garcia was in the box room, working just four hours, then returning home.

  “What’s going on with you?” Ruiz remembered asking.

  Garcia told him he had been hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic for more than three months. “He said he couldn’t walk at all,” Ruiz remembered. “He said he’s got a special class to do things in a wheelchair—to shower, to get on clothes, to eat.” The conversation worried Ruiz; he himself had been having trouble making his auditing rounds lately, moving with such a slow shamble that his supervisor had taken to teasing him about his shuffling gait. Over the next six months, the pain worsened.

  Finally, Ruiz went to see the plant nurse, Carole Bower, about the chronic burning in his feet and hands. She suggested that he might be suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome or beginning to develop arthritis, but by October 2007, she must have known it could be something more serious. A half-dozen workers from the kill floor had come to Bower with complaints similar to those listed by Ruiz, and she had referred them to Richard Schindler at the Austin Medical Center, who had then reached out to Mayo Clinic colleagues in neurology. But for some reason, Ruiz was not referred for medical examination.

  Instead, Ruiz continued to shuffle from one station to the next, struggling to stay ahead of the relentless pace of the line. Then, on November 20, while going to check the temperature of bins of viscera, he collapsed on the kill floor. One moment he was walking, Ruiz told me; the next he was on the floor, his glasses scattered across the concrete. A coworker rushed to help him stand and limp to the nurse’s station. Ruiz could feel blood soaking through his pants and filling his right boot, but, try as he might, he couldn’t move his legs.

  Chapter 3

  ALTER EGOS

  In early November 2007, Aaron DeVries, an epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in St. Paul, drove to Austin to review the medical records of workers from Quality Pork Processors reporting a shared set of mysterious symptoms. MDH had received a call from Daniel Lachance, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, worrying that these cases might represent a new form of peripheral neuropathy, emanating from the slaughter operation. After initial review, Lachance couldn’t rule out the possibility that the illness was food-borne or even transmissible from person to person, so he urged the department to investigate immediately.

  DeVries was a young man, just a few years out of medical school with only three months under his belt at MDH, but he had already earned a reputation as a careful and caring medical investigator. After Hurricane Katrina, he had gone to Lafayette, Louisiana, as part of the Medical Reserve Corps, to provide primary care to evacuees, and h
e had recently begun working with HIV/AIDS patients at the University of Minnesota’s Delaware Street Clinic. Upon arriving at the Austin Medical Center, DeVries began reviewing patient health records, going down his checklist, striking out possible sources of the QPP workers’ illness. First and foremost, there were no reports that workers’ families were suffering from similar symptoms, so the disorder didn’t seem to be transmissible by human-to-human contact. But their complaints, DeVries quickly realized, were inconsistent with any known infections. Like Lachance, he concluded that the illness had to be a new kind of autoimmune disorder, most likely triggered by something inside the plant.

  When he was done reviewing patient histories, DeVries went directly to QPP, where he was given a quick tour of the line by Carole Bower and then shown to a conference room where he met with owner Kelly Wadding and human resources manager Dale Wicks. Wadding made a rough sketch of the warm room where all of the sick employees worked, and Wicks pulled up each worker’s station ID so Wadding could mark his position on the line. The map confirmed what Richard Schindler at the Austin Medical Center had already surmised: almost all of the workers were clustered at or near the head table. DeVries recommended that he return soon with an MDH team to conduct an environmental assessment of that area.

  Three weeks later, just after Thanksgiving, the MDH team, led by DeVries and state epidemiologist Ruth Lynfield, returned to QPP. Before entering, they were given plastic aprons, plastic booties and gloves, plastic masks, and plastic hairnets to go under their hard hats. As Wadding guided them along the cut line, the medical team quickly recognized that workers wore almost none of this protective gear, because it was clingy and uncomfortable inside the warm room. Even at the head table, employees were bare-armed, and none of them wore a respirator or goggles. The team progressed down the steel bench, observing each employee’s workstation, before eventually reaching the brain machine. They stood silently for a moment, watching the bursts of air rising into a red cloud—a small amount each time but enough, as it drifted and accumulated, to gradually coat workers from one end of the head table to the other. Lynfield, watching each blast of pressurized air raise a small swirl of pink mist, asked Wadding, “Kelly, what do you think is going on?” Wadding reportedly replied, “Let’s stop harvesting brains.”