It's Friday night, and I ain't got nobody...

I'm flying solo at casa de los whiskey this weekend, as Mrs. Inallmyyears is out of town. So.

Down to some sweet bloggy action.

The Washington Post had a, whaddya callit, um, ARTICLE! That's it. Actual journalism or something. Anywho. It's on one of my favorite subjects, working conditions for meatpackers in the modern slaughter industry.

That subject collides two of my main interests nicely. The first is working folks' issues and the state of the unions, and the second is animal rights issues. I first took notice of worker's issues when I read Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz. I read it with the intent of learning the modern meat industry's impact on the animals that it, well, 'processes' would be a nice clinical term, but I'll just say kill instead.

What I learned was even worse. And it shouldn't have been surprising. I learned that since the unions that represent packinghouse workers have largely been busted through outsourcing threats, mass importation of illegal immigrants who are not likely to complain much (and will usually work for lots less) and the typical corporate 'race to the bottom' that we're accustomed to. God Bless NAFTA-CAFTA-SHAFTA!

The result of all of this is that Eisnitz' book details the way the humans who do the brutal work of slaughter are treated like cattle themselves by employers that long ago quit paying attention to its workers and its final products.

Weakened unions allowed horrible working conditions to flourish in the packinghouses, which resulted in horrible treatment of the animals.

But the nexus of all of it is that for the meat companies, the impulse to exploit their workers for each penny they can get out of them, is exactly the same impulse that leads them to exploit the animals, all to the nth degree.

In fact, one of the ways that cruelty to the animals manifests itself in the book is when workers, who are fed up with their working conditions, take it out on the animals they come into contact with. Simply because they've reached their breaking point. They also tend to take it out on their wives and children, which makes the circle kinda complete, doesn't it? Because now it's a feminist issue as well.

And so for me, my vegetarianism led me directly to care about the state of working folks' lives (and eventually to feminism). If I'm likely to treat my cattle like shit, I'm quite likely to do that to my workforce, and neither is acceptable, if you're trying to make moral decisions in this insane world.

Or to put it another way, animal liberation is really, human liberation.

They're the same.

The Washington Post article concludes by saying that until folks demand humanely produced meat, the industry is likely to keep doing what they've been doing. The rub is that when you say 'humanely produced meat', one immediately thinks of the conditions of the animals, not the workers. The workers themselves are almost secondary.

But I bet if they're being honest, most of those folks would acknowledge they're in the same boat as their hogs, chickens and cows. They're at the bottom of the hill. And guess which direction shit rolls in that situation.