By Thomas Valdriz
The utilization of technology not only brought about both the psychological and spatial distantiation between Bay Area abattoirs and their consumers, but laborsaving technology also helped to psychologically and spatially distance laborers from the products they made. Laborsaving technology has been utilized in order to increases efficiency and productivity with the end goal being to maximize profits. The sheer competitiveness of meatpacking generates the need to innovate in order to lower total costs and increase production, thereby gaining more market share and realizing more profits. In the early days of industrial meatpacking, productivity was increased as surplus value was appropriated from laborers through the division of labor. In the long run the division of labor decreases the marginal cost per unit of output.
San Francisco’s Miller and Lux,[1] South San Francisco’s Western Meatpacking Co (later called Swift & Company),[2] and Emeryville’s Golden West Meat Co[3] were all highly influential in streamlining Bay Area meatpacking and utilized laborsaving techniques and technology in order to reduce variable costs and stay competitive. By the mid 1800’s Gustavus Swift’s “disassembly line” system of industrial meat production became the standard production technique because his system enabled unskilled cheap labor to quickly assimilate into the production process by dividing the stages of slaughtering into small manageable tasks. The disassembly line of production created more unskilled jobs, leading to the breakdown of apprenticeship traditions[4] and the devolution of the intimate relationship between laborers and cattle (see Figure 3). The division of labor was exerted upon laborers and machines as well as automated devices were able to fill specific roles of production and in turn replace the jobs of the laborers who once filled unfavorable or dehumanizing duties. Although capital investment has high initial costs, over the long run innovative technology can facilitate increases in production by performing the traditionally unpleasant duties with minimal assistance from laborers, thus reducing long run variable costs and distancing laborers from detestable tasks.
The process of making slaughtering more humane was another step in spatially and psychologically dissociating laborers from their products. In the traditional disassembly line system of beef slaughtering, cattle were herded from stockyards to holding pens and positioned single file to be “stunned”. After 1958, the U.S. Congress’s Humane Slaughter Act required that cattle be rendered unconscious prior to being slaughtered.[5] Before the HSA, Bay Area abattoirs used large-caliber soft-nosed bullets or simply bludgeoned the cattle before slitting the throat. In the HSA, the US Congress outlined various methods to humanely slaughter livestock, such as the use a pneumatic captive bolt gun[6] which makes a dull and abrupt “pfft” sound and was a quicker and less psychologically stressful way for workers to perform the task of rendering a cow brain-dead before being bled by another worker. By briskly dividing the process of killing between multiple laborers, the physical act of killing became less absolute and the mental burden is minimized as laborers could isolate themselves from accountability.[7]
Contemporary abattoirs use a much more sophisticated division of labor to further increase productivity and separate laborers from dehumanizing aspects of meatpacking. Bay Area abattoirs have always had distinctive spatial zones within the structure of the slaughterhouse; however, modern-day laborers are now spatially divided into zones of production based on the life, killing, and postmortem stages of a cow’s body, all of which are visibly segregated from one another. [8] In the new spatial arrangement of the industrial slaughter, laborers are spatially and psychologically divided into separate zones and wear color-coordinated hardhats to delineate which zone their duties belong (see Figure 4).[9]
Sources:
[1] Bowcock, Robert H. Butchertown: A Collage of a San Francisco Institution during 1850-1969. San Francisco, CA: Robert H. Bowcock, 2004. 58. Print.
[2] Spangler, Ray. “Scheduled to Close: Swift & Co. Was a Boon to SSF.” The Industrial City Echoes [South San Francisco] 1968: 1. Print.
[3] The Emeryville Historical Society. “Constructing the Crossroads: Transportation.” Emeryville. San Francisco, CA: Acadia, 2005. 34-37. Print.
[4] Groth, Paul. “Working, Shopping, and Living Downtown From the 1850’s To 1900: The C.B.D., Cottage Districts, and Slums.” Lecture. American Cultural Landscapes 1600-1900. University of California, Berkeley. 1 Nov. 2013.543. Print.
[5] United States. Cong. United States Congress. Legal Information Institute. By Government Printing Office. Cong 7 USC § 1902. Cornell University, Web. 1 Nov. 2013.
[6] United States. Cong. United States Congress. Legal Information Institute. By Government Printing Office. Cong 7 USC § 1902. Cornell University, Web. 1 Nov. 2013.
[7] Pachirat, Timothy. “Kill Floor.” Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.56. Print.
[8] Pachirat, Timothy. “Kill Floor.” Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.61. Print.
[9] Pachirat, Timothy. “Kill Floor.” Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.82. Print.
The working class city 