An undercover video taken at one of the nation's largest pork producers shows pigs being dragged across the floor, beaten with paddles, and sick to the point of immobility... "If the USDA is around, they could shut us down," says a worker.

I'm from Austin, I went to school and played sports with a lot of the current executives of Hormel and QPPs' kids, and I still know a lot of their parents personally 15 years after leaving town. I go to these executives houses over the holidays when everyone gets back together. From conversations I've heard hanging out and being around the Hormel dads talking, they have known about this and similar issues for quite some time. They never really do anything to solve the problem about this because of exactly what the article points out, they get to inspect and approve most of their meat themselves. They had a problem not too many years ago with the way they were processing the pig brains, they were blowing them out of the skulls with high air pressure but it was spraying out tiny particles of brain in the air that the workers were breathing in and getting really sick from. It was a long time before they even figured out what was causing the sickness, I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure they actually created this illness, it had never been observed before, and Mayo clinic finally got to the bottom of it. They didn't change that until enough people got so sick that their hand was forced. I also know that they hire illegal immigrants (at least at QPP, hispanic population in Austin legal and illegal I would guess is at least 30% in a town of 25,000) to keep wages lower (these immigrants get recycled but legit paperwork from the previously employed, but those hiring know full well that these people are not who they are on paper). I see both ends of Austin's spectrum, and just like in most small towns based around one major employer these days the laborers are getting the shaft while the people I know are making it off with major profits. The strangest thing is knowing and talking to these people, and most of them are not necessarily bad or greedy, but the urge to make profit at all expense including screwing the workforce is too ingrained in today's businesses, and it's too hard to say no. Especially when you run one of the biggest food companies in the world. After the Hormel strike in the 80's they dropped the starting wage at the plant to the ballpark of 12-13hr, 30 years later after inflation and all its now even below that, I wanna say in the 10-11hr range. They know this stuff happens, but just like all major companies they don't have to do a thing about it until they get caught.

/r/news Thread Link - ashingtonpost.com