Crisis in the meatpacking sector: the impact of increasing line speeds on worker safety and animal welfare

A fast-paced and efficient assembly line is central to modern industrialized methods of meat production. Slaughter lines are designed to disassemble an animal into food as quickly and cheaply as possible. But how fast is too fast? This project examines slaughter line speed regulations in Canadian federally-licensed meat and poultry processing facilities to better understand their impact on food safety, worker safety and animal welfare. More specifically, it explores how Canada’s regulatory shift towards outcome-based regulations with the introduction of the new Safe Food for Canadians Act in 2019 has changed industry practices. While this shift is largely seen as desirable and consistent with international approaches to science-based standards in food safety governance, the regulatory changes mean that industry now has greater leeway to set slaughter line speeds that may endanger workers and animals before slaughter. Drawing on empirical data gathered from access to information requests regarding animal cruelty violations and qualitative interviews with veterinary inspectors and labour union representations, the paper aims to contextualize the legislative and regulatory texts that govern production speeds with the inside knowledge of the government actors who apply them and the workers who experience them. While the results suggest that speed is indeed an issue, speed alone cannot explain the animal cruelty violations and workplace injuries that are widespread. Other factors include staff reductions of veterinary inspectors, conflicts of interest with industry appointed food safety inspectors, siloed governance structures, vulnerability within a migrant labour population, particularly Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and industry consolidation and concentration, to name just a few.