Regulatory theater in the pork industry: how the capitalist state harms workers, farmers, and unions.

The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sales and tax revenue per year. This industry has also generated hundreds of workers' deaths from covid infections, thousands of workers' injuries from hazardous working conditions, economic and environmental depletion of communities near production sites, and the massive decline of small hog farming operations - not to mention over a billion tons of fecal waste per year. Although pork companies, like most firms in the food industry, portray state regulation as a burden for commercial interests, we identify how the pork industry enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the state to create favorable conditions for three interrelated processes: 1) monopoly and monopsony power; 2) hyper-efficient but injurious working conditions; 3) union busting. Using structural contradictions theory, we explain the failure to protect workers, farmers, and communities as a feature of the fundamental contradiction between protection and accumulation within the capitalist state. We argue that the solution to pork industry harms is not more regulation but the outright replacement of currently existing capitalism.

Necropolitical Governance and State-Corporate Harms: COVID-19 and the U.S. Pork Packing Industry

The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the pork packing industry. In 2020, when over 67,000 meatpacking and processing workers were infected with the virus, the state allowed and encouraged this industry to coerce a racialized workforce to risk their health and lives to slaughter pigs. While it would seem reasonable to call for more regulation to protect labor in this industry, we find by analyzing the state?s actions in 2020 that its interests are too far aligned with corporations? interests to expect one to police the other. Our analysis underlines the state as a symbiotic partner of corporations, and places workers? illnesses and deaths in a necropolitical framework that demands attention to the state?s tacit approval of inhumane working conditions, use of law to keep packing plants open, and attempts to limit the liability of corporations for any deaths or illnesses they have caused.