[lobstersammich]

ProPublica has some consistently high-quality reporting on meatpacking as a an industry from all kinds of perspectives - the (mis)management of them during the pandemic, the hiring of children to work there, the horrid safety conditions, etc.

https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=meatpacking

I'm not sure if ProPublica has a free, public dataset on meatpacking plants but they generally have datasets that you can purchase that pertain to particular areas of reporting: Medicare and Medicaid overbilling / fraud; repeated pollution violators who keep paying fines instead of stopping polluting; etc. If anyone knows of a dataset on meatpacking plants, health and/or safety violations, etc. please do share the link to the dataset.

[ssnistfajen]

It's kind of ironic for some people in this thread to dismiss meatpacking jobs as "low value" when they have been crucial to keep the supply chain functional. Severe chicken shortages around 2020-2021 were mainly caused by workers in that industry falling ill, because the work conditions there are ideal incubators for respiratory illnesses (cold temperature, indoor environment, lots of people inside the same space, etc.). These jobs exist so anyone can walk into a grocery store and have an obscene selection of animal protein available for purchase without ever having to touch an animal. They are crucial to the modern consumer society and the way these workers have been mistreated have been awful enough without adding god damn child labour to the mix. We need far more regulatory pressure on the industry, not less.

The argument that more pay & benefits for these workers will make meat more expensive is also nothing but a scare tactic. There is already so much automation that the increased cost will hardly be noticeable when it is distributed among purchasing units at the consumer end.