Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants
More than a century after Upton Sinclair's gruesome "The Jungle," the president is loosening rules that protect workers and consumers alike.
It was more than a century ago that Upton Sinclair went undercover in Chicago’s stockyards, resulting in his reported novel The Jungle. A blood-splattered portrait of the American meatpacking industry, it documented the misery and filth of the city’s slaughterhouses, where miserable workers churned out cuts of rotten meat in treacherous, rat-infested conditions. “The air would be full of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that you could not see five feet before you,” Sinclair wrote. “And then, with men rushing about at the speed they kept up on the killing-beds, and all with butcher-knives, like razors, in their hands well, it was to be counted as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle…”
Link: Trump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants