Just Business

A restaurant worker arrives for her morning shift and discovers that the cooler had broken leaving the meat warm overnight and beginning to rot. She advises the manager who orders her to shut up and make the sandwiches. She refuses. Instead she calls the health department. The inspector confirms that the meat is rotten and not fit for consumption. Now she faces losing her job. Her last ditch hope? Her union.

There were no service-worker unions when Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle". No health inspectors either. As Sinclair described it, the food industry was "tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there are not merely rivers of hot blood and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soup cauldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell-there are also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry and dining rooms littered with food black with flies, and toilet rooms that are open sewers."

You might think that we have seen the last of those dark days but thanks to the pressures of free market capitalism we have been steadily rushing right back.

"Over the past century, the increased centralization of our food production — accompanied by a growth in foreign food imports — has once again left our nation’s health at the hands of mostly unregulated food processors. Currently, the FDA has surprisingly little control over food safety: Our food industry is self-regulated, which means the FDA is not only incapable of demanding a recall of contaminated food products, but they also lack the power to punish the companies that produce such products. As a result, more than 350,000 Americans are hospitalized due to food-related illnesses each year," according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

A hundred years ago, or tomorrow at some fancy joint that refuses union labor, that brave sandwich-maker is too cowed to open her trap. Dozens sicken on rotten meat, one or two perhaps even die and having been a Pinko-Socialist Upton Sinclair knows why:

They were the Beef Trust-- "a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.-- In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power."

Think about that the next time you eat out and dip into that salsa or guacamole. If you start to feel queasy remember ... life is just part of doing business.