As beef plant owners, like the bosses at JBS in Greeley, crank up line speeds, they turn a blind eye to the inevitable injuries to their workers. But they keep looking for new ways to prevent leaving any profit-generating meat on the bone.
Cargill, one of the other major beef processors in North America, is using artificial intelligence to guarantee they can oversee workers and get every speck of it. They’ve developed a computer system — oh so cleverly named CarVe — that spots “red pixels,” tiny bits of meat left behind on the carcasses as they go down the chain. Cutting table stations light up under the bosses’ eyes with a red, yellow or green signal, rating each worker’s performance.
While workers are pushed to scramble even harder to keep up, Cargill bosses expect the technology to recover 0.5% more meat. They gloat this will let them pocket an extra $2 million each year.
Last year, as the price of ground beef soared 15%, the profits at Cargill, the largest privately held company in the U.S., climbed to the highest level in the company’s 160-year history. Shareholders reveled in the extra $1.5 billion made off the backs of the workers.
They’re also using AI to predict how many workers will show up every day, calibrating variables like weather conditions, holidays, and of course the local high school football teams’ schedules.
The bosses insist all this has nothing to do with exploitation. Rather, they say, CarVe “improves resource efficiency” and “empowers” staff, but is not designed to “monitor or replace people.” Really?
On Feb. 17 the Department of Agriculture announced proposed new “updates” to federal line speed regulations in poultry and pork to “reduce outdated regulatory barriers for processors.” That’s bureaucratese for speedup.
The move was blasted by Mark Lauritsen, an international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, who said the “proposed rule endangers hard-working union and nonunion workers alike, all in the service to the bottom line of big meatpackers.”