Chapter 7, "Cogs in the Great Machine"

o What changes did IBP introduce to the meat packing industry?
Each worker stood in one place in the line, did the same job over and over again, making the same knife cut thousands of times during an eight hour shift. IBP’s success depended on access to cheap and powerless workers. IBP was obsessed with efficiency, centralization, and control. IBP put the slaughterhouse in rural areas. They were selling smaller cuts of meat. This enabled markets to fire their butchers. It also let sell the left-overs (bones, scraps of meat) as dog food. They added grinders to make ground hamburger meat in their factories.
o Where do meat packing companies go to recruit new employees? What is the “new industrial migrant?”
The employees come from mainly New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. The meatpacking companies also recruited homeless people. The people were more likely than Americans to work for minimum wage. The “new industrial migrant” was someone who the company recruited from a different place.