My last post featured my work at a TV dinner plant . The indiscretions I mentioned mostly involved meat. But meat production is not the only place where one will find problems in the food chain. One summer, I worked in a vegetable plant freezing and packaging vegetables and fruits. I performed cleaned-up and other miscellaneous chores on the apricot line. A machine split the apricots and removed the seeds. Line workers packed the apricots into five-gallon cans, and covered them with a thick syrup consisting of water and a lot of sugar. The cans were frozen and sent to military installations all over. My girlfriend hosed me down after work and put my pants on a line to dry. Once dry, they stood on their own.
They assigned me to the string bean line when the apricots were through. Trucks dumped the dusty beans onto a belt. The belt led to a shaker filled with water to agitate the submerged beans and remove the field dust. I cleaned the floor around the machine and assisted the line workers. Muddy water leaked from the shaker and covered the floor, along with grease oozing from the machine. The shaker expelled a lot of beans onto the floor as well.
My boss ordered me to pick up the beans from the floor and throw them back in the shaker. To do this, I used a very large aluminum shovel. I also used a squeegee to push muddy water into the gutters that ran along the side of the machine. The supervisor told me to watch out for the USDA because they tried to catch workers putting the beans from the floor back into the shaker. The beans shoveled from the floor were supposed to go into a little cart which was periodically dumped out back with the rest of the inedibles. I didn’t like being made to skirt the rules, but what could I do? I needed the money for college, and they would fire me if I didn’t do what my supervisor told me to do.
What happened next was an awful accident. While I was shoveIing beans back into the hopper and trying to negotiate the pipes and gutters running alongside the shaker, I lost my balance and fell. The muscles in my shoulder tore when I fell. My shoulder swelled up like a balloon and I took a few days off because of the pain. I was assigned another job when I returned, chipping ice from the freezer floor so the forklifts could run in and out without getting stuck. I left the plant in the fall. They were notified that I was going back to school before I was hired. For months I was unable to land a job. A union representative told me that when I used them as a reference, they would give me an unsatisfactory rating and I wouldn’t get the job. The representative told me that when they left, most people injured on the job received this treatment.
The union representative changed the file. Someone sneaked in and rewrote the file without the company’s knowledge. After that the first job I applied for was secured. But that is not the end of the story. My dad ran a meat shop with walk-in freezers and coolers. One day, about a month after the union rep changed my file, he pulled up to the shop with a pickup full of packages of frozen vegetables. He asked Dad to store them for a short time in his freezer. Dad knew something was up. He suspected that the product was stolen from the plant. The guy eventually fessed up to it. Dad refused him. He didn’t want anything to do with stolen merchandise. We never saw the rep again. He was sent to jail a few years later for defrauding the union he worked for.
Wherever there is money, there are those who will steal it. Dad belonged to the Teamsters for a short time when I was very young. Two large, imposing men visited Mom while Dad was at work delivering spices. They were selling World Scope encyclopedias. Mom refused to buy the encyclopedias. The men indicated they were from the Teamsters and that Dad liked his job, and it would be a shame if he lost it. Mom bought the encyclopedias. Years later I took an English class that exposed me to information on all encyclopedias and the story around them. The publication indicated that World Scope was pushed by the mob through the Teamsters. It was not a good source for reference. Not surprising that an encyclopedia originating from the mob would be of low quality.
Some people are angry at unions and say they are a waste of time, but without unions, we would still be working a twelve-hour day six days a week. The problem is that organizations like unions and government get corrupted. Sometimes people try to fix things. My wife’s previous husband worked as an elected union official in the fishing industry union up in Seattle, WA. He tried to clean up the corruption. He disappeared one day. They found his body a week later stuffed into a crab pot. JFK tried to clean up our government and his head was blown off. The criminals are tough to break when they have so much power and attempts to stop them can result in death to those who try. We must keep trying.
Th next installment will answer the question: “Is food inspection really a dangerous job?” The answer might surprise you. In the meantime, stay well, stay fit, and grow a garden.