Tough meat, hard candy: Implications for low-wage work in the food-processing industry

Food processing is traditionally a low-wage area. It is also usually one of the biggest manufacturing sectors of a national economy, it is heavily tied to national culture, and it is at the same time strongly affected by reduced trade barriers and increased globalization. The food manufacturing industry is highly competitive (Wilson and Hogarth 2003), and companies have been faced with many challenges arising from changing economic conditions. In each of the countries in this study, the food-processing sector plays a prominent role and is often regarded as one of the more successful manufacturing areas. Furthermore, the food-processing industries in many parts of the world face similar challenges these days and deal with them within the constraints of different national institutional systems and cultural differences that affect not only the demand for food and drink but also a range of other issues, such as the prevalent business strategy in food processing, management practices, and issues of human resource development. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how the employment and working conditions in the food-processing sector have been affected by the challenges the sector is facing, with a focus on national differences in how these challenges are dealt with and the role of national institutions in explaining these differences. The chapter is based on research completed in the food-processing sectors of five European countries-Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (see Caroli, Gautié, and Lamanthe 2008; Czommer 2008; Esbjerg and Grunert 2008; James and Lloyd 2008; van Halem 2008)-and draws on case studies in the meat-processing and confectionery subsectors. Where relevant information was available, we have included comparisons with the situation in the United States. Our study focuses on the working conditions of process operatives, who account for the largest group of workers in the food manufacturing industry, although previous studies conducted on the food-processing sector often neglect this role. The various tasks in food processing follow rather common patterns across the various subsectors: incoming raw materials are washed, cut, and mixed, then subjected to various mechanical, chemical, and thermal treatments, and the resulting products are cooled down and packed. On-line operative jobs involve routine, often tedious, manual operations and are highly repetitive, with short, intense cycle times. One operative at a U.K. confectionery company explained: At the moment I am doing the new product, and it's actually counting ten sweets, they are twist-wrapped and five in each hand in each box, and we are doing an average speed of seventeen boxes a minute. So that's one hundred seventy sweets a minute we can put into a box. Off-line operative positions include palletizing or mixing ingredients; some positions have more responsibility, such as quality control. Many operatives work in a team where the work revolves around a specific line; however, this does not indicate that a variety of roles are necessarily undertaken within the line. Some operatives advance to team leader and are responsible for the workers of a specific line. With the increase in automation, the job has changed from being classified as reasonably skilled manual labor to more monitoring of production processes and machinery. The responsibility of machine process operatives for the daily running of the equipment mainly involves monitoring duties; however, because engineers are on hand for breakdowns, machine operative roles remain relatively unskilled. Consequently, many common problems in the work of operatives pertain to poor work positions, repetitive and monotonous movements, lifting heavy objects, stench, noise, dust, high or low temperatures, and drafts as well as poor ventilation in the factories. We begin the chapter by describing the challenges that a globalized food sector poses for the various national food-processing sectors. We discuss the generic ways in which food companies can deal with these challenges, distinguishing low- And high-road strategies, and we briefly characterize the different settings within which companies in the selected countries have to deal with these challenges. We then describe the ensuing differences these strategies make for working conditions, discussing the effects on compensation pressure, the use of temporary and immigrant labor, numerical and functional flexibility, de- And up-skilling, and health and safety issues. We close by speculating about the future development of the foodprocessing sector, especially the likely prevalence of high- And lowroad strategies in dealing with competitive pressures and the effects this will have on workers. Copyright © 2010 by Russell Sage Foundation