Open Slaughter Poem by Margaret Alice Second

Found a website explaining problems with
American slaughterhouses; America the vile
whose politicians, their wives & the biggest
companies profit by subjecting powerless
workers to inhuman conditions, ensuring
through legislation workers sign waivers to
renounce all rights to medical attention

Slaughterhouse companies covering up all
accidents, big-wigs destroying the humane
businesses - now assembly-line work means
one person doing the same thing repeatedly
until they drop with permanent aches, with
injuries - sharp knives and saws wielded by
tired assembly line workers; staff turnover:

A new workforce each year as employees
succumb to fumes washing bloody tanks -
the assembly-line never stopping and the
carcasses coming even when the slicer with
an electric saw falls as his platform crashes -
no legal protection, America-the-vile, using
capitalism to deny trade unions, growing rich

On the toil of the weak; immigrants, illiterate
and powerless - American legislation's evil
where slaughterhouse cost is concerned - Is
Africa so much worse when the wars are openly
fought - not by exploiting workers until they
drop with injuries, but in honest conflict -
corruption in civil service SO visible, NOT

Protected and hidden by American laws which
favour politicians' profit, owning a stake in the
slaughterhouse companies - why complain when
South Africa's President Zuma says 'corruption'
is a Western concept applicable in the Western
paradigm only - because it's true, American laws
are more corrupt than African potentates are

In seizing power: While America hypocritically
poses as human rights defendant then ignoring
violations in their own country - as long as big
slaughterhouses make a profit and they have
enough meat to eat - ignorant of the fate of
those forced to lose their health in producing
it: the grand cut or hamburgers on the grill…

[14 October 2014]