What happens to slaughterhouse workers if people go vegan?

The objection

“Whatever you think of the animals, millions of people depend on these jobs. Going vegan throws workers on the scrapheap.”

The answer

Losing a job is a real harm, and some places lean heavily on a single plant: the poultry plant in a US study from North Carolina (2007) was the largest employer of women in its poor, sparsely populated, mostly African American area, in what the researchers call a low-wage industry [1]. The jobs argument assumes the work is worth protecting as it is. The injury and illness figures suggest it isn’t, and so, less firmly, does the research on mental health.

How dangerous is slaughterhouse work?

Slaughterhouse work is more dangerous than the average job, and how much more depends on the measure. In 2024 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 3.2 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers in animal slaughtering and processing, about 1.4 times the rate across private industry (2.3) and above manufacturing (2.7) [9]. The rate was 4.0 in the slaughter of animals other than poultry, and 2.4, close to the average, in poultry processing [9]. Recorded rates may understate the risk: the US Government Accountability Office found in 2016 that workers may underreport injuries for fear of losing their jobs, and employers because of the cost [3].

Narrower measures show a wider gap. By employer-reported data, meat and poultry workers are seriously injured at about twice the rate of other workers, according to the Department of Labor’s safety agency, OSHA, in 2024 [2]. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, OSHA put work-related illness in animal slaughtering and processing at six times the average for all industries in 2022, and carpal tunnel syndrome at more than seven times the national average [2]. OSHA says many of the workers have limited English, and the Department of Labor has found a growing number of children working in the industry, often on maintenance and cleaning shifts (2024) [2].

When COVID-19 reached the plants, the CDC counted 16,233 confirmed cases and 86 deaths among workers at 239 US meat and poultry plants by the end of May 2020 [4]. Of the cases with a recorded race or ethnicity, from 21 states, 87% were in racial and ethnic minority workers, who made up about 61% of the industry’s workforce in those states [4].

Does slaughterhouse work harm mental health?

The research points to more depression and anxiety among slaughterhouse workers, from a small number of studies that cannot show the work is the cause [5]. Slade and Alleyne’s systematic review (2021) found 14 studies from seven countries, half of them in the US, and concluded that slaughterhouse workers had higher rates of mental health problems, depression and anxiety in particular [5]. The review notes two other explanations it could not rule out: plants are more often in low-income areas where mental health problems are already more common, and people who already struggle may be drawn to the work [5].

In the North Carolina study, 47.8% of the women at the poultry plant had depressive symptoms against 19.7% of other working women from the same area, and the rate was still 80% higher after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, health and coping style (2007) [1]. Not every study finds a large gap: at one US beef plant (2017), 4.4% of workers had serious psychological distress against 3.6% of the general population [5]. Workers on its kill floor, where the slaughter happens, reported more distress than those cutting meat [5]. In interview studies, workers described coping by shutting down their emotions or with drink and drugs, and the toll has been characterised as perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a form of post-traumatic stress in people involved in causing the trauma themselves [5]. What the work consists of is on film from the kill cones of a turkey abattoir in Numurkah, Victoria, Australia, in 2020.

Are slaughterhouses linked to crime?

Two US studies link slaughterhouses to more arrests, but the evidence on violent crime is inconsistent and neither study can show cause [5]. Fitzgerald and colleagues (2009), using 1994 to 2002 data from 581 non-metropolitan counties, concluded that slaughterhouse employment increased arrest rates overall and for violent crime, rape and other sex offences, compared with other industries [6]. The 2021 review notes that a second study (2015) also linked slaughterhouses with more arrests overall and for rape, but that neither found a link with violent crime from 1997 onwards, and it concluded that the evidence supports a link with antisocial behaviour and sexual offending but not with violent crime [5].

What would happen to slaughterhouse jobs if people ate less meat?

Slaughterhouse jobs would shrink with the rest of the livestock sector: a 2026 scoping review of 45 studies by Nordhagen and colleagues found that a shift towards plant-based food would cut livestock jobs [7]. It also found that the net change in total employment might be small, because the same shift creates work for legume growers, and that research on the question is scarce, with gaps in job numbers, pay, job quality and studies from low- and middle-income countries [7]. Cultivated meat would probably mean fewer jobs overall, going mainly to high-skilled workers in high-income countries, with job quality that might improve [7]. In the US, meat and poultry processing employed about 500,000 people in 2020 [8]. Helping them through a fall in demand, with retraining and investment in the towns that depend on the plants, is the task any shrinking industry sets, and the review’s authors conclude that much more research is needed to plan a just transition for the people whose livelihoods depend on animal foods [7].