right there--hour after
hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage links and racing
with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep
alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she
could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon
her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed
ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in
a menagerie.

Chapter 14

With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a
sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great
majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had
been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could
now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read
a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest--that they use
everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would
often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away
the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all
the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of
meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and
any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious
apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the
plant--a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by
plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man
could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of
this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so
bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump
into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which
destroyed the odor--a process known to the workers as "giving them
thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be
found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as
"Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon
a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad
part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this
invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and T