Sara Lee Starts Robo-Meat Plant.

Sara Lee, parent company of Hillshire Farms, has announced the purchase of a fully operational meat processing plant where most of the employees are robots.

The plant reportedly cost Sara Lee $140 million and will reduce their human staff by more than half. The robots de-bone, cut, slice, and package all the company’s meat and do it at twice the speed of human workers. More robots and less people are a mixed and bizarre blessing.

Meat processing plants are extremely dangerous places for humans to work with employees getting severe cuts, losing limbs, and getting caught in grinders on a fairly regular basis. Robots doing the work might reduce injuries but it also kills $20/hr jobs. Plant workers operate under the assumption that the robots are detecting defective meat the way humans might but it feels like it could be easier for a robot to miss opportunities to remove diseased meat from the line.

When owned by ConAgra, the plant was site of an infamous shooting spree in which a disturbed employee killed 6 co-workers. In exchange for taking the troubled site in Kansas, the State gave Sara Lee $9.7 million in tax breaks and 47.3 million in other “incentives.”

The State giving Sara Lee millions of dollars to fire half their work force and process twice as many animals? Forget my mixed bag comment, this just sounds bad.