Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Sinclair's 'The Jungle' Turns 100, 05/10/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june06/jungle_5-10.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What do you know about Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle?"

2. Which jobs do you find unappealing? Why?

3. Do you ever think about where the food you buy in the grocery store comes from?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Why is Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle," in the news this year?

Upton Sinclair's famous novel, "The Jungle," which graphically depicts the lives of slaughterhouse workers, turns 100 this year. Still required reading for many students, the book examines issues about immigrant workers and the meat industry that remain relevant today.

2. Describe the life of a worker in the Chicago stockyards 100 years ago.

Life was tough for workers in the Chicago stockyards 100 years ago. Many of the workers came from Eastern Europe and spoke little to no English. They waited in long lines hoping to be chosen for a few days work.

Inside the factory, laborers were injured regularly in the hot, bloody and greasy environment.

Back and shoulder injuries from heavy lifting and repetitive movements were common.

Among workers who handled knives Sinclair wrote that, "You could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb." Other workers were burnt and blinded by exposure to dangerous chemicals.

3. What about the Chicago stockyards caused public outrage after Sinclair's book was published?

The meat factories also were unsanitary and infested with rats.

Before dying, poisoned rats would often climb into piles of meat, where they would end up in food sold to people, according to Sinclair's descriptions.

Sinclair's further graphic details of the slaughter of diseased animals, chemicals used to cover the smell of spoiled meat, and worker's using the workspace as a bathroom all led to public outrage.

4. How did Sinclair's book directly impact the food industry?

The book had a dramatic effect on the food industry: domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half and people began to clamor for government action.

Six months after "The Jungle" was published, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. These laws effectively created the Food and Drug Administration.

5. How did the publication of "The Jungle" impact workers' jobs?

While it took less than a year to improve food safety, better working conditions took another 15 years.

When meat workers formed unions in the 1920s they were able to collectively bargain with company owners on bettering their working conditions.

Still the most dangerous industrial job in the country, by the early 1980s meat workers' wages were up to $18 an hour, the highest paid for industrial work in the United States.

Extensive health benefits and retirement plans helped make the work more acceptable.

6. What is the state of the meatpacking industry today? Who works in it and what is their workday like?

But by the mid-1980s, meatpacking companies relocated their plants from urban areas like Chicago to new state-of-the-art facilities in rural locales like North Carolina, Kansas and western Nebraska, where they were able to reduce costs.

Today the meat packing workforce is largely made up of immigrants from Latin America. Charlie LeDuff, a reporter for The New York Times, says that these workers, many undocumented or illegal, are often the only people willing to work this job

And because they're illegal they are reluctant to unionize, afraid they'll be deported.

"For their part, many of the Mexicans ... fear that a union would place their illegal status under scrutiny and force them out," reported LeDuff, who went undercover as a meat worker in a pork plant in North Carolina.

Wages have fallen to between $8 to $12 an hour.

7. How does the meat packing industry respond to criticisms?

The American Meat Institute, which was founded in 1906, dismisses the claims in the report, saying "wages are competitive (about $25,000 a year), turnover is wildly exaggerated, and safety has dramatically improved."

J. Patrick Boyle, the institute's president, said in the last 15 years, the plants have invested in more power tools and better-designed work stations.

"It's a new world," he told the Associated Press. "If Upton Sinclair walked through our plants today, he'd say he was a successful reformer."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. The publication of Upton Sinclair's novel "The Jungle" had a direct impact on the meat packing industry and its workers. Can you think of other books that had a similar impact?

2. Do you think a novel published today could have such a profound impact? Why or why not?

3. Compare the situation for meat workers now and when Sinclair's novel was published. How are they similar? How are they different? Has the situation improved? Why or why not? Would you want to work in a meat packing plant or slaughterhouse? Why or why not?

Write a 500-800 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.