Can we stop the slaughterhouse for at least one day?

During 2015 a set of rolling strikes occurred across Iceland. The protest actions drew in a large number of unions from a range of industries, with workers demanding increases in the minimum wage. ¹

Veterinarians also went on strike, abandoning workplaces for more than a month. The absence of veterinarians had an unlikely effect: since food regulations typically require a veterinarian to be present during animal slaughter, the strike action forced slaughterhouses to stop. This in turn led to a “meat shortage.”² The impact of the 2015 Iceland “meat shortage” was extraordinary. The supplies of beef, chicken and pork across Iceland became compromised.³ Some consumers panicked and began “clearing out supermarkets to hoard patties in their freezers.”⁴ The fast food chain KFC was threatened with a nationwide closure. (The managing director exclaimed: “This is unacceptable. We have eight restaurants and we’re rather specialized since we only serve chicken”).⁵

What can we learn from events such as the Iceland meat shortage? Certainly, one lesson is the incredible capacity of organised labour to disrupt supply chains and slow, if not temporarily halt, meat production. For animal advocates, the Iceland veterinarian strike points to the strategic potential in working with those who labour in the production of animal based foods. How might pro animal movements strategise and work in solidarity with labour movements? What benefits might accrue from such “production-side” interventions? And could we strategise around innovative new actions, such as stopping the slaughterhouse for at least one day? This essay will explore these potentials.

A Politics of Consumption or Production?

A significant strategic focus of much pro animal advocacy has been around change in consumption practices. Encouraging people to go vegan certainly has the potential to produce social and political change. If individuals withdraw from consumption practices that revolve around meat or dairy foods for example, then this has an impact on aggregate demand for animal based products. There is probably an argument to suggest that consumers’ “voting with their feet” in relation to consumption choices can generate change in the types of food that are available. For example, many communities across the world have been enjoying an increased availability of choice in relation to vegan and vegetarian options from food suppliers.⁶ Vegan lifestyles also hold much potential in generating alternative communities that create new ways of living with each other without utilising animal based products. We should not under-estimate the political effect of such developments.

However, a focus solely on consumption-side strategies have their limitations. At least one limitation is that it is not clear, at least at a global level, that advocating for people to stop consuming animal products is enough. Despite a growth of interest in vegan diets in many countries (particularly in the global north) the world has continued to radically restructure its diet towards animal based foods, with per capita meat consumption predicted to continue to rise.⁷ This means despite some limited progress by a small number of consumers in some countries in creating a market for plant based foods, the global trend towards humans consuming more animals remains locked firmly in place.

The reasons for growing world per capita meat consumption are complex, and include questions around cultures of meat eating and the structural factors that determine food availability. On a deeper level, I would argue that part of the answer is the specific relationship between anthropocentricism and capitalism. It is true: the utilisation of animals as a commodity to serve human needs has a long history that pre-dates contemporary market economies. However capitalism (and with this the processes of industrialisation and globalisation) have radically shifted our relationships with animals on a global level in ways that are completely unprecedented. The global explosion in the use of animals for food is one symptom of this complex interaction between anthropocentricism and capitalism.

To make sense of this, it worth reflecting on what is distinctive about the capitalism as an economic system. Karl Marx was at pains to emphasise that the object of capitalism was not simply the production of commodities, but rather, the accumulation of capital – capital referring to a commodity that had the potential to be involved in the future production of value.⁸ It is for this reason that Marx saw capitalism as a unique economic system with its own inexhaustible drive towards the production of wealth as capital for its own sake. We live in a world shaped by this economic system which seeks the accumulation of capital rather than the satisfaction of need as its primary goal. Today we live in a world where commodities are mass produced in radically unsustainable ways to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the economic system for wealth accumulation: electronics, clothing, cosmetics, furnishings produced using vast global supply chains, often manufactured in ways that exploit human labour and simultaneously pillage natural resources. Despite extreme forms of wealth enjoyed by a few, this system also produces immense contradiction and violence. For example, unjustifiable inequalities that mean 29,000 children die every day of preventable causes.⁹ Human induced climate change has restructured the living environment of the planet in a way that compromises the future sustainability of human and non human communities.

What has happened to animals over the last two centuries has also been shaped by these same processes of rapid capital accumulation and intense unchecked violence.¹⁰ Globally we know that animals have been produced on a scale that has historically never been seen before. During the twentieth century and beyond, capitalism, industrialisation and globalisation have generated unprecedented forms of mass scale animal food production which have substantially altered what humans eat. Animal products, particularly in the Global North, have moved from being occasional foods to every meal and every day foods. While meat and dairy consumption have been central to many diets globally, during the twentieth century and beyond animal based food types were proliferated en mass in unprecedented ways, such as dairy products. The reason that there has been acceleration in the use of animals for food, despite the ready availability of alternatives, is a result of the subsumption of animals into the logic of capitalist economies. Large scale animal agriculture has exploded because it is an industry that has proved immensely profitable, and facilitated the accumulation of capital. Unfortunately in the last two centuries, animals have proved a useful site for this massive accelerated production. For animals, the results of anthropocentricism and capitalism uniting forces have been disastrous.

It is for this reason that I believe that pro animal advocates must continue to deepen their knowledge not only about the specific ways that humans continue to subject animals to domination, but also the emergence of capitalism as an economic relation, and the effects this has had for human relationships with animals. It also the reason we desperately need to explore tactics that go beyond a sole focus on influencing consumers to change consumption practices. An over-emphasis on consumption practices risks underestimating the massive forces that remain invested in large scale animal agriculture and have driven consumption practices for over a hundred years. These same forces have prompted a global restructuring of human societies towards increased animal utilisation. An analysis of the dynamics of capitalism suggests we need to pay attention to the specific nature of these processes, the vast global supply chains that make this production possible, and plan our strategies to strike where we can exert the most impact on the logic and profitability of production. In particular, we need to pay as much attention to “production-side” opportunities, as those on the “consumption-side.”

Towards a Developed Production-Side Politics

While there is a lot of emphasis by pro animal advocates on individual consumption practices, there has arguably been less engagement and discussion around how we can directly intervene in the production of animals for food. What production-side strategies are available to pro animal movements?

It is perhaps sobering to realise that the most “successful” interventions into the production-side economics of large scale animal agriculture have come from animal welfarists, and not more radical pro animal movements. Welfarists have proved incredibly enterprising in many parts of the world in influencing the conditions by which animals are contained and killed. Arguably there have been some improvements in production conditions, including a move towards “free range” forms of containment, or the development of stunning techniques prior to slaughter which, it is argued, reduces suffering experienced. Welfarists have largely pursued governmental and technocratic strategies to make this change – for example, seeking to influence government regulation of industry to make policy changes. But of course, while welfarists have proved successful in influencing conditions of production, it is debateable whether things have got better for animals as a result. As many activists and scholars have argued, animal welfare improvements have also paradoxically created the conditions by which more and more animals are used by humans. Welfarists challenge how animals are used rather than whether animals should be used in the first place: as a result, while welfarists have been the most successful in influencing the processes of animal production, they have proved massively unsuccessful in actually reducing human use of animals, and indeed, challenging the anthropocentricism that underpins current systemic violence.

This doesn’t mean that more radical pro animal movements have not engaged with strategies that have directly targeted conditions of production. On the contrary, radical pro animal forces have readily targeted food and experimentation facilities through direct action tactics. Perhaps the most prominent example of a production-side strategy that radical pro animal movements utilise are forms of direct action upon animal production facilities, including actions to rescue animals and attempts to photograph and record cruelty. However, arguably the success of such direct action tactics are limited, at least with respect to their impact upon large scale production practices.¹¹ We also know that government and industry interests have engineered their own responses to these tactics, including through the use of “ag-gag” legislation to criminalise these interventions.

But production-side engagement need not be limited to these sorts of direct action tactics. Perhaps what is striking in relation to radical pro animal advocacy is the limited engagement with labour rights movements, particularly those engaged with industrialised meat production. This is odd, in part because of the reality that workers typically face harsh conditions within meat industries. Obviously, animals face harms in slaughterhouses that are not comparable to those faced by human workers. However the conditions for human workers are typically not favourable. Globally meat production is intensifying, and increasingly workers within animal food production industries are highly precarious and face deep forms of exploitation. Certainly, we know that in many parts of the world meat production makes use of low wage, often migrant precarious labour. In the US, prison labour – effectively forced labour by a disproportionately black prison population – has been increasingly integrated into meat production supply chains.¹² Some animal production industries have extraordinarily exploitative labour conditions that extend to forms of forced labour and / or debt bondage: for example the continuing role of forced labour in global wild capture fisheries and seafood processing.¹³ There are relatively high rates of injury that are endemic to the industry. Human Rights Watch, goes as far to claim that meat production has embedded “systematic human rights violations.”¹⁴

Of course, it may be argued that labour rights movements and pro animal advocates have little in common. The livelihoods of workers in animal production industries depend on continued work, and frequently their labour within animal industries is the only viable employment available. Radical pro animal advocates, on the other hand, have an open goal of ending human utilisation of animals, and thus ending industries that employ many humans.

However despite these different end goals, there is lots of ground for alliances and solidarity. Firstly, it should be noted that alliances between trade unions and animals advocates have been achieved previously – for example, shared campaigning between animal advocates and unions in Australia to oppose live animal transport.¹⁵ There is much potential to build further on such alliances, particularly as a way to promote ongoing partnerships. In this context it should be noted that there are other informal alliances operating between pro animal organisations and labour, for example in the regular “tip offs” that animal protection organisations receive from anonymous workers on incidents of systemic and individual animal cruelty.

Secondly, labour movements are often better positioned – in comparison to animal advocates – to deeply impact the conditions of production (more on this below). Throughout the last two centuries labour movements have fundamentally shaped the nature of production within economies. Some of these successes have been radical in changing the nature of social life: for example, the intense struggles by labour movements of the 19^th Century to establish the norm of the eight hour day that is today enjoyed in many parts of the world. It is true that globally neoliberalism has substantially attacked labour rights and compromised the organising potential of labour movements. However labour movements continue to drive change in many parts of the world. An important reason for this is the structural position of labour within capitalist production – as long as workers have the freedom to utilise industrial action (strikes, work to rule, pickets etc) to slow or stop production, they have the capacity to bargain for better labour conditions.

Thirdly, while long range goals may be divergent, there are plenty of spaces for agreement and shared working around short term goals between labour movements and animal advocates. For example, in the global fishing industry, there is to my mind no reason why radical pro animal advocates should not support attempts to eliminate low wage and forced labour in wild capture fisheries. At present wild capture fisheries, particularly in the Asia Pacific, represent a social and environmental catastrophe that wreaks havoc on trillions of creatures. The growth of the global market for seafood has expanded wild capture fisheries to their limit. Human labour conditions are shocking, with the rampant use of low wage and forced labour in supply chains. The cost to animals is immense – estimates suggest that up to three trillion fish are killed each year by wild capture fisheries, with large numbers of animals killed as “by catch” and many unwanted species of fish caught, killed and dumped annually. ¹⁶ Globally there are a number of environmental and labour rights groups working to identify the use of forced labour in the industry and campaign for better wage conditions. Arguably any attempt to raise the value of labour within supply chains will have a dramatic effect on the financial viability of the global industry, adding pressure to slow down the violence wrought by global wild capture fisheries. Supporting labour advocates will not only help to apply upward pressure on wages and impact the viability of fishing operations, but also build solidarity and exchange between labour movements and animal advocates to build awareness of the conditions faced by animals, and promote a conception of structural change between workers and animal advocates that includes consideration of non-human interests. Once again, radical pro animal advocates and labour rights movements have potentially very different long range goals; however there remains much scope for partnership over transitional goals, including reducing the number of animals used, killed and made to suffer by humans.

But the labour movement solidarity I have so far described may not lead to radical changes. Indeed, supporting existing campaigns to improve working conditions may not lead to any tangible benefits for animals. For example the costs associated with higher waged may be readily absorbed by industries (or consumers) with little to show in terms of slowing down and eliminating human utilisation of animals. Can we imagine more radical forms of intervention?

Stopping the Slaughterhouse for One Day?

November 1^st is observed internationally as World Vegan Day. This day was established in 1994 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the British Vegan Society. The day is useful for promoting vegan diets and highlighting the violent effects of human utilisation of animals. The day is thus educative – it offers opportunities for people to reflect on their own practices and how they might relate to the mass violence we exert towards animals. In so far as the day focuses on individual consumption practices, this is overtly a consumption-side strategy.

In my book, The War Against Animals, I propose a different strategy: namely, stopping slaughterhouses for one day. This is a production-side strategy, where radical pro animal advocates would explore opportunities to halt industrialised slaughter for a temporary period.

One of the reasons I proposed stopping the slaughterhouse is that I am curious about the how the shift from the politics of the consumption of animal products to the politics of the production of death changes our political aspirations and strategies. Stopping the slaughterhouse for one day differs in character from World Vegan Day in so far as stopping killing, rather than the production of more vegans, becomes a movement goal. Let me be absolutely clear here: promoting veganism, which while important and political, is just one strategy. More vegans do not necessarily translate to fewer animals killed.¹⁷ The goal of radical pro animal advocacy should be to employ a range of strategies to reduce (hopefully to zero) the number of animals used, made to suffer or killed by humans. We have before us a number of different strategies we can use to promote change towards our long range goals of reducing human utilisation of animals. The promotion of veganism is just one strategy. We should evaluate our success not by counting the number of vegans in our ranks but by seeking successive reductions in the number of animals used, made to suffer or killed by humans.

The second reason that stopping the slaughterhouses for one day appeals as a strategy is that it forces radical pro animal advocates to develop alliances with a range of different social movements in order to achieve goals. It is an opportunity to highlight the broader conditions of intensified animal agriculture, including drawing attention to the fact that this production increasingly impacts human workers in a negative way. This politics thus creates the ground for temporary agreement between animal advocates and those representing the interests of labour. Alignment between animal advocates and labour creates a number of strategic possibilities, including the possibility of using industrial action to halt, even temporarily, industrial slaughter. We know that animal advocates alone have little immediate capacity to stop slaughterhouses. The Iceland veterinarian strike demonstrates, on the other hand, that organised labour does.

It is worth reflecting here on the specific capacity of organised labour to intervene in production. One of the primary tools available to labour movements is the strike. A strike action involves the collective withdrawal of human labour from a business or industry. The aim of the action is coercive: by threatening profit, the strike seeks improved conditions and pay. Throughout the history of organised labour, the strike has proved massively useful as a tool for collective bargaining. This is why today in many countries, often after regressive neoliberal restructuring, there are strong controls applied by the State to severely curtail the use of strike action.

An important 19^th Century development in the strike was the “general strike,” a tactical strike coordinated between different unions to close down a range, if not all, industries often through rolling or successive cumulative actions.¹⁸These actions were designed to literally stop everything.¹⁹ We know that general strike action has the capacity to achieve fundamental shifts in production and social relationships. For example the annual 1^st May (International Workers Day) general strike, implemented after the 1886 Haymarket incident in Chicago, not only achieved an annual labour public holiday for many workers internationally, but is tied closely the achievement of the norm of the eight hour working day.²⁰

There has been extensive theorisation of the general strike by Marxist and anarchist movements.²¹ The general strike is “educative” in that it reminds workers that at the end of the day they control the work. In addition, the mass strike has a significant capacity to create opportunities to share resources and experiment with new forms of democracy. The general strike produces a social effect. For example, the North American Occupy movement is renowned for developing experiments in its encampments where protestors tried to “create miniature versions of the society they wish to see.”²² These experiments included forms of open democracy and accountability, social support programs and the development of alternative currencies and economies.

It may appear idealistic or impractical to imagine what role general strikes play in today’s political environment. However general strikes are not as rare as we might think. There has been a recent spate of general strikes across Europe – including the 14 November 2012 anti-austerity strikes.²³ The North American Occupy movement, while not looking like the general strikes of the 19^th Century, resonated strongly with aspects of this sort of industrial action. There is no reason to imagine that we will not see general strike type political actions in future.

I raise all of this to reinforce that although animal advocates may have limited opportunities to intervene in production within industrialised animal agriculture, organised labour, on the other hand, potentially has this capacity. Indeed as the Iceland strikes demonstrated, organised labour has the capacity to stop the slaughterhouse for a significant period of time. Naturally, we should not imagine that the interests of labour and pro animal movements are the same. On the contrary, as I have discussed above, there are deep divisions, including the contradiction that workers have an interest in continued employment, yet radical pro animal advocates want to stop the site of employment (ie. the slaughterhouse) all together. However all political alliances are fraught. Alliances frequently rely on political interests who have little in common with each other establishing solidarity due to the necessity of conditions. Such alliances should be explored for their potential.

Perhaps what appeals to me most about a proposal to stop the slaughterhouse for one day is that it might be transformative of social relations, in just the same way that a general strike is potentially transformative in allowing those involved to experiment with the “society they wish to see.” Stopping slaughterhouses for one day creates an opportunity for everyone to reflect on the role of animal killing in our societies and the possibility of doing without this violence. It reminds everyone that it is possible for the world to go on without meat for one day. Building towards such an action means more than simply taking advantage of the work of labour rights movements to sell a vegan message (such as in PETA’s response to the Iceland meat shortage²⁴). Instead, there is an opportunity to work genuinely with labour movements on a shared problem. What would be the benefits of such shared campaigning? Might it be possible to imagine labour movements as more receptive to the work and vision of pro animal advocates if we actually developed these alliances? And how might we work together to develop a different politics, including one that is simultaneously anti-capitalist and non-anthropocentric?

Finally, I note that the conditions that prompted the meat crisis in Iceland in 2015 may very well be repeated. Indeed, in 2014, similar strike actions by veterinarians and hygiene inspectors threatened meat production in the United Kingdom.²⁵ But the broader context should be considered, as current industrial action is a symptom of a world that is rapidly changing. Today deep contradictions and wealth inequalities shape contemporary economic systems. Intense forms of social stratification, including systemic violence against populations, and arbitrary and non justifiable divisions based on race, nationality and ethnicity, profoundly shape most human relations. Numerous crises haunt capitalism, including human induced climate change, for which no clear “fix” is available. We do not have a crystal ball before us, but it does not seem unreasonable to assume that immense strife and structural change in economies and societies will be a feature of our near future. Where will animal advocates be in the midst of this world that is changing? How will our vision for a different world relate to the visions – democratic or totalitarian, violent or peaceful – that are actively being proposed by others? What alliances and new strategies do we need to make a world without human violence towards animals a reality?

This essay draws on themes I have expanded on in a recently published essay: Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. “Counter-Conduct and Truce.” Paola Cavalieri ed. Philosophy and the Politics of Animal Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 187-237.

Banner image: Haymarket riot, Harpers

This included a general strike proposed for June 2015. See Magnús Sveinn Helgason. “Iceland Strikes Again.” The Reykjavik Grapevine, May 27, 2015, http://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2015/05/27/iceland-strikes-again/.
Amar Toor, “Iceland in Running Out of Meat Because of a Vet Strike,” The Verge, May 7, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8564411/iceland-meat-shortage-veterinarian-strike.
Eygló Svala Arnarsdótt. “Strike Leads to Shortage of Meat in Iceland.” Iceland Review, May 5, 2015, http://icelandreview.com/news/2015/05/05/strike-leads-shortage-meat-iceland.
Omar Valimarsson, “Iceland Running out of Burgers as Vet Strike Causes Meat Crisis,” Bloomberg Business, May 7, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/iceland-running-out-of-burgers-as-vet-strike-causes-meat-crisis.
Jón Benediktsson. “Vet Strike Getting Serious: KFC To Close Due To Chicken Shortage.” The Reykjavik Grapevine, May 7, 2015, http://grapevine.is/news/2015/05/07/vet-strike-getting-serious-kfc-to-close-due-to-chicken-shortage/.
See for example, Amanda Froelich. “8 Nations Going Vegetarian, Proving To The World Less Is More.” True Activist. August 22, 2015. http://www.trueactivist.com/8-nations-going-vegetarian-proving-to-the-world-less-is-more/.
OECD (2016), Meat consumption indicator: doi: 10.1787/fa290fd0-en (Accessed on 18 November 2016)
I recommend Marx’s Grundrisse which provides a detailed explanation of money, capital and its relationship to commodities. See Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1993.
UNICEF. “Reduce Child Mortality.” UNICEF. Website. At: https://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html
I have nominated “two centuries” to encapsulate industrialised animal agriculture, in particular the development of intensified farming and the factory farm. However there are different histories that we may track on the history of capitalism and its relationship to animals. See for example David Nibert. Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Whether these strategies of direct action have proved effective is an interesting question that should be evaluated carefully by pro animal movements. Certainly it is true that any animal saved from a production facility will potentially enjoy a better life in a sanctuary, home or elsewhere. It is also true that photographic evidence from a production facility may prove invaluable in halting egregious cruelty in slaughterhouses and elsewhere and help to draw public attention to sites of intense violence. But I don’t think we should be afraid to frankly evaluate these strategies and whether they are capable of achieving the dramatic structural changes that pro animal movements are working towards.
See Sara Burrows. “How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it.” Return to Now. June 13, 2016. At: http://returntonow.net/2016/06/13/prison-labor-is-the-new-american-slavery/.
See for example EJF (2014) SLAVERY AT SEA: The Continued Plight of Trafficked Migrants in Thailand’s Fishing Industry Environmental Justice Foundation: London ISBN 978-1-904523-34-5. At: http://ejfoundation.org/sites/default/files/public/EJF_Slavery-at-Sea_report_2014_web-ok.pdf.
Human Rights Watch. Blood, Sweat and Fear: Worker’s Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004. 2.
See Gonzalo Villanueva. “Mainstream crusade – how the animal rights movement boomed.” The Conversation. 7 November 2012. At: http://theconversation.com/mainstream-crusade-how-the-animal-rights-movement-boomed-10087
See Alison Mood, Worse Things Happen at Sea: The Welfare of Wild-Caught Fish, Fishcount.org.uk, 2010
More vegans will reduce aggregate demand for animal products. However, in a global environment of growing per capita meat and dairy consumption, the growth in consumers adopting vegans diets may not offset the global growth in per capita meat and dairy consumption, and thus not stem the tide of growing numbers of animals used, made to suffer or killed by humans. Our success should be evaluated on the basis of our ability to reduce animals used, made to suffer or killed by humans. To achieve this will need a range of strategies that go beyond the promotion of veganism.
Early examples of proposals for the general strike include William Benbow’s 1832 proposal for a worker led “grand national holiday”: “The preparations must begin long before the time which shall be hereafter appointed, in order that every one may be ready, and that the festival be not partial but universal.” William Benbow, “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes,” https://www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm
See particularly, Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972).
See Jeremy Brecher, Strike! Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 33-60; Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
Marxist oriented theorists, notably Rosa Luxemburg, have shown interest in the general strike as representing a moment of crises where a range of struggles – social, economic, political – would converge (“all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena” ). See Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, Chapter 4. At: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/ch04.htm. In perhaps a similar vein, anarchists suggested that the general strike would be the mechanism by which a massive social change would occur and direct worker control of production would be facilitated. See for example Ralph Chaplin, The General Strike (Chicago, IL: Industrial Workers of the World, 1985), http://www.iww.org/PDF/GeneralStrike.pdf. On general strikes, also see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “General Strike,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. 26-1 (2014): 9-14.
Ethan Earle. A Brief History of Occupy Wall Street. Rosa Luxemburg Siftung. November 2012. 7. At: http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/earle_history_occupy.pdf
See Carlos Ruano and Andrei Khalip, “Anti-Austerity Strikes Sweep Europe,” Reuters, November 14, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/14/us-spain-portugal-strike-idUSBRE8AD00020121114.
Iceland Magazine. “PETA hopes to place a thought-provoking billboard in Reykjavík in response to meat shortage.” Iceland Magazine. 11 May 2015. At: http://icelandmag.visir.is/article/peta-hopes-place-a-thought-provoking-billboard-reykjavik-response-meat-shortage
Guardian (UK). “Where’s the Beef? Strike Could Mean Meat Free Barbecues.” Equities, August 14, 2014, http://www.equities.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=newsdetail&id=56610. A similar meat inspector strike occurred in Ontario in 1996. See Martin Mittelstaedt, “Ontario Wants Meat Inspectors Ordered Back to Work: Government Fears Possibility of Tainted Food After Reports of Slaughterhouses Operating Illegally During Public-Service Strike,” The Globe and Mail, March 8, 1996.