Hundreds of healthy pigs slaughtered amid UK shortage of abattoir workers | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of healthy pigs slaughtered amid UK shortage of abattoir workers

theguardian.com

25 pointszqna13 comments

If you have a large freezer, buy one and slaughter it yourself. Several hundred pounds of nearly free meat, and not especially hard to process yourself. Various us states have published guides on how to do this

In the UK pigs can only be slaughtered at an abattoir if it is going to be entering the food chain.

Is it legal to slaughter for your own use? You are allowed to do that here in Denmark.

Most likely it is, but you can't do that with huge numbers of animals

Historically, most farmers did this themselves. I don't think anyone would care if you did a few a year. You can probably do them with/for your neighbors as long as you don't charge. Wouldn't go about setting it up as a business.

> Farmers are insistent that low wages are not the reason that meat processing plants are struggling to fill their vacancies. “We are still being represented as a low-pay industry, and we need to put the record straight,” said Tom Bradshaw, vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), adding that meat processing plants are offering wages of up to £18 an hour, but are still unable to attract enough workers.

"Up to £18". That'll be for an experienced, skilled butcher. Starting wage for a factory hand, probably more like £6.

Brexit really is the gift that keeps on giving.

The short term pain of less people to fill low paid jobs, will mean companies are forced to pay higher wages if they want to employ people. The race-to-the-bottom employment conditions created by mass immigration are unsustainable.

Curious how this will play it in ä global economy.

What if the global Jobmarkt was helping Britten to fill gaps?

Might this not lead to inflation?

How will it comped within a global market? How much is it losing when it can't comped against EU internal market?

I'm very sceptical and I think this might even less to a few death. And it could have been done much slower and less risky.

It will probably lead to inflation, however, a careful central bank should be able to keep it in check. In our modern economies having too little inflation is often a bigger problem than having too much. If there is too much inflation then there are lots of growth opportunities that are untapped. The problem that a lot of developing nations face is that they are unable to do the necessary investments on their own that let them grow over the long term so inflation just stays high forever.

The economy is only global until the next round of pandemic — don't you see?

"Britain’s food and drink industry has previously called on the government to introduce a “Covid-19 recovery visa” to recruit overseas workers to temporarily ease disruption in the food supply chain."

More likely unintended consequences from unmeasured covid policies

> I have had grown men in tears on the phone just at the thought to having to contemplate killing healthy animals.

They are also healthy when they are killed to make food, I don't quite understand this posture. This just reduces the turnover so less healthy pigs are killed per unit of time. They are in tears because of the loss of revenue, not because of the animals, otherwise they really chose the wrong career.

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