Granted I know that The Jungle was a widely popular book when it was published and it is often credited with creating the public outcry that lead to the establishment of the FDA in America, but I am just wondering how much historical evidence there is for the conditions he describes. I guess was it really a common occurrence for workers to be killed on the job and simply mixed in with the food?
The conditions of meat packing plants in the early 1900s were indeed horrific - the Meat Inspection Act wouldn’t be around until 1906, and was actually in part a response to “the Jungle” which had been published in 1904.
Although Sinclair’s book was a work of fiction, he based a lot of it on real accounts. Worker’s safety was rarely a concern in the early 1900s, and it was commonplace to find young children in the factories alongside adults. People would work long hours and often get sick from breathing in heavy factory fumes. There were very little regulations in meat factories at the time. Despite all these risks, factory work was attractive due to regular wages, which could not usually be expected in other types of unskilled work. (In farming, for example, one’s earnings would massively vary from year to year depending on crops.) Because regular wages were seen as so attractive, factory work was in high demand and thus the workers didn’t have control in their conditions - speaking up would mean risking one’s job.
While I couldn’t find any evidence that entire bodies had been ground into meat machines, there were definitely accounts of people losing fingers, hair, skin, and even entire limbs into machines. Even without people being ground up into meat, however, illnesses and deaths of factory workers were fairly commonplace, especially due to the general lack of sanitation and thus high risk of contamination from meat. Not only was illness common among factory workers, but incidents were reported among the public consuming the factory meat, too. Europeans had closed their markets to American meat in the 1880s due to claims of pleuro-pneumonia and cholera.
Skin infections were also common, and the idea that gloves should be worn when handling meat would not come into place until after WWI. Workers had a name for people whose hands would get infected after constantly handling cold meat - “pickled hands.” This name was given because worker’s hands would turn red and eventually harden and crack. The skin would literally split open, sometimes all the way to the bone.
So to answer your question - yes, Sinclair’s book was accurate in many senses, but people were probably not ground into meat. Sinclair actually wrote a letter to the president at the time - Teddy Roosevelt, urging him to send in people to investigate factory conditions. However, just because people weren’t ground into meat doesn’t mean that people didn’t die in the factories - they definitely did, and Sinclair’s book is part of the reason why people started to think that meat factories should be regulated better.
Cornwell, Allen. “Chicago 1900: Pickled Hands and Much Worse.” Our Great American Heritage. 2015. http://www.ourgreatamericanheritage.com/2015/09/disease-death-and-child-labor-the-birth-of-the-meatpacking-industry-in-chicago/
Fortin, Neal. “Chapter 1: Introduction to Food Regulation in the United States.” Michigan State University. 2008.
McIntyre, Ashley. “Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’: The Legal and Social Impacts of a Classic Novel.” 2008.