Thomas Carstens

Born in Husum, Germany in 1865, Carstens was depicted glowingly as a model immigrant in Tacoma Newspapers, “a self-made man and a striking example of what hard work and perseverance can accomplish.”¹ The son of a successful fleischman, Carstens immigrated to Wisconsin at 16 and subsequently bounced around several low level butchering positions across Milwaukie, Medford, Portland and Chehalis. After a failed career change in logging, Carstens made three trips up to Alaska, when he came into an unexplained but significant amount of money that allowed him to sell a timber claim in San Francisco and invest in property along Englewood, then a small suburb outside of Los Angeles.²

Using these assets, Thomas opened a retail butcher shop in Seattle with his brother Ernest in 1889, which grew into a wholesale packing house.³ The Carstens appear to have been ejected from this location by their Beacon Hill neighbors for unsanitary practices and creating a noxious environment.⁴ Seeking a space close enough to streams of revenue but far enough away from city dwellers of influence, Thomas seized on the Pacific Meat Company, a cooperative packing facility on the Tideflats which had recently been “visited by fire” in 1903.⁵

Within two years, Carstens was operating the largest meat packing plant west of Denver;⁶ housing around 20,000 animals, employing 170 workers and providing them with an on-site dormitory.⁷ The facility had a complicated series of stables in front of the abattoir, cooler and corporate buildings, designating different categories of livestock as they were prepared for slaughter. These stables stood next to a small pond, now dry, where any unusable remains were routed to the nearby sewage processing facility and out into the Puyallup River.⁸

J.L. Sundquist described the conditions he experienced as a child:

“The slough ran from the city waterway near 15th Street and the water rose and fell with the tide.. Some said that Carstens let some of the refuse into the slough and there were many giant rats… City pest control men came occasionally to spread poison to keep some control. We lost seven dogs to that poison.”

⁹

Thomas Carstens was an outspoken opponent of labor organization and the eight hour workday. In 1908, he publicly announced that he would “never again recognize a union,” in this case, the Local 235 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, and required all new employees were to sign “yellow dog contracts,” demanding the applicant to abstain from any “agitation” that could “injure the business of the company”, under the penalty of a week’s pay.¹⁰ The press remained loyal to Carstens during the union busting process, writing glowingly about the “rich packer” putting on his overalls to kill 75 sheep due to striking employees and quoting Carstens boasting that he was “not a member of any union and I can work as long and hard as I want to.”¹¹

In September of 2017, Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued Geo Group for violating the Washington state minimum wage law, in response to inmates being paid one dollar a day or less for manual labor. Although representatives assert that these are “volunteer work programs” that comply with Federal standards, forced labor instances in other GEO-run facilities, and obvious power discrepancies bring into question how anyone could really volunteer, implying free will, while incarcerated.¹²