Think you have it tough at work? Imagine taking a post at a
factory-scale poultry slaughterhouse. Chicken carcasses whiz by at the
rate of 140 per minute, requiring repetitive hand motions with sharp
knives. Then there's the caustic odor of chemical sprays and washes—
practices the industry has resorted to in recent years as a way to control bacterial pathogens like salmonella.
The US Department of Agriculture, which inspects the kill line at
these plants, has been brandishing a proposal since 2012 that would
remove some inspectors from the kill line while allowing the industry to
speed them up to a rate of 175 birds per minute—a 25 percent
acceleration. The speedup would likely increase reliance on those
antimicrobial sprays to manage pathogens: In the USDA's
proposal, "visibly
contaminated poultry carcasses" would be allowed to remain on-line for
treatment with germ-killing chemicals, instead of being taken offline
for cleaning, as is the current practice. For companies that opt to keep
their "visibly contaminated" birds on the kill line, "all carcasses" on
the line would be doused with antimicrobial chemicals, the proposal
states, "whether they are contaminated or not."
The department has delayed
finalizing the highly controversial new setup, but keeps stubbornly
repeating its intention to do so, eventually. As recently as April 3,
Brian Ronholm, acting under secretary for food safety,
touted the plan before a House subcommittee.
Meanwhile, new information on the already-harsh conditions that
prevail on the factory-slaughterhouse floor has emerged over the past
month. On the chemical-spray front, the above video, from Atlanta's
WSB-TV News, shows that some USDA inspectors in the southeast are
complaining publicly that the antimicrobial sprays are causing them, as
well as line workers, serious respiratory troubles. The Atlanta report
builds on an
excellent 2013 story by the
Washington Post's
Kimberly Kindy, who conducted interviews with more than two dozen USDA
inspectors and poultry industry employees, and found a "range of
ailments they attributed to chemical exposure, including asthma and
other severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes, and
sinus ulcers and other sinus problems."
Poultry plant workers suffer from a "range
of ailments...including asthma and other severe respiratory problems,
burns, rashes, irritated eyes, and sinus ulcers and other sinus
problems," according to the Washington Post.
Than there's this
March report by
the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on a plant in
South Carolina operating at the current maximum speed of 140 birds per
minute, which found that 42 percent of the workers had carpal tunnel
syndrome, an extremely painful condition brought on by repetitive
motion.
Stunningly, the USDA trotted that report out in
defense of
its speedup plan. The report, requested by the USDA itself, did find
that carpal tunnel rates at the South Carolina plant did not rise 10
months after its line speed increased from 140 birds per minute to 170
birds per minute. In a triumphant March 26
blog post, Al
Almanza, administrator of the department's USDA Food Safety and
Inspection Service, hailed that result, declaring that NIOSH researchers
had shown that "the increase in evisceration line speeds was not a
significant factor in worker safety"—a statement he saw fit to underline
for emphasis.
In a scathing
April 7 retort,
NIOSH director John Howard claimed that his agency's report drew "no
such conclusion." He called the finding of carpal tunnel syndrome at a
steady rate of 42 percent "alarming," adding that the 10 months between
the researchers' two visits was "not sufficient to result in a change in
health status."
Moreover, the plant didn't just speed up its line, it turns out. It
combined two lines, each operating at 140 birds per minute, into a
single one operating at 170 birds per minute—and kept all of the
employees working on the combined line. That meant that "the number of
chickens handled by most workers and the total production remained the
same at the time of our follow-up visit," the report clearly states.
Howard noted that because of the unusual arrangement, "no conclusion can
be drawn" from the report about "the effect of line speed changes on
worker health." This assessment was made clear in the report itself,
which stated that "this plant may not be representative of all plants
that may increase their evisceration line speed."
Yet the USDA is sticking by its creative reading of the NIOSH report.
In an email to me, a USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service public
affairs specialist reiterated that "increased line speed at this plant
did not result in an increase in injuries" at the plant. The specialist
added that the report "illustrates that a plant can adjust its
processing so that increased line speeds do not necessarily lead to more
birds being processed per worker, a fact FSIS has continued to point
out." Fair enough. But FSIS has also
repeatedly claimed
that the sped-up system would benefit poultry processing companies to
the tune of "at least" $256 million annually in reduced costs. It's hard
to imagine where that cool quarter-billion in annual savings would come
from, if not from each worker processing more birds per minute.
"The work speed is so unrelenting that it has forced workers to urinate and defecate in their clothing while working."
At any rate, the report shows definitively that even the current
maximum line speed is sufficient for generating "alarming" rates of
carpal tunnel among workers.
Finally, things have gotten so dire on the poultry line that three organizations—Nebraska Appleseed,
the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, and
the Southern Poverty Law Center—appealed to the the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (part of the Organization of American States)
for a hearing on the "Human Rights Situation of Workers in the
Meatpacking and Poultry Industry in the United States," which was held
on March 25. Drawing on SPLC's harrowing 2013 report compiling the
complaints of poultry workers called
"Unsafe at These Speeds," SPLC attorney Tom Fritzsche delivered blunt testimony (video
here),
calling on the USDA to abandon its new plan and instead slow down the
kill lines. This bit from Fritzsche's testimony caught my attention:
"The work speed is so unrelenting that it has forced workers to urinate
and defecate in their clothing while working on the line because
employers deny reasonable bathroom use, violating workers' rights to
dignity."
