Brutal Conditions In Meat Slaughterhouses Found

by Katherine Stapp

(IPS) NEW YORK -- "Cleaner killed when hog-splitting saw is activated... Cleaner dies when he is pulled into a conveyer and crushed... Cleaner loses legs when a worker activates the grinder in which he is standing... Cleaner loses hand when he reaches under a boning table to hose meat from chain..."

These victims, mostly undocumented immigrants working the nightshift to scrub down slaughterhouses in the midwestern state of Nebraska, were just some of the hundreds who are maimed and killed in animal "disassembly" factories around the United States every year.

"They love you if you're healthy and work like a dog," one worker told Human Rights Watch (HRW), "but if you get hurt you are trash."

According to a new 175-page investigative report by the Washington-based group, titled "Blood, Sweat and Fear," these savage injuries are "just the tip of an iceberg" of thousands of lacerations, contusions, burns, fractures, punctures and strains sustained by workers in the industry, as the federal regulators charged with protecting them look the other way.

"We don't want to let anyone off the hook," said Lance Compa, the report's author. "The industry has lobbied against even modest efforts to raise safety standards, like giving workers a 10-minute break."

"But this report is mainly aimed at regulatory agencies," he told IPS. "The (Bill) Clinton administration was starting to take small steps, particularly on ergonomics, but when Bush came in, he squashed that right away."

It wasn't always this bad, Compa says. For a while, wages and working conditions improved dramatically thanks to pressure from trade unions and the passage of national workers' rights laws.

By 1980, meatpackers' pay was 17 percent higher than the average factory wage. But just five years later, it was 15 percent lower. By 2002, it was 24 percent lower.

The rollback was achieved by shuttering and relocating union factories, and automating more of the process, the report says, a strategy pioneered by industry giant Iowa Beef Processors (IBP). IBP sped up its disassembly lines, slashed wages, and expanded its non-union immigrant workforce. Many other companies followed suit.

Today, meatpacking is officially the most dangerous factory job in the United States, with injury rates more than twice the national average.

In fact, HRW reports that almost every worker interviewed bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered from working in a meat or poultry plant. These range from rashes to lost limbs and blindness.

"In many respects, the situation has reverted to the time of Upton Sinclair," said Compa, referring to the novelist who published an influential exposŽ of abuses in the meat industry in 1906 called "The Jungle."

The main reasons for the extraordinarily high injury rate are conveyor belts that move too fast, repetitive stress from performing up to 30,000 cutting motions per shift, inadequate training and safety equipment, and forced overtime, according to the report.

"There was no training," said one beef worker in Nebraska. "They told us, 'Do what the person next to you is doing.'"

The poultry industry, based almost exclusively in the U.S. South, also relies on economies of scale, and has some of the fastest production speeds in the business.

Tyson Foods, by far the biggest poultry company and a strong bankroller of President Clinton, defended the hectic pace of work in its processing plants, telling HRW that it fully complied with federal regulations.

"Line speed varies depending on the type of product," the company said in a statement. "Line speed mainly regards evisceration lines, and that is regulated by the USDA (Department of Agriculture). The historical standard was 70 per minute, but it has increased with automation to 120 per minute."

"It's all automated now; there is much less hand work. We are constantly trying to automate," Tyson added.

The problem is that the USDA is narrowly focused on food safety, HRW says, and the separate federal agency that is supposed to protect workers has failed to set its own standards for safe line speeds.

In some cases, the USDA actually encouraged companies to speed up the lines.

USDA-sponsored time and motion studies found, for example, that "reducing the time required to 'reach for the next bird' enabled a worker to remove the oil gland of 36.8 birds per minute rather than a mere 33.0."

Most workers are afraid to object to the working conditions because they lack the protection of a union contract, the report says.

According to HRW interviews, managers at the factories commonly use union-busting tactics like threatening immigrant workers with deportation, exploiting racial and ethnic divides, and firing organizers.

At one North Carolina hog slaughterhouse owned by Smithfield Foods, local police joined with company security guards to intimidate employees and arrest union supporters on the day of the union vote in 1997.

"In some instances, employers' treatment of workers violates international human rights standards as well as U.S. law reflecting those standards," says the HRW report. "Ineffective enforcement by U.S. labor law authorities compounds the violations by failing to remedy the abuses."

In a statement, J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, said the report was "replete with falsehoods and baseless claims."

"The meat and poultry industry has seen a significant and consistent decline in injury rates and illnesses for more than a decade," he said. "These improvements are extraordinary, particularly in a field where many workers use very sharp knives or work with live or freshly harvested animals."

"Many workers have decided to remain non-union because they see little value in union membership... The fact is that jobs in the meatpacking industry still pay more than twice the minimum wage."

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state regulatory agencies share responsibility for setting and enforcing basic workplace safeguards.

In practice, however, local officials can be vulnerable to pressure from powerful employers, and OSHA is so understaffed that it inspects less than one percent of U.S. workplaces annually, says HRW.

While OSHA is empowered to refer cases of "willful" employer violations that result in death to the Justice Department for criminal prosecutions, Compa found that the agency rarely exercises this power -- even when employers repeat the violations and cause more deaths.

He cites an investigation in 2003 by The New York Times, which found that in the past 20 years, OSHA made criminal referrals to the Justice Department in just seven percent of more than 1,000 workplace death cases, avoiding prosecution by re-labelling violations as "unclassified" rather than "willful."

OSHA did not respond to requests to comment on the HRW report.