Fitzsimon File

Sometimes you have to read things twice to believe them. A lot of folks must have had that experience recently reading the News and Observer’s in-depth look at the Smithfield Packing Company’s pork processing plant in Bladen.

The story detailed allegations of various safety problems and employee abuse made by a human rights organization, charges company executives deny, claming that the plant has dramatically reduced its injuries on the job in recent years. Here is the troubling part.

There is no way to know who is telling the truth. State law only requires companies to report injuries when someone dies or at least three people are hurt.

What about the worker’s compensation system and its Industrial Commission that rules on workers’ claims of injuries on the job?

Turns out the computer system at the commission can’t sort the cases by employer. That will supposedly change in a couple years with a new computer system, but how could that update have taken so long? Hasn’t Microsoft Office been out a while?

There are 110 workplace inspectors at the Department of Labor and more than 200,000 workplaces. The News and Observer story reports that the inspectors get to less than 6,000 businesses a year. And that’s not the only problem.

Unless officials have evidence of a violation, all workplace inspections are scheduled with the company. Isn’t the effectiveness of inspections primarily based on the fact that a business doesn’t know when it’s coming and has to follow rules all the time just in case?

Odd that restaurants don’t know when an inspector is going to show up, but animal slaughterhouses do. And maybe the inspectors ought to concentrate on the plants with the most workers hurt on the job. Oh wait, that information isn’t collected.

Then there is the ergonomic standard to protect workers from injuries that come from performing the same task over and over, like say cutting meat. North Carolina has a voluntary ergonomics standard. A company like Smithfield can protect workers if they want to or not just get around to it. No one will ever know after all.

In 1999 the Secretary of Labor Harry Payne was holding hearings on establishing an ergonomics standard. North Carolina Citizens for Business Industry did not appreciate that effort and had a provision inserted in the House budget that year prohibiting the Labor Department from adopting a standard to protect workers.

The provision was never debated or discussed in the legislative process, just inserted at the request, more likely the demand, of NCCBI’s lobbyists.

So we have no real standard. We have no way to know how many people are hurt at a plant, no way to conduct a surprise inspection, no way to protect workers from getting injured from repetitive motion.

Seems like a state whose leaders like to say has a progressive spirit should do a lot better.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.