Setting the Record Straight

Why are government regulators shirking their duty?

One of the most important series of newspaper reports in recent North Carolina history concluded today. “The Cruelest Cuts” is a collection of articles, photographs and videos that has been produced by a team of journalists at the Charlotte Observer. The series documents in painful detail the reality of life for the thousands of North and South Carolinians who toil in the poultry processing industry. If you haven’t been keeping up with the series (some of it has also appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer), click on the following link now: http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/. (Note: you may be asked to register – go ahead and do it – it’s fairly unobtrusive.)

The series tells many poignant, maddening and stomach turning stories – several concerning the treatment of workers at the company known as House of Raeford. Here is a representative example that helps explain how the company maintains a record of having hardly any “lost-time accidents”:

“Cornelia Vicente was packing chicken tenders at House of Raeford Farms' plant in 2003 when a conveyor belt snagged her hand, snapped her right arm and ripped off the tip of her index finger.

Maintenance workers struggled to free her, and paramedics rushed her to a hospital.

Hours after surgery, Vicente recalled, a House of Raeford nurse who had come to the hospital gave her some news: She was expected back at the plant early the next day.

The following morning, managers put Vicente to work wiping down tables and handing out supplies, she said.

When she asked for time off, she said, the nurse said no.

"So, of course, I stayed so I didn't lose my job or my salary," Vicente said.

Vicente’s injury occurred at House of Raeford’s Greenville, South Carolina plant. The company operates seven poultry processing facilities – three in North Carolina, three in South Carolina and one in Louisiana. Raeford, of course, is a small southeast North Carolina town west of Fayetteville. It is home to one of the North Carolina facilities. The others are in the towns of Wallace and Rose Hill – both of which are just off of I-40 about halfway between Raleigh and Wilmington.

Among the other “highlights” from the series:

• A story that details the epidemic of hand and wrist injuries that is afflicting current and former poultry industry workers,
• A profile of House of Raeford’s combative and politically connected owner, Marvin Johnson,
• A detailed and sobering description of a day in the life of a typical line worker, and
• A brief video that recounts the heart-rending story of the 1991 Hamlet chicken plant fire that killed 25 people, scarred scores more for life and sparked North Carolina’s last notable public effort to rein in worker safety abuses in the poultry industry.

Not again…

The “Cruelest Cuts” series is at once shocking and numbingly familiar. On the one hand, it’s hard not to shed a tear while contemplating the misery that accompanies the day-to-day existence of Celia Lopez or watching Hamlet survivor, Conester Williams, describe the panic that accompanied the flame and smoke and locked exit doors in Hamlet. Similarly, it’s hard not to want to put a fist through a wall or scream at the heavens when reading about Marvin Johnson and his abusive treatment of government regulators and shady political dealings.

On the other hand, there is something painfully familiar and intuitive about the details related in the story. Where exactly is it that we all thought those immaculate $6 packages of chicken breast fillets came from?

As anyone who has ever undertaken the task of boning a chicken for the family stir fry can readily confirm, it is, at best, an unpleasant process that one hopes to get through as quickly as possible. Any of us that has even given it a moment’s thought  knows that much of the food we consume is produced by thousands of our fellow humans standing shoulder to shoulder with their co-workers in a cold, wet, foul-smelling assembly line tearing, cutting and slicing meat all day, everyday. To the extent these thoughts hadn’t occurred to you, you owe it yourself to check out the slideshow that allows you to follow a chicken from its arrival at the plant to its departure in a handy freezer bag.

What to do?

As with the overall plight of workers that the series documents, there is no real mystery as to what needs to be done in order to assure that thousands of hardworking North Carolinians aren’t leading a life of quiet pain and misery in order to keep down the price of Chicken McNuggets. Systems need to be changed (both within government and the poultry industry) so that workers are better protected.

In this regard, the first and most obvious step is for state (and federal) regulators to adopt workplace “ergonomics standards.” This would not be new ground to plow. In 1990, then U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole set a process in motion that would lead to the development of just such a regulatory scheme that was designed to prevent many of the debilitating injuries that often befall poultry industry workers. By the end of the 1990’s, both the U.S. and North Carolina OSHA departments had developed comprehensive standards that could, if implemented, have prevented much of the misery detailed in the Observer series. Unfortunately, both of those regulatory schemes were torpedoed in blatant fashion by a combination of powerful business interests and pliant politicians only too happy to do their bidding.

At the federal level, Congress handled the dirty work – just a couple of months after the final regulations were put into place in January of 2001. Here in North Carolina (which is one the 25 or so states that run their own OSHA programs) current Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry rescinded the regulations. She met no resistance, however, from the Governor or the General Assembly. Click here to read a sobering but comprehensive chronology of the ergonomics saga.

Since that time, according to the Observer, Berry’s office has done virtually nothing on this subject – except to reduce the number of OSHA inspections and to take a fairly lax approach toward enforcement of OSHA violations generally.  

Setting the record straight

While much of the resistance to ergonomics reform (and OSHA protections in general) is a result of kneejerk opposition from big businesses worried about their bottom lines and any government interference in their operations, this is not the entire story.  First of all, opposition to ergonomics rules does not appear to be monolithic. Many large product manufacturers (like auto companies) figured out long ago that ergonomics guidelines are an excellent way to protect valuable employees. Most of the opposition today comes from businesses that employ lower wage workers, like food processors, that are more inclined to treat their employees as a disposable commodity.

What many of these companies fail to understand is that ergonomics rules do not necessarily mandate the use of expensive new equipment or result in lower productivity and slower assembly lines. Some solutions can be as simple as allowing assembly line workers to move around in the plant from job to job so that they use different muscles to make different cuts and slices throughout the workday. Even brief exercise sessions of just a few minutes to allow workers to stretch their limbs can often make an enormous difference.    

Ultimately, however, the resistance to better worker protection standards may be more a matter of mindset and stubbornness than bottom line business sense. Experts report (and common sense confirms) that for too long in our culture, it has been taken as a “given” that pain and disability are simply unavoidable consequences of many manual labor jobs. Modern research and technology confirm, however, that this is not necessarily so. With better designs and planning, many worker injuries can be minimized or even avoided with little to no impact on cost.

Going forward

The last major workplace safety policy initiative to take place in North Carolina took place in 1992 following the Hamlet fire. In that instance, strong willed state lawmakers led by former House Speaker Dan Blue stood up to big business and pushed through some important reforms. Let’s hope that the Charlotte Observer series gives rise to a similarly courageous response in weeks and months to come.

            

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Setting the Record Straight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.