musculoskeletal disorders
cmonforton | November 17, 2016Two new reports describe the working conditions for some of the 21 million workers in the U.S. food industry. Food workers constitute 14 percent of the U.S. workforce. They are employed across the system from those who work on farms and in canning plants, to meat packers, grocery store clerks and restaurant dishwashers.
No Piece of the Pie: U.S. Food Workers in 2016 was released this week by the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The report examines employment trends, wages, advancement opportunities, discrimination, and work-related injuries. The authors use government and industry data, but…
cmonforton | September 15, 2015For the second time this year, OSHA has put a poultry company on notice for inappropriate medical treatment of injured workers. The agency sent a letter last month to Delaware-based Allen Harim Foods raising concerns about the company's use of emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to treat chronic injuries and practices that contradict the firm's written protocols for treating injured workers.
The agency’s letter is a follow-up to citations issued in June to Allen Harim Foods, a topic I wrote about in “Crippled hands, strained bladders.” OSHA's letter, dated August 7, 2015, contains themes…
cmonforton | April 8, 2015Imagine a workplace in your town where one of every three employees had the same work-related illness. Better yet, imagine that it was one in three employees in your own workplace. That'd be pretty shocking, right?
Well, that's what the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) found among 191 workers at Amick Farms’ poultry processing plant in Hurlock, MD. Thirty-four percent had carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Equally striking, a whopping 76 percent of the workers in the study had evidence of nerve damage in their hands and wrists. The findings of this NIOSH “Health…
cmonforton | February 6, 2015The story was about US immigration policy, but my-oh-my what it said about working conditions in poultry processing plants.
NPR’s Jim Zarroli reported from Georgia on the impact on businesses of the state’s 2011 law targeting undocumented immigrants. The president of Fieldale Farms, a poultry processing company, indicated he used to rely heavily on workers from Latin America and admitted that the documents of some may have been forged. But under the new law, undocumented workers are avoiding jobs in Georgia, and this is causing a problem for Fieldale Farms and other employers in the state.…
cmonforton | October 30, 2014OSHA proposed serious and repeat violations yesterday to Wayne Farms for a variety of safety hazards, including those that led to musculoskeletal injuries among the company’s poultry processing workers. By my calculation, it was the first time in more than a decade that the Labor Department used its “general duty clause” to cite a poultry company for ergonomic hazards.
OSHA conducted the inspection in response to a complaint filed six months ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of a group of workers. The complaint described the harsh working conditions in the Jack, Alabama plant,…
cmonforton | January 28, 2014Several recent newspaper editorials have gotten under USDA’s skin. Editors at the Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News Observer, Bellingham (WA) Herald and Gaston (NC) Gazette are skeptical that the USDA’s plan to “modernize” the poultry slaughter inspection process is a wise move.
In “Fed's proposed shift in poultry rules troubling,” the Charlotte Observer’s editorial board wrote this on January 20:
“Warning horns should blast full force around the Obama administration approving a change in federal law to replace most federal inspectors on poultry processing lines with company workers who would…
cmonforton | April 25, 2013USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack seems determined to implement a new poultry slaughter inspection system, despite strong calls from the food safety and public health communities for him to withdraw it. At an April 17 congressional hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies, Vilsack indicated that the new regulation would be completed soon, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Opponents say the proposal will do little to improve food safety, at the same time reducing USDA's ranks of poultry inspectors and shifting their food-…
cmonforton | February 12, 2013It's one thing to say your agency is committed to environmental justice, but actions speak louder than words. That's why I'm eager to see how USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and his Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) respond to the environmental justice concerns raised about the agency's proposed regulation to "modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system" (77 Fed Reg 4408.)
A disproportionate share of workers employed in poultry slaughter and production are Latinos and women. Many earn poverty-level wages. Their work environment----which is already associated with adverse health…
cmonforton | December 18, 2012McClatchy Newspapers' Lindsay Wise reports in two stories today (here and here) on the USDA's proposal to "modernize" the poultry inspection process. The proposal, part of the Obama Administration's offerings in the name of eliminating burdensome regulations, will eliminate hundreds of Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors, allow line speeds to increase to 175 birds per minute, and cede to the poultry companies the task of spotting diseased and defective birds. USDA estimates the financial benefits to the poultry industry will exceed $250 million annually. Without those pesky…
cmonforton | May 31, 2012The Obama Administration's quest to appease business interests' claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the civil rights, public health and workers' safety communities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Council of LaRaza, to the American Public Health Association and Nebraska Appleseed, the feedback is loud and clear: USDA should withdraw the regulatory changes it proposed in January (77 Fed Reg 4408) which would shift the responsibility for examining and sorting poultry carcasses with obvious defects from USDA inspectors to the…
cmonforton | May 18, 2012Members of and organizations affiliated with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) received an Action Alert today urging them to tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to withdraw his agency's proposed rule on poultry slaughter inspection (77 Fed Reg 4408.) As written here previously and by the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor in "The Age of Greed," the USDA proposal was developed in response to President Obama's edict about regulations, and his call to agencies to eliminate "outmoded" and "excessively burdensome" rules. The change proposed by USDA involves shifting the responsibility…
cmonforton | April 26, 2012Gabriel Thompson writes today in The Nation about a summer job he had a few years back, working on the assembly line at a Pilgrim's Pride poultry plant in Alabama. The chickens flew by on hooks at 90 birds-per-minute as he sliced and cut the meat non-stop. It didn't take long for him to meet co-workers who suffered from painful and debilitating musculoskeletal disorders caused by the high-speed, repetitive work. Thompson writes:
"One was unable to hold a glass of water; another had three surgeries on her wrists; a third had discovered, after a visit to the doctor, that her thumb joint had…
cmonforton | March 1, 2012Federal OSHA proposed a $283,000 penalty against an employer responsible for staffing a Hershey's chocolate packaging facilty in Palmyra, Pennsylvania for willfully violating workplace safety regulations. The agency's action followed a formal complaint lodged by workers at the plant, many of whom were foreign students employed under the State Department's J-1 visa program. A few hundred of them walked off the job last summer to protest the poor working conditions in the Hershey plant. The New York Times' Julie Preston reported at the time about workers' injuries related to heavy lifting,…