Southern Poverty Law Center
cmonforton | August 26, 2016The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) brought a lawsuit last week in U.S. district court against a Georgia-based poultry company for discriminating against an employee with a work-related injury. The firm, Wayne Farms, is one I’ve written about previously (e.g., here, here, here.) They’re a company identified by OSHA for not only serious safety problems, but for injury care that was seriously “out-of-date and contrary to good medical practice.” In one example, a worker with a repetitive motion injury had been seen at least 94 times at a plant's nurses station before being…
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 | February 27, 2014The billion-dollar poultry industry chews up its workers and spits them out like a chaw of tobacco. One of those workers is in Washington, DC this week to make a plea to the Obama Administration. For 17 years, Salvadora Roman, 59 worked on the de-boning line at a Wayne Farms poultry processing plant in Alabama. The production line ran at an incessant pace that forced her (and her co-workers) to make tens of thousands of repetitive motions on each and every work shift. Her hands and wrists eventually became so swollen and painful that she requested to be moved to a less hand-intensive task.…
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-…