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The International LaborOrganization’s Convention No. 155 on occupational safety and health calls fornational policies “to prevent accidents and injuries to health . . . byminimizing . . . the causes of hazards inherent in the working environment.” Inthe NAFTA labor agreement, the United States and its trading partners committedthemselves to “prevention of occupational injuries and illnesses” by “prescribingand implementing standards to minimize the causes of occupational injuries andillnesses.”

The human rights standard forworkplace safety and health centers on the principle that workers have a rightto work in an environment reasonably free from predictable, preventable,serious risks. This does not mean that all countries must immediately adopt thesame state-of-the-art technology and safety standards, or go beyond that to eliminateall risk, however major or minor. It does mean that workers in every countryhave a right to expect that when they go to work and do what they are told todo, that they will be able to leave the workplace at the end of the day withlife and limb intact. The UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and CulturalRights invoked “a minimum core obligation to ensure the satisfaction of, at thevery least, minimum essential levels of each of the rights,” and insisted thatsuch core obligations are “non-derogable.”

As one expert puts it, humanrights violations occur when employers’ intentional actions “expose workers topreventable, predictable, and serious hazards. The fundamental right to be freefrom these hazards should be guaranteed.” Violations alsooccur when government authorities by action or inaction fail to protectworkers’ safety and health, or fail to enforce protections. An authoritativestatement interpreting the ICESCR notes:

[T]he obligation to protect[the rights] includes the State’s responsibility to ensure that privateentities or individuals, including . . . corporations over which they exercisejurisdiction, do not deprive individuals of their economic, social and culturalrights. States are responsible for violations . . . that result from theirfailure to exercise due diligence in controlling the behavior of such non-stateactors.

In terms of general statutorylanguage, U.S. law comports with international standards. Like the civil rightsmovement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the consumermovement, and other social movements, a broad-based worker health and safetymovement led by unions and public health advocates took shape in the 1960s.These campaigners won passage of a comprehensive federal workplace law, theOccupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (the OSH Act).

The Act empowered the OccupationalSafety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency of the U.S. Department ofLabor, to set national standards over the patchwork of state and local laws governingworkplace safety. The Act also made OSHA the enforcement agency authorized tocarry out inspections for noncompliance with standards. OSHA also has power toorder “abatement,” i.e., the correction or removal of a health and safetyhazard, and to levy fines for violations. OSHA has wide discretion in assessingsuch penalties, taking into account an employer’s good faith, the seriousnessof the violation, the employer’s past history of compliance, the employer’ssize, and other factors. OSHA standards cover all workers, includingundocumented non-citizen workers.

Congress also allowed states toadopt “state plans” by which state agencies, rather than the federal OSHA,enforce national standards. This “state plan” or “state OSHA” system was basedon the policy assumption that state officials are closer to the ground and canrespond more quickly to health and safety problems. But state officials alsocan be subject to more pressure from large, powerful employers than can federalauthorities, who have more insulation from such pressures.

The OSH Act’s “general dutyclause” states: “Each employer shall furnish to each of his employeesemployment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazardsthat are causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” But critical issues of implementation still remain. Five thousand workers dieon the job each year in the United States, and five million are hurt on thejob; many of these are preventable at reasonable cost. 

Workers’ concern for health andsafety on the job is grounded in history. In the infamous 1911 TriangleShirtwaist Fire in New York City, 146 young women workers perished in aconflagration. They burned alive or jumped to death on the street below becausetheir employer locked the factory exit doors on suspicion they were takingfabric home from work. 

Such tragedies are not limited tothe pre-OSHA period. In 1991, more than twenty years after the adoption ofOSHA, twenty-five workers died in a fire at the Imperial Poultry plant inHamlet, North Carolina. One reason for the high death toll was that theiremployer had locked the doors on suspicion they were taking chicken parts homefrom work. 

The disaster was attributed inpart to lax enforcement by state authorities of their OSHA “state plan”program. The director of the North Carolina state plan said his agency wasunderstaffed and that in the eleven years the plant operated, the departmentnever inspected the plant's fire exits, alarms, and sprinkler systems. The effects were still felt a decade later:

It can seem, at times, likethe town of Hamlet is still afire. In the aftermath came bankruptcies,addiction to painkillers, suicide, murder. All the bullets that followed seemedto backtrack through the smoke, into the building, through the fire. Forsome, it was fire, then off to the hospital, and not long after thephysical healing, right into the small rooms over at the mental ward inPinehurst.

This is not meant to suggest thatall state plans are weak or that federal safety and health enforcement isalways strong. OSHA staffing and budget levels fall far below what would beneeded to carry out its responsibilities effectively. Given its limited staffand the number of workplace sites it covers, OSHA inspects less than onepercent of U.S. workplaces annually and can inspect any single workplace onlyonce in a century. 

OSHA is empowered to refer casesof willful employer violations causing worker fatalities to the JusticeDepartment for criminal prosecutions. However, it rarely exercises this power, evenwhen employers repeat the violations and cause more deaths. Moreover, a willfulviolation causing death is no more than a misdemeanor with a maximum six-monthjail term.

A 2003 investigative report in theNew York Times found that in the past twenty years, OSHA made criminalreferrals to the Justice Department in just 7 percent of more than a thousandworkplace death cases due to willful employer violations. The agency shrinksfrom prosecution by re-labeling violations as “unclassified” rather than “willful.” 

Meat and Poultry IndustryDangers

Working in the meatpacking orpoultry processing industry is notoriously dangerous. Almost every workerinterviewed by Human Rights Watch for this report began with the story of aserious injury he or she suffered in a meat or poultry plant, injuriesreflected in their scars, swellings, rashes, amputations, blindness, or otherafflictions. At least they survived.

On October 9, 2003, thirty-one-year-oldJason Kelly was repairing leaks in “hydrolizer” equipment used to processchicken feathers to make a pet-food additive at Tyson Foods’ River Valley animal feed plant in Texarkana, Texas. The hydrolizer was leaking hydrogensulfide, a poisonous gas created by decaying organic matter. According to anOSHA investigator’s report, Tyson did not give Kelly respiratory gear to guardagainst inhalation of the poison, failed to label hazardous chemicals, andfailed to train workers how to detect those chemicals in case of a leak.

Kelly died of asphyxiation,according to a coroner’s report, due to “acute hydrogen sulfide intoxication.”Tyson is contesting an OSHA citation and fine in connection with Kelly’s death,arguing that the cause of death has not been conclusively determined.

Five weeks after Kelly’s death, onthe morning of November 20, 2003, twenty-five-year-old Glen Birdsong wasworking alone cleaning a holding tank near the loading dock at the SmithfieldFoods hog processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The tank held Mucosamixed with sodium bisulfite intended for use as a clotting medicine ingredient.The hose Birdsong was using got caught in the tank. Birdsong climbed down aladder to free the hose. Coworkers later found him at the bottom of the ladderunconscious and not breathing. Attempts to resuscitate him failed. He diedovercome by fumes inside the tank. “They didn’t tell him about the dangers, and they didn’t give him a safety beltto get pulled out of there in case he fell in,” coworkers told Human RightsWatch.

On March 10, 2004, the NorthCarolina Division of Occupational Safety and Health, which is authorized underOSHA “state plan” provisions to administer the federal safety law, citedSmithfield for a “serious” violation, namely: “the employer did not informexposed employees, by posting danger signs or by any other equally effectivemeans, that the tanker was a permit-required confined space and of the dangerimposed.”On April 19, the state agency fined the company $4,323 for the violation. Thefine was reduced after applying a 25 percent discount for the company’s “basic”health and safety program and a 10 percent discount for “minimal employerdisruption” of the state’s inspection of the site of Birdsong’s death.

Anecdotal evidence of the dangersin meat and poultry plants is backed up by hard numbers. The industry has thehighest rate of injury and illness in the manufacturing sector. As one Nebraska expert explains:

Despite the hardhats,goggles, earplugs, stainless-steel mesh gloves, plastic forearm guards,chain-mail aprons and chaps, leather weightlifting belts, even baseballcatcher’s shin guards and hockey masks . . . the reported injury and illnessrate for meatpacking was a staggering 20 per hundred full-time workers in 2001.This is two-and-a-half times greater than the average manufacturing rate of 8.1and almost four times more than the overall rate for private industry of 7.4.

A special investigative report in2003 by theOmaha World-Herald documented death, lost limbs, and otherserious injuries in Nebraska meatpacking industry plants since 1999. Much of the evidence involved night shift cleaners, most of them undocumentedworkers. OSHA documents dryly recorded what happened:

• “Cleaner killed when hog-splitting sawis activated.”
• “Cleaner dies when he is pulled into aconveyer and crushed.”
• “Cleaner loses legs when a workeractivates the grinder in which he is standing.”
• “Cleaner loses hand when he reachesunder a boning table to hose meat from chain.”
• “Hand crushed in rollers when workertries to catch a scrubbing pad that he dropped.”

In all, the report concluded,nearly one hundred night shift cleaning workers in the state meatpackingindustry suffered amputations and crushings of body parts in the period (1999-2003)reviewed by the investigative team. These severe injuries are just the tip ofan iceberg of thousands of lacerations, contusions, burns, fractures, puncturesand other forms of what the medical profession calls traumatic injuries,distinct from the endemic phenomenon in the industry of repetitive stress or musculoskeletalinjury.

Eric Schlosser documented asimilarly gruesome string of deaths in the mid-1990s:

At the Monfort plant in Grand Island , Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente. . . was pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Lorenzo Marin, Sr. fell from the top of a skinningmachine . . . struck his head on the concrete floor of an IBP plant in ColumbusJunction, Iowa, and died. . . . Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez had his headcrushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a bloodcollection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcomeby hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried torescue him. All three men died.

Part of the OperatingSystem

Slaughtering and carving upanimals is inherently dangerous work, but the dangers are accentuated bycompany operational choices. Profit margins per chicken or per cut of meat arevery low, often a few pennies a pound, so competitive advantage rests onsqueezing out the highest volume of production in the shortest possible time.

Greater margins exist furtheralong the production and marketing chain where value is added in specialtyfoods and prepared foods. However, in the basic slaughtering and early-stageprocessing plants, the employer’s focus on the bottom line all too oftensacrifices worker safety and health. As one industry expert says, “The impactof narrow [profit] margins on working conditions for hourly employees at meatand poultry plants is palpable. In the meat and poultry industry, the searchfor faster and better ways to slaughter and process meat and livestock isrelentless.”

Putting workers at greater risk issometimes a conscious calculation. In a revealing exchange in a 2003 trialinvolving an alleged scheme by Tyson Foods to smuggle undocumented immigrantworkers into its plants, a Tyson manager described the company’s decision toeliminate a “mid-shift wash down” by dropping room temperature from the high sixtiesto fifty degrees.

The wash down was a brief,intensive cleaning operation that allowed workers a short rest while microbebuildup in work areas was eliminated. In the new system, the room was chilledto reduce microbes. The manager testified that Tyson eliminated the wash downand the workers’ brief respite so that “more production can be achieved.” Hesaid that upper management rejected his recommendation for freezer suits,better gloves, and other more protective equipment for workers in the new,colder environment.

The impact on the workers waspredictable. As the manager testified:

It’s so hard on them, theywere complaining of bursitis, arthritis, and increased musculoskeletalproblems. And, also, we depended upon our current workers, naturally, to referus incoming workers, and that stopped because nobody was—people weren’t goinghome and saying Tyson is a good place to work, they were going home sayingwe’re freezing.

Why Is It So Dangerous?

Key features of meat and poultryindustry labor make it rife with hazards to life, limb, and health. Here arethe chief dangers:

Line Speed

Meatpackers try to maximize thevolume of animals that go through the plant by increasing the speed at whichanimals are processed. The speed of the processing line is thus directlyrelated to profits. However, the fact that line speed is also directly relatedto injuries has not prompted federal or state regulators to set line speedstandards based on health and safety considerations.

The sheer volume and speed ofslaughtering operations in the meat and poultry industry create enormousdanger. Workers labor amid high-speed automated machinery moving chickens andcarcasses past them at a hard to imagine velocity: four hundred head of beefper hour, one thousand hogs per hour, thousands of broilers per hour, all thetime workers pulling and cutting with sharp hooks, knives, and otherimplements. 

Meat and poultry workersinterviewed by Human Rights Watch and by other researchers consistently citethe speed of the lines as the main source of danger. “The chain goes so fastthat it doesn’t give the animals enough time to die,” said one beef plantworker.Another told of life under her foreman on the line: “‘Speed, Ruth, work forspeed!’ he shouted as he stood over me. ‘One cut! One cut! One cut for theskin; one cut for the meat. Get those pieces through!’”

Another beef slaughterhouse workerdescribed what went on in his plant: “When I started working, there werefifteen chuck boners on each line . . . 380 chain speed [cattle per hour] wasconsidered fast; you had to have sixteen or seventeen chuck boners for that. .. . [later] they were doing 400 an hour, with thirteen or fourteen chuckboners.”

A 2002 investigative report in theDenver Post described the experience of workers at a Swift & Co.meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado who “can barely move” at the end oftheir shift, “exhausted from working on a line that turns live animals intoprocessed meat as fast as six times a minute.”

Workers told the reporter that“supervisors apply constant pressure to keep the line moving” and described:

[A] world in which they aredriven, sometimes insulted and humiliated, to keep the plant’s production up. “Fromthe time you enter, you’re told that if the plant stops 10 minutes, the companywill lose I don’t know how many millions of dollars,” said Maria Lilia Almaraz,who earns $10.60 an hours cutting bones from cuts of meat with a razor-sharpblade. “It’s always, faster, faster,” she said.

In July 2000, Jesus Soto Carbajalwas cutting rounds of beef from hindquarters coming down the line at him everysix seconds near the end of his shift at Excel Corp.’s meatpacking plant in Schuyler, Nebraska. He was working alone on the line; a coworker had left early. Aninvestigative reporter tells what happened:

No one witnessed the exactmoment. Maybe the cuts were taking just that much too long because Sotocouldn't pause to sharpen his knife. Maybe the next slab whacked Soto's hand ashe turned a beat late.

The wound didn't look thatbad. Martin Contreras, still a high-level worker at the plant, had seen gashesgush far more blood. This man will survive, he thought, standing above Soto.

The knife had puncturedSoto's chest just above the protective mesh. Above the left collar bone wherethe jugular vein returns blood from the head to the heart. Within minutes, Sotowent from yelling in pain to dazed silence.

Contreras sped behind theambulance in a manager's car past cornfields and the Last Chance steakhouse tothe medical clinic. It turned out there was no need to rush.

The Associated Press reportfurther noted that:

Excel was not fined forSoto's death because no federal safety standards covered the circumstances thatkilled him, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. . .. A spokesman for Excel, owned by Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc., said thecompany has outfitted workers with extended safety tunics.

The speed at which hogs are movedthrough a pork processing plant was described by a Smithfield manager intestimony at an unfair labor practice trial in 1998-1999. (See Appendix A for acomplete description of the production process.)  The manager testified that atthe Tar Heel plant it took “between five and ten minutes” from the instant ahog is first slain to the completion of draining, cleaning, cleaving,kidney-popping, fat-pulling, snap-chilling, and other steps before disassembly.

One interviewed worker fromSmithfield Foods’ Tar Heel plant told Human Rights Watch:

The line is so fast there isno time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder.That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself. I cutmy hand at the end of my shift, around 10:30 at night.  . . . I went to theclinic the next day at 11:00 a.m. They gave me stitches and told me to comeback at 2:30 before the start of my shift to check on the stitches. They toldme to go back to work at 3:00. I never stopped working.

Poultry processing is even morefrenzied. Line workers make more than 20,000 repetitive hard cuts in a day’swork. A Mexican woman poultry worker in Northwest Arkansas said:

I came to Arkansas from California in 1994. I started working in chicken lines in 1995. At that time we did thirty-twobirds a minute. I took off a year in 1998 when I had a baby. After I came backthe line was forty-two birds a minute. People can’t take it, always harder,harder, harder [mas duro, mas duro, mas duro].

Another woman poultry worker said,“The lines are too fast. The speed is for machines, not for people. Maybe wecould do it if every cut was easy, but a lot of the chickens are hard to cut.You have to work the knife too hard. That’s when injuries happen.”

A male worker with swollen handsapparently fixed in claw-like position said:

I hung the live birds on theline. Grab, reach, lift, jerk. Without stopping for hours every day. Onlyyoung, strong guys can do it. But after a time, you see what happens. Your armsstick out and your hands are frozen. Look at me now. I’m twenty-two years old,and I feel like an old man.

A business journalist summed uppoultry labor this way:

It’s difficult, dirty anddangerous. Tasks involve repetitive movements (workers sometimes perform thesame motion 30,000 times a shift), and knife-wielding employees work perilouslyclose together as they struggle to keep up with the production line. [OSHA]statistics for 2000 reveal that one out of every seven poultry workers wasinjured on the job, more than double the average for all private industries.Poultry workers are also 14 times more likely to suffer debilitating injuriesstemming from repetitive trauma—like “claw hand” (in which the injured fingers lockin a curled position) and ganglionic cysts (fluid deposits under the skin).

Senior Tyson Foods officials saidthat the pace of work in poultry processing plants was consistent with federalregulations. In an interview with Human Rights Watch, they said:

Line speed varies dependingon the type of product. Line speed mainly regards evisceration lines, and thatis regulated by the USDA. The historical standard was 70 per minute, but it hasincreased with automation to 120 per minute. It’s all automated now; there ismuch less hand work. We are constantly trying to automate.

As the Tyson statement indicates,the federal government is complicit in increasing risks to workers. The U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA) assesses permissible line speeds, but solelyin terms of food safety considerations, not worker safety. OSHA is responsiblefor worker safety, but OSHA has not set standards for line speed to protectworkers.

As long as USDA inspectors cancertify that the product is uncontaminated, line speed can increase with noconcern for effects on worker safety. Indeed, sometimes USDA itself encouragesfaster production. USDA-sponsored time and motion studies found, for example,that “reducing the time required to ‘reach for the next bird’ enabled a workerto remove the oil gland of 36.8 birds per minute rather than a mere 33.0.” USDAtime-motion studies also found that “a slicing cut with a six-inch knifeenabled one worker to make an opening cut on 45 birds per minute or 2,700 perhour in contrast with only 28.7 birds per minute or 1,722 per hour with astabbing cut.” 

One investigative reporterinterviewed USDA inspectors “squawking about a change in their procedures,ordered by USDA, to speed up the flow of fowl.” According to the report:

Watching the birds go by . . . some are complaining about an assembly lineaffliction called “line hypnosis.” They lose awareness and concentration, thebirds become just a blurred yellow vision, they say, and some bad ones may slipthrough. . . The inspectors who oppose the new system argue that public healthis being endangered.

Agriculture officials counter that the speedup—as much as 30 percent higher insome cases—was a long-needed effort to improve government efficiency. They sayUSDA inspectors were actually a drag on an industry churning out one of today'srare supermarket bargains . . . “The way the industry is growing, if they keptthe old system, they'd have to add thousands of inspectors to the federalpayroll,” said William P. Reonigk of the National Broiler Council, whichrepresents the industry. . . “We just don't want to be the cap on productivity,”said Dr. Donald Houston, a top food safety official with the USDA.

To poultry producers, anextra bird-per-minute or two can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands, oreven millions (for the largest plants) of dollars in profits. “A penny a poundto us means $1.6 million a year,” said Edward Covell, president of BayshoreFoods. . . For the inspectors and all the others who toil in chicken land,however, the conveyor belt rolls on inexorably, under the ultimate imperativeof the business, as Covell put it, “sell ‘em or smell ‘em.”

Close-Quarters Cutting

Workers use sharp hooks and knivesin close quarters. The height of most disassembly lines and work surfaces, andthe space between workers, is usually one-size-fits-all. Workers who are talleror shorter or stouter must make extra efforts, bringing extra risks to them andtheir coworkers. One worker explained,

We come in all differentsizes, but the hooks and the cutting table are the same for everybody. Theshort ones have to reach more, and they hurt their backs and shoulders. Thetall ones have to stoop down more, so they hurt their backs and shoulders.Everybody walks out of the plant hurting at the end of the shift.

The force and direction of stabs,cuts, jerks and yanks are unpredictable. “Sometimes it’s like butter, sometimesit’s like leather,” explained one Northwest Arkansas poultry worker interviewedby Human Rights Watch, displaying scars on her hands. “Sometimes the only wayto make the cut is toward yourself. Everybody is on top of each other, so a lotof people get cut, especially their hands. Or they stick themselves withinjection needles [for marinade injection]. Blood and flesh fall into the meat.The birds just keep going.” 

Heavy Lifting

Despite advances in automation,many jobs in meatpacking involve lifting, shoving, and turning of heavy animalsand animal parts, or of saws and other equipment. In poultry, “live hangers”constantly and rapidly lift bunches of chickens from the ground to overheadhooks to begin the slaughtering and disassembly process. Here is how oneanalyst described live hang labor:

Chicken processing is a dirtybusiness, but no job in a poultry plant is more dreaded than “live hang.” Here,workers known as “chicken hangers” grab birds by their feet and sling them onto fast-moving metal hooks. This is the first—and dirtiest—stage of poultryprocessing. The birds, weighing approximately five pounds each, fight back bypecking, biting, and scratching the hangers, who wear plastic cones aroundtheir forearms to shield off chicken attacks. Then, as workers finally hoistthe birds onto the hooks, the chickens urinate and defecate out of desperation,often hitting the workers below.

Appendix A contains a Smithfield plant manager’s lengthy description of hog processing operations at the TarHeel, North Carolina plant, where workers kill and cut up twenty-five thousandhogs a day. Among other characteristics of the job, the manager said:

Sometimes some of those hogswill go onto the floor, and a hog may need to be pulled to a location wherethey can be hoisted back onto the line. . . . There is a lot of heavy liftingand repetitive work you know in that environment depending on the weatherbecause it’s right there by the livestock area.  . . . There are people thattend the scald tub and there are times when hogs become unshackled under thewater and the only way to get them out of there is with a long steel hook andpull them to one end and reshackle them back to the line again. That’s adifficult job. Heavy lifting, and that is you know always in a hot workenvironment. . . . When the hog comes out on the other side it comes onto aconveyor belt type table. At that point again another tough job is that theperson that works on that gam table depending on how that hog comes out ofthere is going to have to flip dead weight, flip that hog from one side to theother if he doesn’t come out with his feet to the right.

Sullied Work Conditions

Whatever protective equipment theyare furnished, workers inevitably come into contact with blood, grease, animalfeces, ingesta (food from the animal’s digestive system), and other detritusfrom the animals they slaughter. A review by Human Rights Watch of a sample ofUSDA reports on the failure of Nebraska Beef to meet sanitary productionstandards from 2001 and 2002 showed unsanitary conditions in the plantdangerous to both workers and consumers:

• “visible ingesta on the brisket areasof carcass sides;”
• “visible fecal material on the neck,armpit, underneath the foreshanks, and underneath the brisket area of twocarcass sides;”
• “a carcass was observed with an 11½ x1” fecal contamination smear above the shoulder;”
• “several pieces of a greenish fecalmatter in the belly area;”
• “a closed rat trap contained adecomposed mouse . . . a backed up floor drain with a grayish and blackresidue buildup on floor . . . black splattering on boxes of edibleproduct . . . smelled of sewage . . . no rodent windup trap checks duringpest control inspection;”
• “visible yellow ingesta behind thestainless steel shield . . . repetitive drips of water from an overheadinedible auger adjacent to the product.”

Many workers have painful reactionsto conditions, but they do not act for fear of losing their jobs. “I am sick atwork with a cold and breathing problems, and my arms are always sore,” a Smithfield worker said. “I have red rashes on my arms and hands, and the skin between myfingers is dry and cracked. I think I have an allergic reaction to the hogs.But I am afraid to say anything about this because I’m afraid they will fireme.” 

Said another, “Two or three timesa year I get infections under my fingernails. I think it’s from the dirty watergetting into my gloves. When I go to the clinic they freeze my fingertips andcut out the pus. They don’t write anything down about that or do anything tochange it.”

Slipping and falling in meat andpoultry plants’ wet conditions are another commonplace hazard and source ofinjury. However, workers consistently said that management is indifferent tothe problem. Said one Smithfield employee:

In 2002 I slipped on remnantson the floor. I hurt my back, my hips and my leg. My knee turned black and blueand was swollen. I could hardly walk. The company doctor told me I was OK andto go back to work. But I couldn’t stand the pain. I went out on sick leave.The company fired me for missing time. They said they would take me back butonly as a new employee on probation with no benefits.

Here is what former Smithfield worker Melvin Grady told Human Rights Watch in an interview:

I started working at Smithfield on the Kill Floor in July 1993. I worked there for eighteen months, then I wentto a knife sharpening job and stayed in knife sharp after that.

I was working second shift inSeptember 2002 when I went upstairs to my lunch at 6:30. When I was comingback, I slipped on the greasy steps and fell to the bottom. I felt a rubberband kind of pop in my leg. I couldn’t feel my toes.

I went to the clinic and toldthe nurse what happened. I told her I need to see a doctor right away. She said,“I don’t see any blood, so I can’t send you to a doctor.” She didn’t writeanything down, she just told me to go back to knife sharp.

I went back and told mysupervisor I was going to see a doctor. I limped out to the parking lot anddrove home to change. I put an Ace bandage on my ankle and went to theemergency room. They took an x-ray and the nurse said to me, “How did you evenget here? Your Achilles tendon is torn. They should have brought you here rightaway.”

A health care provider servingpoultry industry workers at a medical clinic in Northwest Arkansas summed upthe many dangers of working in a plant:

The line speeds arepunishing. I see lots of repetitive stress injuries in the neck and upper back,a lot of carpal tunnel in hands and arms. It’s mostly working on the lines andthey have to stand up and stretch and hold and pull and cut all day long. That’sa terrible strain from the waist up. But I see leg and knee injuries too frompeople slipping on the wet surface, fighting to keep their balance. I see coldroom syndrome too, people whose hands and joints are affected by working inconstant cold.

Long Hours

Time demands on workers areanother factor in health and safety. According to one expert, prolonged workshifts are “clearly less safe for workers than shorter ones,” increasing therisk of accidents. The risk increases at an accelerating rate, so that,according to the same expert, it more than doubles at the end of a twelve-hourshift from what it would be at the end of an eight-hour shift.

“The last hour of a regular shiftis hard,” said a Smithfield worker. “You’re tired and it’s hard to concentrate.Then they tell you to work two hours overtime. That’s when it gets downrightdangerous.” At the same time, the same worker conceded: “I want the overtime.People want the overtime. We need the money.”

U.S. labor law permits employers to require mandatory overtime on pain ofdismissal if workers decline, with no limit on the amount of forced overtime.In contrast, most other countries’ laws limit, on a daily or weekly basis, howmuch overtime can be required of workers without their consent. Although overtime must be paid at 150 percent of workers’ regular salary, oftencalled “time-and-a-half” in the United States, most employers prefer to demandovertime to cover staffing shortages and surges in production demands. Usingworkers already hired and at the worksite on overtime relieves employers of theextra cost of insurance and other benefits for newly-hired employees, trainingcosts, and, in the meat and poultry industry, costs associated with highturnover rates among new employees.

 A health care provider servingpoultry industry workers at a medical clinic in Northwest Arkansas told Human RightsWatch:

I see a lot of problemsrelated to heavy mandatory overtime in the poultry plants. Patients tell methey have to work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. I see lots ofpsychological problems along with injuries. That relentless overtime causesfatigue and depression in a lot of patients. A lot of them feel guilty becausethey don’t think they are taking good care of their children. And they’reright. But they have to live with the mandatory overtime or they get fired.Then the kids have problems. What’s really going on here is that the companygets cheap labor, they maximize production, and all the social costs get passedon to the community.

Inadequate Training and Equipment

Numerous workers told Human RightsWatch that they received minimal training before being put on the job and thatthe companies were stingy with protective equipment. Company officials however,insist they provide appropriate training. According to three senior Tyson Foodsofficials: “We give a three to four day orientation and training to newemployees, and when they go on the line it’s with a ‘buddy system’ to helpthem. . . . On muscular-skeletal disorders (MSDs), we make sure employees getit in their language. They may not have been aware of the risks.”

Responding in writing to questionsfrom Human Rights Watch, Smithfield officials said:

Various training programs areconducted in both English and Spanish, to include: