April 14, 2014

Washington Post: Did USDA mislead the public, Congress about injury risks for poultry workers?

By Kimberly Kindy

It’s being called an ‘interagency throw down.’

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are publicly feuding over the results of a study that found the same double-digit injury rates among poultry plant workers both before and after processing lines had accelerated.

USDA officials are pointing to the study as evidence that a new poultry inspection program it hopes to finalize — which would allow line speeds to rise by as much as 25 percent — would not cause further injuries to workers.

In a March 26 blog post, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service director Al Almanza said the study shows line speed increases are “not a significant factor in worker safety.” USDA officials have offered a similar interpretation to members of Congress and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the past several weeks.

However, NIOSH Director John Howard chastised USDA officials, last week, saying he was “quite surprised” by the agency’s assertions. “It’s impossible to draw a conclusion about the impact of line speed changes on worker health” from the NIOSH study,” Howard said in a letter to Almanza, adding that to do so “is misleading.”

Howard said NIOSH “found an alarming 42% prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome” among workers during its first assessment at a plant in South Carolina. When NIOSH returned a second time, some 10 months later, they were not surprised to find the injury rates were about the same. Too little time had passed, Howard said, and the plant had made important adjustments, actually reducing the number of birds each worker had to process from 180 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute.

“Given what NIOSH observed upon its second visit relative to changes made to the production lines, NIOSH would not have expected to find an increase or a decrease in musculoskeletal symptom prevalence,” Howard wrote in his April 7 letter.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, (D-Conn.) — who opposes the new inspection system — has also waded into the interagency fight over the study. “As I said at the time, this report does not prove what USDA claimed it proved,” DeLauro said in a statement. “Director Howard’s letter calls attention to the fact we need more, and better, data before moving forward with changes to our poultry processing system that could harm the public health.”

Howard’s letter was also posted last week on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site. On Friday, and over the weekend, worker rights groups, animal welfare organizations and unions that oppose the proposed poultry inspection program e-mailed the letter to its members and to the media.

“Inter-agency Throw Down!” wrote Public Citizen spokesman Ben Somberg in an e-mail that linked to the letter.

“The USDA deliberately misread worker health safety research in order to fast-track a rule that provides for stepped-up poultry industry self-regulation,” wrote Vaishali Honawar, an editor with the Humane Society of the United States.

“USDA is using this study to justify the poultry modernization rule but NIOSH clearly disagrees,” wrote Tim Schlittner, spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) in e-mail.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is not backing down from its take on the study.

In response to Post inquires about the squabble, the USDA provided the following prepared statement: “The fact is that the NIOSH study showed, and NIOSH’s follow-up letter confirms, that increased line speed at this plant did not result in an increase in injuries.”

USDA officials said they came to their conclusions based in part on language from the NIOSH study, which said, “The prevalence of hand and wrist symptoms (pain, burning, numbness, or tingling) was similar for both evaluations.”

Agency officials also said they expect that the changes that were made at the plant in the study, which reduced the number of birds workers had to process, would also take place at plants that adopted the new inspection program. “The report also illustrates that a plant can adjust its processing so that increased line speeds do not necessarily lead to more birds being processed per worker, another fact FSIS has continued to point out,” the USDA statement said.

The new inspection program was first proposed two years ago, but it has not been finalized due in part to opposition from members of Congress, unions, worker and animal rights groups.

The proposal has been controversial because about 40 percent of government inspectors would be replaced with plant employees, leading some groups to say it would largely privatize poultry inspections. Also, animal rights and worker rights groups are concerned that conditions for both the birds and the workers would become worse if line speeds accelerated.

© The Washington Post Company

April 9, 2014

New Government Study Confirms Dangers of Working in Poultry Industry

WASHINGTON, DC—A new study released by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) confirms what workers in the poultry industry have been saying for decades—it is among the most dangerous places to work in America.

Among the key findings of the report:

• 42 percent of workers had evidence of carpal tunnel syndrome
• 41 percent of workers performed daily tasks above the threshold recommended by industry experts
• 57 percent of workers reported at least one musculoskeletal symptom

The report was commissioned to allay safety concerns about the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposed poultry modernization rule, which would increase the speed that birds are processed from 70-91 a minute to a maximum of 175 a minute. Yet the drastic level of injury documented by NIOSH occurred before lines were ever speeded up.

“One injury is one too many,” said UFCW International President Joe Hansen. “Four out of ten workers with carpal tunnel. Nearly six out of ten showing symptoms. This is an epidemic.”

Hansen said the industry, which has fought efforts to give workers a union voice on the job, should stop dragging its feet and adopt the recommendations outlined in the NIOSH report. They include but are not limited to: designing job tasks at the levels recommended by industry experts, providing more than one break during a work shift, and enhancing reporting, screening, and assessment of musculoskeletal disorders.

Hansen called the idea of proceeding with the poultry modernization rule “reckless” given the current rash of injuries across the industry. “The USDA must pull this rule and take a hard look at how to improve safety in our nation’s poultry plants,” he said. “This NIOSH report is both a wakeup call and a warning sign.”

By increasing line speed so dramatically, workers will be at heightened risk of repetitive motion related injuries. Despite this fact, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has yet to develop a standard that would adequately protect workers.

Hansen said the rule should be scrapped until poultry workers can be guaranteed a safe work environment.

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The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) represents more than 1.3 million workers, primarily in the retail and meatpacking, food processing and poultry industries. The UFCW protects the rights of workers and strengthens America’s middle class by fighting for health care reform, living wages, retirement security, safe working conditions and the right to unionize so that working men and women and their families can realize the American Dream. For more information about the UFCW’s effort to protect workers’ rights and strengthen America’s middle class, visit www.ufcw.org, or join our online community at www.facebook.com/UFCWinternational and www.twitter.com/ufcw.