One federal agency studied workers at a South Carolina poultry processing plant and
found that 42 percent had "evidence of carpal tunnel syndrome," while 41 percent "worked in jobs above the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists’ threshold limit value for hand activity and force."
At the same time, another federal agency is talking about making changes that would allow companies to speed up poultry processing. The sky-high rates of carpal tunnel were found by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture could change poultry
inspection procedures, speeding them up and in turn speeding up the rate at which processing lines operate. Dave Jamieson reports that:
USDA officials have told stakeholders privately that the change wouldn't impact line workers, drawing a distinction between the slaughtering process, where the speedup would occur, and the processing line, where most workers toil.
But critics like Tony Corbo, a lobbyist at the watchdog group Food & Water Watch, say that if chickens are being slaughtered at a faster rate, then it stands to reason they will be processed at a faster rate as well. Corbo told HuffPost he's skeptical that poultry plants, well-known for their tight controls on labor costs, will be eager to add more workers to the lines to account for a slaughtering speedup. Many plant employees already work essentially shoulder-to-shoulder, he noted.
It's insane, incredibly stupid, or brazenly disingenuous to think that if poultry plants have more chickens to process, they won't try to make their workers do it faster. This is an industry with a lot of immigrants and other vulnerable workers, people the companies can push to the point of physical harm while exploiting them economically as well. And the USDA doesn't have to care about that. The USDA is about keeping food safe, not keeping workers safe. Which is why someone else in the Obama administration should be looking at this situation and saying that even if the USDA thinks it can inspect chickens faster than it is right now without compromising the safety of consumers, the workers cutting up those chickens deserve some protection, too.