OSHA: Packers’ safety not ignored

No federal safety standards exist governing the speed at which packinghouse workers do their jobs, but inspectors still must ensure that those workplaces are safe, a federal official said Wednesday.

“It’s not something we’re ignoring,” said Bernard Hauber, assistant area director for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Omaha.

His comments came after a Lincoln nonprofit group says its survey of 455 packinghouse workers in Nebraska indicates that injuries and abuse are common, a decade after the state enacted a “bill of rights” designed to prevent such problems.

Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute in Washington, D.C., disputed the survey’s conclusions, saying that the industry has vastly improved its safety record and that employers treat workers with respect because they are essential for successful operations.

She also questioned whether the survey results reflect the experiences of Nebraska’s thousands of packinghouse workers.

The results are a starting point for seeking changes, said Darcy Tromanhauser, director of the immigrant integration and civic participation program of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, which works on social justice issues and conducted the survey.

The 1999 state law offers some protection, but “it’s just not enough,” she said.

Groups working on the issue, including Creighton University’s Center for Service and Justice, plan to talk with state and federal policy-makers about strengthening worker protections and ensuring workers know their rights.

The pace of production is a major complaint of packinghouse workers, according to speakers at a press conference held Wednesday near Omaha’s Livestock Exchange Building.

Olga Espiñoza, who is on leave from a packinghouse job to work for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said workers often don’t have time to sharpen knives properly and must push harder to cut the meat, making repetitive-motion injuries more likely.

She said she knows of workers who were fired after reporting such injuries, which made other workers reluctant to report their injuries.

Workers’ immigration status also can discourage the reporting of injuries, Espiñoza said.

“If they don’t have permission to work, it’s not easy for them to find another job,” so they keep quiet to protect the jobs they have, she said.

Tromanhauser said OSHA should regulate packinghouse procedures to prevent injuries.

Hauber, the OSHA official, said in an interview later Wednesday that the government doesn’t have standards on workplace speed, such as the number of cuts per hour a worker can make. But federal law requires employers to provide workplaces “free from recognized hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm,” he said.

Hauber said many factors affect safety in a factory, including the speed of the production line, the tools used and the positions of the workers. Establishing one factor or a combination of factors as a “recognized hazard” is difficult, he said.

“OSHA has guidelines out there on evaluating those places,” he said. “We have inspected meatpacking plants in the past relative to these kinds of hazards. But there is no standard, and therefore all of the issues relating to the hazard have to be evaluated.”

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