Poultry Industry: Safer for Workers, or Better at Hiding Accidents?

Eviscerating chickens has never been safer! At least, that’s what the poultry industry wants you to believe.

After finding itself the target of a growing campaign to shine a public spotlight on the dismal treatment of its workers, the industry responsible for taking billions of live chickens a year and turning them into a stream of boneless breasts and bite-size nuggets appears to be falling all over itself to tout a new federal report. According to the industry reading of the Government Accountability Office publication, there have been dramatic improvements in workplace health and safety in the meat and poultry industry.

Here’s the thing: That’s not what the report shows at all.

Yes, whether by accident or by design, the feds have given the industry a statistical golden nugget that it can crow about ad nauseam in the press. Whereas a decade ago, the rate of illness and injury for meat and poultry workers hovered around 10 cases per every 100 full-time workers, the GAO report shows that today the rate has fallen significantly, to just 5.7.

The North American Meat Institute characterized that as “a new, all-time industry low.” A joint statement issued by the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association happily clucked, “U.S. poultry processors are proud of the advancements in worker safety and the ongoing efforts for continued improvement. The incidence of occupational injuries and illnesses within the poultry sector’s slaughter and processing workforce has fallen by 81 percent in the last 20 years and continues to decline.” In its statement, the North American Meat Institute even went so far as to brag that “the data show” it’s safer to slice and dice animal carcasses on a swiftly moving processing line than it is to work in a plant that, say, bottles fruit juice and soft drinks.

All this self-congratulatory backslapping would seem to obscure something critical—so critical that it’s right there in the (admittedly snooze-inducing) official title of the GAO report: Workplace Safety and Health: Additional Data Needed to Address Continued Hazards in the Meat and Poultry Industry.

See that? “Additional data.” What sort of data is the GAO talking about? Oh, how about data that’s at the heart of what the GAO is purporting to analyze: namely, reliable data on just how many meat and poultry workers are being injured on the job each year.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, sometimes we know what we don’t know, and sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.

As the GAO states, “workers and employers may underreport injuries and illnesses in the meat and poultry industry because of worker concerns over potential loss of employment, and employer concerns over potential costs associated with injuries and illnesses, according to federal officials, worker advocacy groups, and studies. As a result, the injury and illness rates discussed in the previous section may not reflect complete data” (emphasis most emphatically mine).

This may be true for a lot of industries, but as nonprofit advocacy groups including Oxfam America and the Southern Poverty Law Center have chronicled, there is reason to believe it may be of particular concern in meat and poultry processing plants, which tend to employ a disproportionately higher number of undocumented or foreign-born workers who can more easily be intimidated into keeping quiet or risk firing. Couple that with the economic vulnerability that comes from working a job where the average take-home pay for full-time employment clocks in at just above the poverty line for a family of four, and it becomes no surprise when the GAO states—halfway into its report—that the extent of underreporting of injury and illness in the industry is, quite simply, “unknown.”

What probably won’t make it into the industry’s bells-and-whistles press releases are the anecdotal reports of worker abuse compiled by the GAO that echo those compiled by nonprofit groups. “We were told about multiple incidents in which meat and poultry workers were punished for visiting the health unit [at their plant] too often or ignored by health unit staff when they sought further medical care,” the report states. One worker visited the company nurse more than 90 times before being referred to a physician. Another worker who fell off a platform was given an ice pack instead of being sent to a doctor for an x-ray—only to find out several days later he had a broken bone.

“In an effort to maintain a clean safety record and avoid recording injuries in their [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] logs, some plant health units may repeatedly offer first aid treatments—for example, compresses and over-the-counter painkillers and ointments—rather than refer workers to a doctor,” the GAO report states.

So despite the champagne popping, whether the industry has indeed become safer or whether it has just become better at hiding its accidents would very much seem to be a question worthy of more investigation.