http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/492672.html
Cornelia Vicente was packing chicken tenders at House of Raeford Farms' plant in 2003 when a conveyor belt snagged her hand, snapped her right arm and ripped off the tip of her index finger.
Maintenance workers struggled to free her, and paramedics rushed her to a hospital.
Hours after surgery, Vicente recalled, a House of Raeford nurse who had come to the hospital gave her some news: She was expected back at the plant early the next day.
The following morning, managers put Vicente to work wiping down tables and handing out supplies, she said.
When she asked for time off, she said, the nurse said no.
"So, of course, I stayed so I didn't lose my job or my salary," Vicente said.
The nurse declined to be interviewed for this series.
House of Raeford boasts that its Greenville plant has gone more than 7 million hours without a "lost-time accident," meaning no worker has been injured badly enough to miss an entire shift. But according to the company's own safety logs, Vicente was among at least nine workers at the plant who suffered amputated fingers or broken bones -- all during the time the plant claimed to have millions of safe working hours dating back to 2002.
Managers have kept the streak alive by requiring injured workers to return to the plant -- in some cases hours after medical procedures.
This is the last installment of the 6-part Charlotte Observer Poultry Worker series. The entire series can be found here: http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/
Poultry processors face few consequences when they ignore hazards that can kill and injure workers.
Weak enforcement, minimal fines and dwindling inspections have allowed companies to operate largely unchecked. An Observer investigation found:
• Workplace safety inspections at poultry plants have dropped to their lowest point in 15 years. The industry has kept steady employment over that time and has leaned heavily on illegal immigrants to fill jobs.
• Fines for serious violations -- including conditions that could cause deaths and disabling injuries -- are usually cut by more than half, to an average of about $1,100.
• It has been a decade since OSHA fined a poultry processor for hazards likely to cause carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and other musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) that are common to the industry.
• The federal government has made it easier for companies to hide those MSDs. Regulators in 2002 stopped requiring companies to identify injuries associated with repetitive trauma.
Officials with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration say poultry plants are safer than ever, pointing to a decade of declining rates of reported injuries. They credit enforcement programs and a growing recognition among industry leaders that reducing injuries is good for business.
But the Observer found that the official injury statistics aren't accurate and that the industry is more dangerous than its reports to regulators suggest. Current and former OSHA officials say the agency has made it easier for companies to hide injuries, and has all but abandoned its mission to protect workers.
Three stories of OSHA encounters
http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/494418.html
Regulators routinely slash fines and fail to pursue the toughest penalties against House of Raeford Farms, an Observer analysis shows.
• Since 2000, the N.C. poultry company has been cited for dozens of hazards that threatened safety and were linked to two workplace deaths. Inspectors proposed fines totaling $205,000. Following negotiations with the company, the fines were cut to $47,000.
• OSHA often cuts proposed fines, but it has been unusually generous to House of Raeford. For all N.C. poultry companies, the average fine is reduced about 50 percent; for House of Raeford, it's nearly 80 percent.
• Twice, N.C. OSHA collected evidence that workers in a company plant were suffering from repetitive motion injuries. They dropped both cases.
OSHA officials say they've tried to protect House of Raeford's workers while being fair to the company.
North Carolina bolstered its workplace safety program after a chicken plant fire killed 25 workers in Hamlet in 1991. But the state's focus on keeping poultry workers safe has waned since the mid-1990s, an Observer investigation has found.
http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/492955.html After a conveyer broke her arm and ripped off the tip of a finger, a worker in a poultry plant in Greenville, S.C., was back on the job the next morning. Cornelia Vicente said the plant nurse told her at the hospital she had no choice.
Think that sounds right? Neither do we. Ms. Vicente, a former line worker for House of Raeford, is one of hundreds of poultry workers interviewed by the Observer during a 22-month investigation. It found weak safety rules and slack government oversight have made it easy for a dangerous industry to exploit illegal workers and underreport injuries.
http://www.charlotte.com/716/story/497264.html
U.S. Senate and House committees, spurred by an Observer report on N.C. poultry giant House of Raeford Farms, are planning hearings on worker safety in the poultry industry, congressional leaders and aides said.
"All Americans should be horrified at the conditions reported in this investigation," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in an e-mail. He said he plans to hold a hearing this spring.
In a six-part series that began last Sunday, the Observer reported that House of Raeford, which has seven processing plants in the Carolinas, had masked the extent of injuries behind its plant walls.
Posted on Sun, Feb. 17, 2008
http://www.charlotte.com/716/story/497232.html
In what ways do you find yourself somewhat alone in the workplace?
Start a list and you might soon hit upon at least one attribute that could become a vulnerability.
It could be your skin color. Your accent. Your gender. Your faith. It could be your condition as a cancer patient. Your status as a single parent.
Maybe you have to juggle your job with caring for an aging parent.
You'd like to think that your employer will treat you fairly and humanely when your vulnerability surfaces.
Not everyone can count on that.
You met workers in exactly that predicament over the past week if you read the Observer series titled "The Cruelest Cuts: The Human Cost of Bringing Poultry to Your Table."
Vulnerable poultry industry workers have little recourse if their employers mistreat them. All are poor and in need of the work they find in poultry processing plants. Most of them entered the country illegally and have no rights.
For many, the law can be what their boss says it is. The tragedy that this series exposes unfolds from there.
Our journalists focused largely on workplace conditions at the House of Raeford, one of the biggest poultry companies based in the Carolinas. Its plants have also been cited for 130 serious workplace violations since 2000.
House of Raeford is an industry leader for such violations. But as we reported, that doesn't begin to describe the extent to which workers are injured and neglected, often in ways that go unreported.