David Kellen, a 40-year-old meatpacking worker from Sioux Falls, S.D., made his first trip to the nation`s capital last April. He came here not as a tourist but to implore senators to help because he feared federal safety regulators did not take rampant injury problems in his industry ”seriously enough.”
Kellen, who works for John Morrell & Co., described at a hearing of the Senate Labor Committee how he had had surgery on each wrist to repair injuries caused by pulling thousands of sheets of fat each day from the flanks of hog carcasses.
Kellen then returned to work-he kept the airline ticket receipt as a souvenir-and soon needed another set of operations on his wrists. But he had the satisfaction of knowing he had gotten somebody`s attention.
Partly because of prodding by the committee`s chairman, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began a comprehensive investigation at Morrell`s Sioux Falls plant less than two weeks after Kellen gave his testimony.
That inspection produced a dramatic result on Friday, when OSHA levied its largest fine against a single employer, $4.33 million, against Morrell.
The agency charged that Morrell, a subsidiary of Cincinnati-based United Brands Co., ”willfully” exposed more than 700 of the 2,000 workers at its Sioux Falls plant to ”serious and sometimes disabling” hand and arm injuries caused by having to make as many as 10,000 pulling, tugging or slicing motions each day.
The agency said most of those workers received no time off to allow their injuries to heal. Morrell exposed 63 of the workers to reinjury by returning them to work within an average of 1.1 days after surgery, the agency said.
The action marked the second substantial fine citing cumulative trauma injuries at a packing company in what OSHA has billed as a crackdown on dangers in beef and pork processing plants, where one of every three workers suffers serious injury each year.
The agency in May proposed a fine of $3.1 million against IBP Inc., the nation`s largest meatpacker, for ”willfully” exposing one-fifth of the 3,000 workers at its headquarters plant in Dakota City, Neb., to repetitive motion, or cumulative trauma, injuries.
OSHA`s new safety campaign has come too late to save Dave Kellen`s hands or those of thousands of other workers who developed debilitating injuries while the agency was rolling back basic safety protections during the first six years of the Reagan administration.
The injuries have become commonplace as the meat companies have divided their processing lines into hundreds of narrowly defined tasks to reduce the need for skilled labor and to vastly increase production speed.
But OSHA`s recent interest has buoyed the spirits of workers and union leaders, and it seems to have caught the attention of the industry.
Several major packing firms, including IBP and Morrell, have hired ergonomists to examine ways to ease the stress on their workers` bodies. Ergonomists are scientists who study the motions of jobs and try to adapt the workplace to the worker. The American Meat Institute, the industry`s major trade association, last month budgeted $500,000 for research into new knife designs and other possible engineering solutions.
”Hell, three years ago, I didn`t know what an er-go-nom-onist was,”
said Kenneth Monfort, a leading industry executive and chairman of the meat institute.
”And now we have one,” he said, referring to his own company, Monfort of Colorado Inc., a division of ConAgra Inc.
But none of the ergonomists` studies has progressed very far. No one is sure yet what combination of solutions will prove best for the workers or how much it will cost. And the pace of change promises to be slow.
Workers at many plants complain that the companies are focusing first on relatively small and inexpensive changes, such as installing small stands with adjustable heights so that some workers can improve their posture and suffer less strain as they reach out to grasp pieces of meat passing on conveyor belts.
The companies so far have refused to consider dealing with what the workers see as the main problems: the speed of the production lines and a decrease in the number of workers manning some of them.
Company executives counter that many workers are reluctant to test knives with new types of handles that could prove less stressful. They also complain that union seniority and pay rules make it difficult for them to try to reduce the strain by rotating workers among jobs that require different types of exertion.
There also is some controversy over OSHA`s new taste for big-dollar fines, and the resolution of this issue could have the most impact on how quickly changes occur.
Union leaders, in particular, question whether the federal agency is placing too much emphasis on the public relations value of assessing large fines and too little importance on negotiating pledges from the meat companies to correct the hazards.
Publicly, IBP, which is owned in part by Occidental Petroleum Corp. of Los Angeles, has denied that it exposed its workers to cumulative trauma injuries and asserted that OSHA`s charges are ”just wrong.” It has contested the $3.1 million fine in a review proceeding that could last a year or more.
Morrell on Friday branded the charges against it as ”grossly unfair and totally unjustified” and said it would appeal.
Privately, however, IBP executives reacted to OSHA`s investigation last spring by working with the meat cutters` union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, to develop a program to halt, through engineering and other changes, the spread of cumulative trauma injuries at its 14 beef and pork plants, company and union officials said.
The company then tried to use the agreement as leverage to get OSHA to drop or substantially reduce the $3.1 million fine and a separate fine of $2.6 million that the agency levied against IBP last year for allegedly underreporting injuries to the government.
Agency officials said IBP wanted OSHA to settle the total of $5.7 million in fines for $500,000, or less, in exchange for a pledge by the company to adopt the program it had worked out with the union.
Frank White, OSHA`s deputy assistant secretary, said the agency rejected the settlement offer because, at less than 10 cents on the dollar, it was far lower than the 30 to 50 cents on the dollar that the agency had insisted on in similar negotiations with companies in other industries.
IBP, meanwhile, has refused to implement the correction program, leaving many of its 21,000 workers exposed to the hazards while it contests the fines. IBP officials have said they fear the administrative law judges hearing its appeals might construe adoption of the program as evidence that the company should have addressed the hazards years ago.
White conceded that top OSHA officials believed that the agreement between IBP and the union represented a ”satisfactory” approach to correcting the problems.
But, White added, ”We are not willing to take whatever the company feels like they want to offer us.”
The plan worked out by management and the union called for IBP to teach workers less stressful ways to use knives, to emphasize early detection and treatment of cumulative trauma injuries and to test a wide range of engineering changes, such as providing mechanical assists for workers who must push and pull heavy pieces of meat.
The company also was prepared to agree that, if such measures failed to solve the problem, it would test cuts in production speeds or the addition of workers to certain jobs, ”where feasible.”
But OSHA`s White said the company could-and should-have undertaken all those steps without expecting any special reward from OSHA.
”There are some very simple things that generally can be done that don`t take a lot of exotmake the cuts,” White said. ”We have found, in these cases, that the training was minimal, and workers sort of developed their own systems, really having no idea whether it`s the best way to do it ergonomically or not. . . .
”When a worker has to to lift 40 pounds over his or her head and toss it on a conveyor, it doesn`t take a genius to figure out that some mechanical assistance in that regard would greatly alleviate the worker`s problem. So I think that, yes, there`s a lot to be learned about the causes and the cures, but I think there`s a lot that`s known that could be done that frankly isn`t being done.”
He added: ”If they attempt all of those things and the problem is still pervasive, I think everybody recognizes that line speed is one of the things the companies are going to have to look to. They can`t ignore that abatement method if they can`t solve the problem another way.”
White also said OSHA sought ”not to compromise too much on the penalty amount, because it`s the initial penalty amount, frankly, that gets the company`s attention at the highest corporate levels and makes them willing to sit down and negotiate.”
White said the agency`s goal is to force at least one of the industry`s largest companies to deal comprehensively with the injury problem.
”I think that`s, in a certain sense, what the industry is waiting for, for one company to take the necessary steps,” he said. ”Then they can say,
`Well, maybe I won`t lose my competitive edge if I also undertake these kinds of steps.` And we think we can achieve that breakthrough.”
Besides OSHA`s increased aggressiveness, there are other incentives for the major meat companies to begin addressing their safety problems.
A general recovery in the economy reduced the pool of unemployed people that the meat companies had tapped for ready replacements for injured workers. As medical costs keep rising, some meat companies are realizing what most other American businesses long have known: It is cheaper to operate with a stable and healthy work force.
Industry officials say wide-scale automation is no answer: It would be too expensive to build cutting machines that could allow for the variety in size and shape of each piece of meat.
Whether OSHA can expand its regulation to cover the rest of the industry is another key question.
The agency so far has conducted major inspections of cumulative trauma problems only at plants where the union or Congress has directed it to go. Its critics argue that it needs to reach out to smaller, nonunion plants, where many workers often are afraid to complain.
Few disagree that states need to require corporations to pay higher benefits to disabled workers, both to provide a greater incentive to prevent injuries and to enable more workers to obtain retraining.
Most critics also believe that real improvements will only come if the people who own and run the meatpacking companies put the safety of their workers over their profits.
”I believe it`s just a case where they`ve got something that works now” in being profitable, said OSHA ergonomist Roger Stevens. ”And they say,
`Let`s not fix it; it might cost too much.` ”
