New Trump Rules Will Make Meat Processing a Lot Deadlier
The country’s poultry and swine processing plants, already incredibly dangerous workplaces, are poised to get a green light from the Trump administration to vastly speed up the work. In February, the Department of Agriculture released two proposed regulations to increase evisceration line speeds for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The swine plant proposal removes the current maximum of 1,106 hogs an hour and instead imposes no limit at all, allowing companies “to determine their own line speeds,” which has never happened before. The proposed poultry rule, meanwhile, allows all chicken plants to run at 175 birds per minute, a limit that has only applied previously to plants involved in a pilot program. Turkey processing plants could increase from 55 to 60 birds per minute.
The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers: It also threatens to let more food-borne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.
The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds.
Now that these companies have cozied up to the second Trump administration, they are on the verge of getting what they’ve long sought. Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian behemoth JBS, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Tyson donated $1 million. The proposed rules are “just doing the industry’s bidding,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University who worked at OSHA for six years.
The administration is also misusing the findings of federal research into worker safety in poultry and swine plants, according to the two scientists who led the research, to argue that faster line speeds won’t hurt workers. In their public comments, the scientists state that “the results of our study do not support the Proposed Rule” in both poultry and swine. They argue that, until the high risk of injury and pain in these plants is mitigated, the agency “should not allow or facilitate increased line speeds.”
“They’re looking at part of the research and they’re ignoring other parts,” said Carisa Harris-Adamson, associate adjunct professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley and one of the lead scientists. “That’s unfortunate, because it means that no matter what the results would have been, they were likely to use them in the way that they wanted: to eliminate line speed regulations.”
In these studies, researchers went into poultry and swine plants, some operating at elevated line speeds, to evaluate the impact on workers. In poultry, they found, 81 percent of workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, and they were at higher risk if they had a higher piece rate, or had to handle more bird parts per minute. Forty percent of workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity pain from the work over the previous year. The researchers also found that 46 percent of swine plant workers were at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders, which was associated with higher piece rates, while 42 percent of swine workers reported pain. These findings were “measured objectively, quantitatively,” Harris-Adamson noted.
The injuries and chronic conditions were “related to the work they were doing, and it really had to do with how fast they had to work and the repetitive jobs,” said Fagan, who was “unceremoniously” kicked off the study at the behest of industry before it was completed. Workers that she and the other researchers interviewed would tell them they had no health issues before they began the work and that symptoms would improve at home and then worsen on the job. “It’s just too fast,” she said.
The studies found that, in poultry, there were similar hazards to worker safety in plants running at 140 bpm as at 175, which the administration is claiming in its proposed rulemaking means that the higher speeds are just as safe. But what the research found, Harris-Adamson asserted, was high levels of risk in both settings. “That was misconstrued to say there’s no difference between the two and therefore we’re going to allow them to run faster,” Harris-Adamson said. “They’re ignoring the fact that there’s high hazard at both speeds.”
In the study of swine plants, meanwhile, all of them were operating at high speeds. One plant was found to have high rates of injury, while another had lower. The administration “essentially averaged those two,” Harris-Adamson said, to say there’s no difference. “That’s really faulty logic.” Lower levels at one plant don’t excuse the higher levels at the other, she said. “There was a clear increase in hazard for some workers.”
“We thought the findings spoke for themselves that at the lower line speeds there was a lot of hazard,” she added. She had hoped the outcome would be efforts to require the industry to increase safety before any other waivers to run at higher speeds were granted.
Of the proposed rules, Harris-Adamson said, “Do I think workers will suffer? Yeah, I do.”
Higher line speeds don’t necessarily lead to more worker injuries. In the two USDA studies, higher risk of injury was directly correlated with how fast the piece rate was, but higher evisceration line speeds don’t lead to higher piece rates if the work takes longer or more employees are added to handle it. The companies can’t afford to let carcasses pile up after evisceration, however, and adding more workers is “a financial decision,” Harris-Adamson pointed out. “The more staff you have to hire, the more you’re paying.” A plant that received a waiver to run at 175 in 2018, for example, simply reduced the number of days it operated from six to five, cramming more work into less time.
Companies are under no obligation to spend the extra profits they’ll generate from faster lines to hire more workers; the proposed rules don’t mandate any mitigation steps. “You’re taking a group of workers who already have high exposure [to risk of harm] at even lower line speed levels and it’s going to be up to their individual employer as to whether they protect their workers or not,” Harris-Adamson said. “If we could trust employers to understand the issues and respond accordingly, we wouldn’t be seeing such high hazards.”
Even if companies wanted to hire more workers, it might not be possible. There isn’t necessarily room in the highly crowded plants to add more people on the lines. Poultry and swine processing workforces are majority immigrants, sometimes undocumented and sometimes with temporary protected status, so the Trump administration’s huge increase in immigration enforcement and attempts to end TPS will make those workers scarcer. Without limits or requirements, meanwhile, there will almost certainly be a race to the bottom. “There’s a hugely unfair disadvantage for companies that are trying to do the right thing,” Harris-Adamson said.
These problems could at least be mitigated if OSHA were empowered to act. But while the agency put out a standard in 2000 to protect workers from musculoskeletal injuries, Congress rescinded it and blocked the agency from issuing the same rule in the future. “That would have prevented hundreds of thousands of work-related injuries and saved many, many workers from years of pain and suffering,” Fagan said. Congress could still act by passing legislation that instructs OSHA to create a standard to protect meat processing workers.
“I am convinced that there will be an increase in work-related injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, and also acute injuries if things go faster—people are going to slip and fall, there will be more amputations and cuts,” Fagan said.
The proposed rules also eliminate a requirement in both swine and poultry plants to report back to the USDA on their programs to monitor and document workers’ injuries. “USDA is saying, ‘We don’t have to care about worker safety,” Berkowitz said. USDA and OSHA currently have a memorandum of understanding that requires them to work together on meat processing worker safety, but Fagan sees this waiving of the reporting requirement as a weakening of that agreement. “It’s a first salvo to cutting ties completely with OSHA,” she said.
“The data and science are very clear,” Berkowitz said. “This is going to harm workers.”
Then there’s what higher line speeds could do to food safety. The Trump administration argues that there won’t be an impact on food safety and isn’t requiring any heightened monitoring for food-borne pathogens. But Jill Mauer, who was a USDA inspector for 31 years in swine processing plants, and Hallie Varvel, who was a USDA supervisory public health veterinarian, say they couldn’t adequately do their jobs under current speeds. “At current speeds with current staffing levels, they’re not able to observe the animals for food safety and animal welfare purposes,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School who supported Mauer and Varvel in writing their comments.
The administration argues that USDA line inspectors in charge can stop the lines if food inspection problems arise. An agency spokesperson tells The New Republic: “[The Food Safety and Inspection Service] protects the public’s health by ensuring that meat, poultry and egg products are safe, wholesome and properly labeled. In its recent proposals to update poultry and swine processing regulations, FSIS is seeking to clarify and streamline regulatory requirements to align with FSIS’ statutory responsibilities while preserving all necessary food safety verification and inspection activities. Further, under these proposals federal inspectors retain the authority to slow or stop lines if food safety or process control is not maintained.”
Still, according to Mauer and Varvel, that’s not the reality. “The inspector in charge is under a tremendous amount of pressure to not stop the lines,” Winders said, because it costs the companies money every time workers get paid while meat isn’t being processed. In her comments, Mauer noted that she personally experienced retaliation and extra scrutiny after stopping the line. There often isn’t even an inspector in charge present at the plants, leaving no one with the authority to stop the line. The proposed rule also doesn’t require them to stop the line at any particular time, it only says that they can. “That is no assurance whatsoever that food safety and animal welfare will be protected. There is no backstop,” Winders said.
“Based on my direct experience, I believe these high-speed models lead to lower-quality meat products and increase the likelihood that unsafe food reaches the public,” Mauer wrote in her public comments. “At higher speeds, there is less time to observe, less time to react, and less margin for error.” But it might be hard to know exactly how much more illness these rules, if they go into effect, will cause. The Trump administration has significantly weakened the country’s surveillance system for identifying and limiting the spread of food-borne illnesses.
“We are going to have more food outbreaks, and some number of Americans are going to die because of this,” Winders said.
