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America's Worst Graveyard Shift Is Grinding Up Workers
Retweeted by Paul Cox: https://twitter.com/PaulCoxNY
There are things more important to this country’s future than the latest spat between Steve Bannon and the president. This week’s cover story on how we treat immigrant workers risking life and limb for $12 an hour is one of them. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-29/america-s-worst-graveyard-shift-is-grinding-up-workers?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social …
Link to tweet
America’s Worst Graveyard Shift Is Grinding Up Workers
Cleanup at the slaughterhouse is as dangerous as it is repulsive, and the immigrants who do the work are under pressure to complete it faster than ever.
By Peter Waldman and Kartikay Mehrotra December 29, 2017, 4:00 AM EST
No one knew her real name. At work she was Tiffany Sisneros, until her arm got crushed in a conveyor belt. She filed for workers’ comp as Martha Solorzano, born 1966. The doctor who evaluated her wrote down her last name as Torres. We’ll call her Martha, the name her lawyer uses. Like millions of undocumented immigrants, Martha lived in the shadows. She slept by day, worked at night, shifted names as circumstances demanded, and supported her family with scraps that fell her way from the U.S. labor market. ... She worked as a cleaner on the graveyard shift at Tyson Foods Inc.’s cavernous meatpacking plant in Holcomb, Kan.
....
It was about 3:30 a.m. on July 7, 2011, when Martha finished cleaning conveyor belt FC-3A on the main factory floor. After powering the machine back on, she realized she had forgotten to wipe down a spot where fat collects under the side rail. Such deposits, if neglected, can shut down a processing line, at considerable cost in lost output, if a USDA inspector discovers it during daily swab tests. ... So Martha reached under the moving belt to get at the smudge and lost her balance, she testified in her workers’ comp case. As she tried to brace herself, her left hand got caught in the machine’s roller, which reeled her in past her elbow, twisting and cracking her forearm. A supervisor heard her scream and shut down the line. Maintenance workers had to dismantle the guards and rollers to get her out. The radius and ulna bones could be seen sticking out of her arm, in shards.
Most accidents at the Holcomb plant are covered by Tyson’s workers’ comp insurance. But Martha didn’t work for Tyson. The cleaning crew was employed by Packers Sanitation Services Inc., the nation’s largest cleaning contractor to the food industry. The meatpacking industry has a hard enough time filling daytime production jobs, so many bigger plants staff the night shift through contractors such as Packers. These companies pay their largely immigrant workforce up to a third less than what production employees earn during the day. Martha was getting $202 a week. Packers pays current employees an average of $11.86 an hour. ... Such is the genius of American outsourcing. In an era of heightened concern about food safety, meat and poultry producers are happy to pay sanitation companies for their expertise. The sanitation companies also assume the headaches and risk of staffing positions that only the destitute or desperate will take—very often undocumented immigrants. And they relieve the big producers, including household names such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., of responsibility for one of the most dangerous factory jobs in America.
....
But no one knows how many sanitation workers get sick and injured on the job, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t require plants to report contractors’ injuries, and the highly fragmented sanitation industry uses multiple job codes, so cleaners fall through the data cracks, the GAO says. ... Judging from Packers’s record, the nightly storm of high-pressure hoses, chemical vapors, blood, grease, and frantic deadlines, all swirling in clouds of steam around pulsing belts, blades, and blenders, can be treacherous. From 2015 through September 2016, Packers had the 14th-highest number of severe injuries—defined as an amputation, hospitalization, or the loss of an eye—among the 14,000 companies tracked by OSHA in 29 states, according to data analyzed by the National Employment Law Project, or NELP. Even that statistic understates the risks. With about 17,000 workers, Packers is a fraction of the size of the 13 companies above it on NELP’s danger scorecard, including the U.S. Postal Service (No.?1), Tyson (No.?4), and Pilgrim’s Pride (No.?6). Adjusting for size, Packers topped the danger list by a wide margin, with a rate of 14 severe injuries for every 10,000 workers. Its amputation rate of 9.4 dismemberments per 10,000 workers was almost five times higher than for U.S. manufacturing workers as a whole in 2015.
Cleanup at the slaughterhouse is as dangerous as it is repulsive, and the immigrants who do the work are under pressure to complete it faster than ever.
By Peter Waldman and Kartikay Mehrotra December 29, 2017, 4:00 AM EST
No one knew her real name. At work she was Tiffany Sisneros, until her arm got crushed in a conveyor belt. She filed for workers’ comp as Martha Solorzano, born 1966. The doctor who evaluated her wrote down her last name as Torres. We’ll call her Martha, the name her lawyer uses. Like millions of undocumented immigrants, Martha lived in the shadows. She slept by day, worked at night, shifted names as circumstances demanded, and supported her family with scraps that fell her way from the U.S. labor market. ... She worked as a cleaner on the graveyard shift at Tyson Foods Inc.’s cavernous meatpacking plant in Holcomb, Kan.
....
It was about 3:30 a.m. on July 7, 2011, when Martha finished cleaning conveyor belt FC-3A on the main factory floor. After powering the machine back on, she realized she had forgotten to wipe down a spot where fat collects under the side rail. Such deposits, if neglected, can shut down a processing line, at considerable cost in lost output, if a USDA inspector discovers it during daily swab tests. ... So Martha reached under the moving belt to get at the smudge and lost her balance, she testified in her workers’ comp case. As she tried to brace herself, her left hand got caught in the machine’s roller, which reeled her in past her elbow, twisting and cracking her forearm. A supervisor heard her scream and shut down the line. Maintenance workers had to dismantle the guards and rollers to get her out. The radius and ulna bones could be seen sticking out of her arm, in shards.
Most accidents at the Holcomb plant are covered by Tyson’s workers’ comp insurance. But Martha didn’t work for Tyson. The cleaning crew was employed by Packers Sanitation Services Inc., the nation’s largest cleaning contractor to the food industry. The meatpacking industry has a hard enough time filling daytime production jobs, so many bigger plants staff the night shift through contractors such as Packers. These companies pay their largely immigrant workforce up to a third less than what production employees earn during the day. Martha was getting $202 a week. Packers pays current employees an average of $11.86 an hour. ... Such is the genius of American outsourcing. In an era of heightened concern about food safety, meat and poultry producers are happy to pay sanitation companies for their expertise. The sanitation companies also assume the headaches and risk of staffing positions that only the destitute or desperate will take—very often undocumented immigrants. And they relieve the big producers, including household names such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., of responsibility for one of the most dangerous factory jobs in America.
....
But no one knows how many sanitation workers get sick and injured on the job, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t require plants to report contractors’ injuries, and the highly fragmented sanitation industry uses multiple job codes, so cleaners fall through the data cracks, the GAO says. ... Judging from Packers’s record, the nightly storm of high-pressure hoses, chemical vapors, blood, grease, and frantic deadlines, all swirling in clouds of steam around pulsing belts, blades, and blenders, can be treacherous. From 2015 through September 2016, Packers had the 14th-highest number of severe injuries—defined as an amputation, hospitalization, or the loss of an eye—among the 14,000 companies tracked by OSHA in 29 states, according to data analyzed by the National Employment Law Project, or NELP. Even that statistic understates the risks. With about 17,000 workers, Packers is a fraction of the size of the 13 companies above it on NELP’s danger scorecard, including the U.S. Postal Service (No.?1), Tyson (No.?4), and Pilgrim’s Pride (No.?6). Adjusting for size, Packers topped the danger list by a wide margin, with a rate of 14 severe injuries for every 10,000 workers. Its amputation rate of 9.4 dismemberments per 10,000 workers was almost five times higher than for U.S. manufacturing workers as a whole in 2015.
Holcomb, Kansas, was where the Clutter family, slain in the incident that was turned into "In Cold Blood," lived.
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