By Kim Geiger, Tribune Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - As part of President Barack
Obama's push to streamline regulations on businesses, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture plans to let chicken slaughterhouses run production lines faster
and with fewer federal inspectors, angering food safety advocates and poultry
plant workers.
Under the proposal, production lines would be
allowed to move 25 percent faster, while the government would cut by as much as
75 percent the number of line inspectors eyeing chicken bodies for defects
before the carcasses are packaged for consumption.
The quicker conveyor belts also raise the
prospects that plant workers who hang carcasses, clean, trim and cut chickens
at rapid speeds will be prone to more injuries as the pace is ratcheted up,
labor groups said.
The USDA estimated that the proposal would
eliminate as many as 800 inspector positions and save the federal government
$90 million over three years. The department closed public comments on its
proposed rules last week and could adopt them or revised ones by this fall.
The proposed rules mark a major policy shift.
They are based on a 13-year pilot program that tested whether public safety
would be improved by giving plant employees a bigger role _ and federal
inspectors a lesser one _ in sorting good chickens from bad.
"We would be turning over what are
essentially quality sorting jobs to people employed by the company," said
Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, undersecretary for food safety. "And that's an
appropriate transfer of responsibility."
But Tony Corbo, at the health advocacy
group Food and Water Watch, calls it "a privatization of poultry
inspection" because plant employees would be responsible for spotting and
removing defective chickens. Consumer advocates said the rising rates of
salmonella infection in recent years should give pause to any plans to cut the
number of federal inspectors at poultry plants.
The dispute highlights the competing
interests facing the Obama administration as pressure for fiscal austerity and
pro-business policies collide with concerns about the role of government in
protecting public health and worker safety.
"It's this perfect storm that allows
USDA to lax up on the amount of scrutiny they give these plants," said
Amanda Hitt, director of the Food Integrity Campaign for the Government
Accountability Project, a watchdog group. "It's beyond safety. It's an
integrity issue."
The proposal has sparked a flood of letters
from concerned consumers and public health advocates, many of them urging
slower, more deliberate inspections.
But in a tough re-election fight, Obama has
urged his departments to help companies by ditching overly burdensome and
outdated regulations.
The National Chicken Council, which
represents the $45-billion-a-year poultry industry, said the proposal would
modernize an outdated inspection system.
In testing its relaxed rules at 20 chicken
slaughterhouses and five turkey plants, the USDA found little difference with
conventional plants in the instances of salmonella and other pathogens.
The test plants performed "exceptionally
well" at preventing bodies with defects like feathers and tissue from
making it down the line to federal inspectors, the department said.
The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service
is required by law to inspect each carcass that moves through a poultry plant
for safety and wholesomeness.
Under existing rules, the production line can
move as fast as 140 birds a minute. Up to four federal inspectors positioned
along the line inspect carcasses and remove those that have visual defects that
might indicate the presence of pathogens. No single inspector inspects more
than 35 birds a minute.
The relaxed rules allow lines to speed to 175
birds per minute while relying on plant employees to spot defective carcasses
and pull them from the line. They then move past a single line inspector.
The system frees inspectors from having to
perform such duties as ensuring that "there's no bruises and feathers in
the way," tasks that should be the plant's responsibility, the USDA's
Hagen said.
"If our inspectors are focusing on only
inspecting the birds that have been found to be suitable for inspection, that
can be done at a faster pace," she said.
The shift in resources would allow for four
times more carcasses to be examined by offline inspectors, the department said.
Some plants might gain additional offline inspectors to help perform those
examinations.
But critics said proposed rules would allow
poultry plants to move more chickens faster and with less oversight.
"What they're proposing is a joke,"
health advocacy lobbyist Corbo said. "One inspector can't
possibly do this at 175 birds per minute."
Workers in test plants reported being unable to
stop dirty and potentially diseased carcasses from moving through their plants,
according to the Government Accountability Project, a group that assists
whistle-blowers.
"Every bird in a traditional plant
receives an inspection. You look at the viscera, at the inside of the
chicken," said Stan Painter, a federal inspector who has worked in poultry
processing plants for 27 years.
In a test plant, "you're not able to
look at the inside of the chicken. They're just jammed together, their wings
are literally touching."
Painter said he has seen defective chicken
bodies move down the line for packaging "every day" at the
slaughterhouse where he works, one of the test plants.
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimated that there are 1.2 million incidents of salmonella illness
each year. Unlike other food-borne illnesses, the incidence of salmonella has
risen 10 percent in recent years.
When Consumer Reports tested 382 broiler
chickens bought from grocery stores in 2009, 14 percent were found to contain
salmonella.
Thorough cooking typically kills salmonella,
but the bacteria can spread from hands and kitchen implements that have not
been thoroughly washed.
The United Food and Commercial Workers
International Union, which represents nearly a third of the nation's 200,000
poultry workers, said the new rules would mean "more danger on the
job."
The poultry industry's worker injury rate
already is about a third higher than the average for all manufacturing
industries. They often are prone to back and repetitive stress injuries, and
one study said 59 percent of line workers already have carpal tunnel syndrome
at line speeds of 70 to 91 birds a minute.
The USDA did not examine the effect of
increased line speeds on workers, but said it is preparing a report now.
The National Council of La Raza argued
that the proposed rule is based on "the unsubstantiated assumption that
faster line speed will have no adverse impact on worker health and
safety."
The American Public Health Association, in a
letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, called the proposal
"seriously flawed" and said the USDA should be taking steps to slow
production lines.
"The conclusions of the best
occupational health researchers who have studied this population is that the
line speed should be slowed not increased to an unfathomable 175 birds per
minute to protect workers from harm," the association wrote.
The USDA's Hagen said the department is
looking into the effect of line speeds on worker health.
Original Article Here
No comments:
Post a Comment