One of Trump’s cruelest policies yet has received almost zero attention
· Vox
Last week, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a strikingly cruel policy, even for this administration: speeding up the kill lines at America’s chicken, turkey, and pig slaughterhouses. The plan will make one of the country’s most dangerous jobs — working in a meat processing plant — even more unsafe, labor advocates argue.
The new draft rules would allow slaughterhouses that participate in certain inspection systems — which account for the majority of poultry and pork processing in the US — to move even faster than they already do. Chicken slaughterhouses would be able to increase kill line speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175 — a 25 percent increase. Turkey slaughterhouses would be able to accelerate from 55 birds per minute to 60. Pig slaughterhouses currently have a maximum line speed limit of 1,106 pigs per hour, but under the new rule, there will be no speed limit.
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The USDA has also proposed ending the requirement for these slaughter plants to publish annual reports on worker safety.
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If finalized, the rules will apply to 94 percent of chickens slaughtered, 79 percent of turkeys slaughtered, and 64 percent of pigs slaughtered.
The nearly 500,000 people who work in meat processing plants in the US — one-third of whom are immigrants — use sharp knives to quickly cut up animal carcasses over long shifts, already making them susceptible to high rates of cuts, lacerations, amputations, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The work can take a heavy toll on their mental health, too, as many suffer from anxiety, depression, and a form of PTSD they often didn’t carry before taking up the job.
The proposed rules are all but certain to increase injury rates for these workers, who already have some of the highest in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (and which, according to numerous federal government sources, are likely severe underestimates).
Animal welfare groups worry the draft rules could increase botched slaughter, too, as faster lines can make it more difficult for workers to properly stun animals, leading to further suffering.
The trade groups that represent meatpackers, however, are cheering on the USDA’s proposed rules.
“Thank you, Secretary Rollins and the Food Safety and Inspection Service, for taking steps to unleash the potential to process pork more efficiently,” reads part of a statement from Duane Stateler, president of the National Pork Producers Council.
On top of the worker and animal welfare issues, Trump’s USDA has also withdrawn a Biden-era rule to reduce salmonella in poultry and has reduced its number of slaughterhouse inspectors.
Magaly Licolli, the cofounder and director of the poultry worker advocacy group Venceremos, said that increased line speeds can further compromise food safety: “Many workers explain that they simply cannot check for contamination, defects, or improperly processed meat when items pass by them in a blur.”
The Trump administration has, over and over again, vowed to improve the food system on behalf of the American people, but its latest proposal is one in a series of actions that demonstrates its allegiances lie on the side of the large businesses that run much of that food system.
The bipartisan project to speed up slaughter lines
However, the blame doesn’t entirely rest on the Trump administration; the effort to speed up slaughter lines is a bipartisan project decades in the making.
The effort began in 1997 when, under President Bill Clinton, the USDA allowed a small number of poultry and pig slaughterhouses to operate faster.
In 2012, President Barack Obama’s USDA proposed increasing the chicken slaughter rate from 140 birds per minute to 175. After strong pushback from labor and food safety groups, the agency dropped it.
But everything accelerated during the first Trump administration. Trump’s USDA expanded the number of poultry slaughterhouses that could speed up their lines and finalized a rule to allow for some pig slaughterhouses to do the same.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union sued over the pork line speed increase and a judge ruled that the USDA had to abandon the measure because it had failed to consider how it would impact worker safety.
Still determined to increase slaughter line speeds, the USDA — during the Biden administration — hired third-party researchers to conduct experiments on how line speed affects worker safety. The study found that 81 percent of line workers at poultry plants and 46 percent at pork plants are at high risk for musculoskeletal disorders, like tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome.
But the results were also counterintuitive. The risk wasn’t correlated with how fast the kill line moved; it was correlated with the employee’s workload — what’s called the “piece rate,” or the number of animals or amount of meat they’re required to process in a given amount of time.
To compensate for the increased workload that came with faster line speeds, some chicken plants in the study also increased staffing, which prevented further injury risk. The chicken plants that didn’t add extra staff did see injury risk increase.
The researchers made it clear that this finding should be implemented in meat processing plants: “Any establishment anticipating an increase in evisceration line speed should proactively mitigate MSD [musculoskeletal disorder] risk by increasing job-specific staffing levels and/or decreasing job-specific line speeds.”
But the USDA didn’t incorporate any rules about increasing staffing to compensate for increased line speeds into its new draft proposals.
When asked about this, an agency spokesperson told me that the USDA does not “have the power to regulate piece rates or how private companies manage their staff.”
Debbie Berkowitz, who served as a chief of staff and senior policy adviser at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under Obama, told me that she and other labor advocates have long urged the USDA to require companies to add workers to the line if they’re going to increase line speeds. But, she said, “they refuse because the [meat] industry runs the agency and they don’t want to spend money where they don’t have to.”
The National Pork Producers Council declined to answer questions about whether it would encourage its member companies to increase staffing when line speeds go up. The National Chicken Council and the National Turkey Federation didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Berkowitz said the two USDA proposals represent an effort on the agency’s part to relinquish its responsibility to protect workers. During past rulemaking processes on line speeds, the agency — under both Obama and Trump administrations — asked the public for input on worker safety. This time around, it is not, even though a judge told the agency it has to consider worker safety.
The move sets a “huge” precedent, Berkowitz said. And they’re doing this “knowing full well that the Trump administration is hollowing out OSHA and the number of inspections has already fallen precipitously.”
Taken together, the draft rules are a “very telling sign of this administration and how they view blue-collar workers…they have decided that they no longer have to care about workers at all.”
It’s unclear when the USDA will finalize its rules, though the public can weigh in until April 20. But given the USDA’s longrunning deference to the meat industry, its final rules are unlikely to look much different than its drafts.