Get Injured, Get Fired

In order to keep insurance rates low and to avoid having to file reports with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), workers in slaughterhouses and factory farms are often pressured to hide injuries and continue working even if they’re in great pain.⁴⁰ According to an investigative report by Reuters on the exploitation of meat industry workers, “Court documents show several of the largest companies kept two sets of injury records, one for themselves and one for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”⁴¹ A congressional report on OSHA violations in the farmed-animal industry found that animal-processing plants frequently failed to report “serious injuries such as fractures, concussions, major cuts, hernias, some requiring hospitalization, surgery, even amputation.”⁴² The Supreme Court of Iowa even noted that slaughterhouses often force badly injured workers to show up at the processing plant for a short period each day so that the plant does not have to report to OSHA lost workdays because of injuries. Some workers are even sent back to the line on the same day that they have a surgery or the day after an amputation as the result of a work-related injury.⁴³

Workers who are hurt on the job have a tough choice to make—they can either try to work while in pain, or they can request sick time or complain to a manager and put their jobs at stake. Because injured workers are less productive, if a supervisor finds out that an employee is injured, the employee may either be fired outright or assigned to awful tasks such as “watching gauges in the rendering plant, where they [are] subjected to an atrocious smell” of animal parts and blood being boiled down into fertilizer.⁴⁴ One slaughterhouse employee says, “They love you if you’re healthy and you work like a dog, but if you get hurt you are trash. If you get hurt, watch out. They will look for a way to get rid of you before they report it. They will find a reason to fire you, or put you on a worse job like in the cold room, or change your shift so you quit. So a lot of people don’t report their injuries. They just work with the pain.”⁴⁵

In addition to forcing injured workers to quit, the animal-processing industry also encourages the under-reporting of injuries by giving managers with low worker-injury rates larger bonuses. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes, “The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of creating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported.”⁴⁶

Under the Bush administration, OSHA has also done the farmed-animal industry a big favor by deciding that it is no longer necessary to keep track of on-the-job repetitive stress injuries. The rate of repetitive stress injury for slaughterhouse employees is 35 times higher than in other manufacturing jobs, but the meat industry doesn’t have to take these injuries seriously now that the government doesn’t even care enough to ask employers to keep a record of them.⁴⁷ Instead of setting a tougher ergonomic standard to combat repetitive stress injuries in slaughterhouses, OSHA made the problem go away by refusing to keep track of these injuries at all.⁴⁸

No Compensation for Injured Workers

Workers’ compensation often fails to provide support for those injured at their jobs in slaughterhouses or factory farms. Because many of the workers cannot speak English, they cannot fill out the forms necessary to make workers’ compensation claims. Managers often lie to injured employees to make sure that they don’t file for workers’ compensation—for instance, they may tell workers that their insurance will only pay their medical bills if they agree to say that they were injured while at home.⁴⁹

Roughly one out of three workers is injured in animal-processing plants in a given year, and there are often on-site clinics to deal with the constant stream of hurt employees.⁵⁰ The nurses and doctors who staff these clinics are often described as being extensions of management and may tell workers that they were injured at home, or they may pressure workers not to fill out accident reports. The clinics often send hurt workers back to the line even when they have suffered serious injuries.

One worker told Human Rights Watch of this failed attempt to get compensation for a work-related injury: “I kept having pain in my back. My supervisor wouldn’t let me go to the clinic. He said there was too much work and I couldn’t leave the line. I woke up the next day and couldn’t move. When I went to the clinic, they told me I got hurt at home. They said that the regular insurance would pay my medical bills if I agreed that I got hurt at home. They asked me to sign a paper but it was in English and I didn’t understand it, so I didn’t sign it. I quit because the pain was so bad. Nobody paid my medical bills, neither the company insurance nor workers’ comp.”⁵¹

From being kicked in the chest by a dying cow to suffering from chronic bacterial infections because of the exposure to animal feces, working in a slaughterhouse entails risks that only desperate migrant workers and rural Americans are willing to take. Read more about how slaughterhouses prey on poor and unskilled workers.