Summary
Because meatpacking is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States, we were asked to provide the Congress with information on the characteristics of workers in the meat and poultry industry and the conditions in which they work, the types of injuries and illnesses these workers incur, how injury and illness rates have changed over the past decade, and factors that may have affected these rates. We were also asked to determine what is known about the effectiveness of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) efforts to improve safety and health in the meat and poultry industries.
The largest proportions of workers in the meat and poultry industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), are young, male, and/or Hispanic. Although the majority of workers are citizens, an estimated 26 percent of them are foreign-born noncitizens. They work in hazardous conditions involving loud noise, sharp tools, and dangerous machinery. Many workers must stand for long periods of time wielding knives and hooks to slaughter or process meat on a production line that moves very quickly. Workers responsible for cleaning the plant must use strong chemicals and hot pressurized water. While, according to BLS, injuries and illnesses have declined over the past decade, the meat and poultry industry still has one of the highest rates of injury and illness of any industry. The most common injuries are cuts, strains, cumulative trauma, and injuries sustained from falls, but more serious injuries, such as fractures and amputation, also occur. According to BLS, the injury and illness rate for the industry has declined from an estimated 29.5 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers in 1992 to 14.7 in 2001. Injury and illness rates can be affected by many factors, such as the amount and quality of training, employee turnover rates, increased mechanization, and the speed of the production line. Some evidence suggests that OSHA's efforts have had a positive impact on the injury and illness rates of workers in meat and poultry plants. However, while the criteria OSHA uses to select plants for inspection--which focus on plants with relatively high injury and illness rates--are reasonable, OSHA could improve its selection process by also considering trends in plants' injury and illness rates over time. In addition, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of OSHA's efforts because the agency does not assign a unique identifier to each plant, making it hard to compare the data it collects on specific plants' injury and illness rates with the information the agency collects on the results of its plant inspections and other programs.
Recommendations
Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change
from "In process" to "Implemented" or "Not implemented" based on our follow up work.
Director:
Team:
Phone:
Robert E. Robertson
Government Accountability Office: Education, Workforce, and Income Security
(202) 512-9889
Recommendations for Executive Action
Recommendation: In order to strengthen the agency's efforts to improve safety and health of workers at meat and poultry plants, the Secretary of Labor should direct the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health to consider adjusting OSHA's criteria for selecting worksites for site specific targeting inspections and for record-keeping audits to consider worksites that have had large reductions in their injury and illness rates over time.
Agency Affected: Department of Labor
Status: Implemented
Comments: In its official response to our recommendation, OSHA stated that it has added 400 employers with low rates in high-hazard industries to its fiscal year (FY) 2006 Site-Specific Targeting (SST) program. OSHA also stated that it will look to expand the SST in future years based on the results of the FY 2006 program. In addition, OSHA has solicited public comments on its SST program and is currently reviewing comments from industry associations, employers, and safety and health professionals. As it completes this review, it will consider GAO's suggestion to expand the criteria for SST inspections in this industry.
Recommendation: In order to strengthen the agency's efforts to improve safety and health of workers at meat and poultry plants, the Secretary of Labor should direct the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health to consider requiring worksites that are surveyed by OSHA to obtain worksite-specific data on injuries and illnesses to include (1) multiple years of data, so that trends in their rates may be analyzed and (2) data on injuries and illnesses to workers employed by cleaning and sanitation companies that provide workers to the plant under contract so that these data can be included in the rates OSHA uses to select plants for inspection.
Agency Affected: Department of Labor
Status: In process
Comments: Agency did not provide updates for fiscal year 2007. OSHA stated last year that it does not consider the collection of multiple year data for a specific small industry like the meatpacking industry to be a cost effective way to collect data. OSHA attempts to collect data from 80,000 worksites each year via a mail survey form with call backs if there is no response or if submitted data is inconsistent. OSHA stated that the collection of data from previous years would result in at least a three-fold increase in collection costs, due in part because the prior year data is not as readily available to the data keeper. According to OSHA, these significantly increased costs to both OSHA and employers would be onerous. Additionally, the agency stated that it does not have the authority to require employers to maintain a site log for its contract cleaning workers, who are not their own employees. GAO continues to believe, however, that the benefits to OSHA of collecting these data outweigh the costs, particularly given the highly hazardous nature of the industry, and that the costs would not be "onerous." In addition, it would be beneficial and, we believe, feasible, to require employers to maintain records of workers injured at their worksite--whether direct employees or contractor staff.
Recommendation: In order to strengthen the agency's efforts to improve safety and health of workers at meat and poultry plants, the Secretary of Labor should direct the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health to consider requiring that a common identifier for each plant be used in all of its enforcement and cooperative program databases so that these different data sets can be more easily compared in an effort to measure the agency's impact on worker safety and health.
Agency Affected: Department of Labor
Status: In process
Comments: OSHA did not provide updates for fiscal year 2007. OSHA stated last year that it has considered using a unique worksite ID number for each employer worksite in its enforcement database for many years. (Currently, its database includes a unique identifier for each employer but does not have a unique ID number for each worksite). However, OSHA also stated that the costs associated with including a unique ID for each worksite are more than the agency could afford and, even if it included such an identifier, it could not expect this unique ID to work for several much smaller cooperative program databases, which deal with corporate entities and other organizations. While the cost implications of developing a unique ID for each employer worksite cannot be ignored, GAO continues to believe that the benefits of using such a unique ID number would outweigh the costs in terms of enhanced enforcement and follow-up, including the ability to more easily track repeat violations and compare OSHA's efforts across programs. Particularly given the realities of OSHA's limited resources and the high cost of conducting on-site inspections, it needs to make the best use of the data collected during these inspections. Being able to tie the results of each of these inspections to each worksite and its cooperative assistance program efforts at each worksite would greatly enhance this ability.
Recommendation: In order to strengthen the agency's efforts to improve safety and health of workers at meat and poultry plants, the Secretary of Labor should direct the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health to consider expanding successful partnerships, such as the Omaha Area Office's partnership with meatpacking plants in Nebraska to other area offices with high concentrations of meat and poultry plants.
Agency Affected: Department of Labor
Status: In process
Comments: OSHA did not provide updates for fiscal year 2007. Last year, according to OSHA, participation in any of its compliance assistance programs is voluntary; participation results from private/public-sector industry interest and willingness to partner with OSHA. While OSHA can target its outreach efforts, it cannot require compliance assistance program participation by any particular industry or group. The agency stated that it targets its enforcement and compliance assistance efforts to industry groups based on a number of criteria, such as high injury and illness and severity rates. These industries are identified in OSHA's Strategic Management Plan and targeting goals are established. The current plan does not include meatpacking as a targeted industry. However, OSHA noted that 14 of its Voluntary Protection Program participants are from this industry and the agency has continued to operate a partnership in Nebraska with a meatpacking group and has several major cooperative agreements impacting the meatpacking industry under the Alliance Program (alliances have been established with the American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council and the National Turkey Federation). Through these alliances, OSHA is working with these groups to develop compliance assistance information and products, conduct training, and share best practices and technical knowledge on safety and health issues, including reduction and prevention of ergonomic injuries associated with poultry handling and processing. However, GAO believes that these efforts, particularly the Nebraska partnership, could be expanded in the meatpacking industry. Although OSHA cannot mandate industry participation, OSHA staff have succeeded in enlisting reluctant companies to participate: officials in OSHA's Omaha Area Office succeeded in convincing reluctant companies to work cooperatively to address their safety and health problems.
Recommendation: The Secretary of Labor should direct the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health and the Secretary of Agriculture should direct the Acting Administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service to revisit and update their memorandum of understanding to ensure that USDA inspectors receive training in recognizing and referring workplace hazards and that the agreement remains current.
Agency Affected: Department of Agriculture
Status: Implemented
Comments: Although USDA and DOL have not updated their MOU, USDA issued Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) Directive 4791.12, Reporting and Correcting Occupational Hazards, which instructs FSIS inspection program personnel about how and when to refer concerns about hazards appropriately within FSIS and to OSHA. It includes a section instructing FSIS personnel on how to report safety and health hazards verbally or in writing within FSIS, and how to file safety or health hazard complaints with OSHA. In addition, the FSIS Center for Learning has developed a training course, "Identifying and Reporting Workplace Safety and Health Hazards," an e-learning project that all FSIS employees can access electronically. In addition, the center has updated its training modules covering OSHA safety and health requirements.
Agency Affected: Department of Labor
Status: In process
Comments: OSHA did not provide updates for fiscal year 2007. Last year OSHA stated that it plans to cooperate with the Department of Agriculture to encourage the revitalization of the USDA-inspector training. OSHA also stated that it is in the process of updating and reviewing existing memorandums of understanding (MOUs) based on their relevance and obsolescence but did not indicate when these actions would be completed.
Recommendation: In addition, the Secretary of Health and Human Services should direct the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health conduct a study of the effect of the speed of the production line on workers in the meat and poultry industry, a study that would also include other job-specific features that interact with line speed to increase the risk of injuries and illnesses to these workers.
Agency Affected: Department of Health and Human Services
Status: In process
Comments: As of August 2007, NIOSH reported that is exploring opportunities with the American Meat Institute to develop a collaborative research effort focused on reducing injuries in the meat industry, which could include a review of the speed of the production line. It is NIOSH's position; however, that the issue of line speed is not an independent factor directly contributing to injuries but is confounded by a multitude of other factors and cannot be examined in isolation in research focusing on prevention of injury outcomes. NIOSH noted that successful injury prevention research in the meat industry would require cooperative worksite access and industry participation, which is difficult to obtain.
