Tag Archives: Workplace Safety

Poultry Plants Get To Police Self

Chicken processing plants now get to act as their own inspectors.

Chicken processing plants now get to act as their own inspectors.

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets, the US Department of Agriculture has released new poultry-inspection rules that will adversely affect workplace safety.

According to the New York Times, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, a food and worker safety advocacy group, if a plant has an inspector on the assembly line at all, that inspector will have to inspect 2.33 birds every second for potentially harmful defects.

Further, others have stated that there are no accompanying worker-safety regulations designed to address the stress and injuries often suffered by workers due to the repetitive motion involved in the work at these plants.

And animal-rights and welfare organizations were also highly critical of the new rules.

The rules announced on Thursday work like this: poultry plant operators will now have the option of conducting inspections of their line for harmful defects in the birds themselves, without the supervision of an Agriculture Department inspector. The plants will be allowed to turn out 140 birds per minute. But if a plant doesn’t want to make their own inspections, an agent would remain on the line to inspect 140 birds a minute for flaws, contamination, feces or any other defect that would render the product unacceptable.

Various groups in favor or worker safety and food safety are exploring ways of blocking the new rules.

Hamburgers anyone?