Tom Polansek and Leah Douglas
CHICAGO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration said on Monday it plans to permanently allow our poultry and pork processing plants to operate faster, raising concerns among advocacy groups on workers’ health and food safety.
The USDA’s decision was a victory for meat companies and industry associations such as the National Chicken Commission, which advocated speeding up processing lines.
However, this increases health problems for slaughterhouse workers, who often perform repetitive tasks with sharp knives and work in extremely high heat or cold.
A statement said the USDA will begin a process to make it permitted by certain facilities under exemptions to allow for a higher rate of permanent speed. Chicken plants with exemptions can process up to 175 birds per minute, while previous 140 birds can be processed.
The agency will also expand its immunity to allow facilities to “meet demand without excessive government intervention,” the statement said.
The USDA announcement notes that there is a lack of direct link between processing speed and workplace injuries, but studies show that meat packers face greater risk of serious injury.
Unions and other advocacy groups have long believed that greater speeds threaten food safety and are at a higher risk of stress injury and accidents for workers. Immigration and undocumented workers often fill meat packaging work.
“Increasing the speed of the line will hurt workers, it’s not a clear worker,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Alliance.
During his first term, Donald Trump issued a rule in 2019 that allows pork factories to run processing lines as quickly as possible. A federal judge blocked the rule in 2021 after a union challenge.
Biden Administration allows six pork plants to operate faster in a pilot program in 2023, and the USDA has collected data on worker injuries.
The National Pork Producer Council Industry Group said that making higher speeds permanent will increase the stability of pork producers.
USDA-funded data, released in January, found that pork and chicken factory workers are at higher risk than other manufacturing workers, such as musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
According to the data, among the six pork plants, higher linear velocities were at greater risk from workers in one plant, while the other plant was at lower risk, and the linear velocities did not differ statistically significantly across the four facilities.
Data show that there is no correlation between higher speed and higher risk.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of occupational disease reported in the animal slaughtering and processing industry is six times the average of all industries in 2022.
(Reported by Tom Polansek in Chicago and Leah Douglas of Washington; Edited by Richard Chang)
