041165 Injury Rate Increases at Tyson Plant

Wallula, WA - Ramon Moreno bears scars from his 23 years working at the beef slaughterhouse and processing plant in Wallula now owned by Tyson Fresh Meats Inc.

Moreno, 47, has been kicked in the face three times by dying cows. The second incident, in 1988, required an operation to repair his jaw. He's broken his finger while herding cattle, which put him on restricted light duty, and he frequently suffers minor cuts and burns.

But the worst injury he's suffered wasn't caused by a knife, a saw, a thrashing cow or a jet of steam. It was caused by the constant stress of repetitively cutting through the inch of mud that coats the cow forelegs he skins at a rate of about four per minute for seven hours and 26 minutes each day. "I just injured everything -- my back, my neck, my shoulders, my arms, my head. It was just too much work," Moreno said.

"I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sit, I can't lay down," he said, describing the pain that persisted through a year and a half of drugs and physical therapy. "I just wanted to not live, I felt so bad."

Moreno's story is far from unique among the 1,800 workers at the sprawling Wallula complex. Analysis of injury logs filed with the federal government show that in 2002, Wallula workers were taken off their jobs for injuries or illnesses at a rate that was 2.5 times higher than the national average for meatpacking plants -- and 10 times the average rate for American workplaces overall.

Logs from past years also show reported injuries have increased since Tyson Foods, the nation's largest meat company, took over the Wallula plant with its purchase of IBP Inc. in 2001, according to a University of Massachusetts study.

Union leaders claim it's because of increased pressure to speed production. Company officials say it's because more injuries are being reported because Tyson has placed greater emphasis on safety.

Several items are not in dispute. Those include the fact that the Wallula plant plays an important role in the Tri-City economy, with an annual payroll of $46 million and $415 million in annual cattle purchases.

Second, while industries like logging and deep-sea fishing yield more fatal accidents, U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration statistics show meatpacking leads in the number of injuries or medical problems that take workers off their jobs.

And third, most of the Wallula workers are immigrants -- mostly Mexican but with significant numbers of Southeast Asians and Eastern Europeans. They eagerly seek the Wallula jobs because of the pay, which averages $10 an hour, and benefits including medical insurance and education programs.

But the jobs come with risk. From the drive alley where live cattle enter the plant's slaughterhouse floor to the shipping department where they emerge as boxes of vacuum-sealed plastic bags of beef, Tyson workers face danger from exposure to heat and cold, slippery floors and the constant flash of electric saws, pneumatic cutters and knives that dismember slaughtered cows.

Workers also face inevitable wear on their bodies from making the same forceful, complicated cuts, using the same twisting, straining motions, hundreds of times an hour, in a daily rush to produce the highest quality beef at the lowest possible cost.

Teamsters Union Local 556, which represents the Wallula workers, argues Tyson is shortchanging worker safety to keep labor costs down and profits high.

With Local 556 and Tyson negotiating over a labor contract to replace the previous five-year agreement that expired in June, safety has emerged as a key issue, said Maria Martinez, union secretary-treasurer.

"I think it's important to them because it changes their way of living," she said. Some workers have been injured so badly, she said, "they're not able to go find other jobs they'll be able to handle."

Martinez said workers want more input into plant safety, which could include slowing the pace of work and assigning more workers to difficult jobs.

But Tyson plant managers and company officials say the company's insistence that workers report every sign of injury or illness, no matter how small, has helped keep workers healthy and safe -- while also boosting the number of injuries reported.

"We probably do go above and beyond most other employers to ensure our employees' safety," said Ray McGaugh, plant manager.

With $2 million per year spent on safety equipment and training, constant efforts to improve equipment and work conditions to ease strain on workers, and an emphasis on reporting and treating the first signs of any kind of injury, McGaugh said, Tyson is doing more than many meatpackers to keep its workers safe.

The importance of worker safety was highlighted Jan. 2, 2003, when plant worker Luis Madrigal, 24, lost his left arm to a hock-cutter.

Other accidents recorded by state inspectors in the past four years include a broken arm caused when a worker's sleeve was caught in a conveyor belt, as well as other hazards attributed to malfunctioning or poorly protected equipment -- hazards that plant management quickly corrected, state inspectors noted.

But workers point to a less visible cause for increased injury rates -- the repetitive stress of the work, which leads to ergonomic injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. A summer 2001 worker survey showed up to three-fourths of workers had experienced pain or numbness in the previous year. Nine of 10 felt high production speeds contributed to accidents and injuries, and 75% felt understaffed work positions played a role.

Fernando Hernandez, 47, of Pasco, has spent most of his 12 years at the Wallula plant on Line 730, A shift. There, he's worked as a rib boner, short rib trimmer and baby bone cleaner.

For the past three years, he also has been a member of the company safety committee, which meets weekly to discuss ways to make jobs less dangerous or difficult.

"They report simple things, like a hose that's missing, a cover for a motor that needs to be put on, water on the floor where a drain cover's clogged," Hernandez said in Spanish as a fellow union member translated.

"In a lot of issues, the company does solve the problems. But on the issues that are really important, like short-handed crews, they don't."

Amir Mustafic, 27, of Kennewick, agreed. When he moved to the Tri-Cities from Bosnia six years ago, he took a job at Wallula because he had family working there. With almost no English, he didn't think he could find another job that paid as well.

His job as the aitch boner involves pulling a section of rump meat from a passing conveyor belt with a hook, carving the bone out, then passing the piece down the line while cleaning remaining meat from the bone.

He's done this four to five times per minute, five days a week, for the past five years. "I've felt a lot of pain a lot of times," Mustafic said in a May interview. "Right now I feel it. It's kind of tingly in my hands, from my elbow to my fingers -- actually, my shoulders to my fingers. It wakes me up every morning at 7 o'clock."

Like Hernandez, Mustafic said the company stresses proper work practices to workers who complain of chronic pain.

"They say you have to sharpen your knife good, you have to use it good," he said. "They try to explain to people how to hold the hook in the hand. But it doesn't help if people have hard jobs and they go too fast."

Much has changed at the Wallula plant since Hernandez and Mustafic began working there. In 1999, workers led a strike against plant owner IBP, protesting production speed. Union-management relations have been strained since, and union leaders say production speed and staffing concerns have remained a central issue.

In 2001, IBP was bought by an even larger meat company, Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods, bringing changes to Wallula.

Since then, some workers say they've seen fairer treatment from supervisors, more emphasis on safety and more acceptance of workers who report injuries, pain or other problems.

But other workers agree with Teamsters Local 556 officials, who say Tyson has increased workloads without increasing the number of staff. That, they say, has led to short-staffed workers being overwhelmed -- and causing more injuries and ergonomics problems.

Hernandez said since Tyson took over he's seen a trend toward reducing workers at each station on the line. At his position, he said, there used to be 11 to 12 workers, but Tyson reduced that to seven or eight.

"Everything's faster," he said. "You need to make the cuts faster. Your hands start to hurt faster because you're making your movements faster."

The trend reached a head in 2002 and persisted until August 2003, he said, when a case of mad cow disease in Canada led to a ban on Canadian cattle coming across the U.S. border. That shut off an important supply of cattle for the Wallula plant, slowing the pace of work.

When interviewed last summer, Hernandez said eight workers were assigned to his position, but about half of those weren't there because they were on light duty after reporting injuries or ergonomics-related problems.

"There was another person, but he quit today," he said, noting another challenge to keeping the plant fully staffed -- the high rate of worker turnover.

Froilan Godinez, an eight-year veteran of the Wallula plant's material handling department, said the number of workers who move boxes to waiting trucks also had dropped since Tyson took over.

"We have less people on the lines," he said last summer at his Kennewick home. "They're pushing us to do more than we can."

Godinez, 35, a native of Aguas Calientes, Mexico, carries himself stiffly and said he feels constant lower back pain, which he believes is the result of the day-to-day strain of lifting boxes that weigh up to 60 pounds and two work injuries in 1998 and 2001.

"When I went to my doctor, he told me my back was so bad. He said, 'You're going to take medicine, maybe forever.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Your back is like a man 65 years old.' That's why every time I hold something more than 40 pounds, it hurts."

It is notoriously difficult to pinpoint the cause of such injuries, and workers and employers can have different views on whether long-developing medical conditions are caused by what people do at work. But Margarita Carrasco, 53, can't imagine what she could have done outside of her seven- year job at the Wallula plant to cause the problems that have led to four surgeries in the past three years.

Carrasco, originally from Jalisco, Mexico, has long, thin white scars up and down her right arm from numerous surgeries. She's had two pins and a metal bar implanted in her right forearm, but they haven't been able to restore use of her right hand -- her knife hand.

Her right wrist first started to hurt several years ago when she was working at the "trim knuckles" position, flipping over 7-pound pieces of meat and cutting out a central bone using tight, circular knife cuts. After she developed sharp, stabbing pains in her arm, she went to the company nurse and then to a doctor, who recommended surgery.

The first surgery helped, and Carrasco returned to work on light duty for six to eight months. Then she returned to the trim knuckle job, and six months later she noticed a nodule forming in her right wrist.

Then the pain returned. "It was a feeling like your hand was asleep," she said. The pain persisted and spread down her forearm, so she went to the nurse and got another doctor's appointment. That led to another surgery, and the metal bar in her arm.

"My arm is now forever useless," Carrasco said in Spanish during an interview at her Pasco home. She can't write on a flat surface or hold a spoon with her right hand, and now uses her left hand to brush her hair in the morning.

Santos Garcia, 48, has been working as a meatpacker since 1978, the last 10 years at Wallula. He said Tyson fired him from his supervisory job in August 2003 after a side of beef hanging from a chain slipped and fell on him, leaving him with pain in his back and neck.

Garcia admitted he still had hard feelings toward Tyson, but he said he felt plant management under the company had strived to follow safety rules. "They have good safety," he said during a July interview at his Pasco home. "Things happen with almost 1,800 people working there."

But he said he saw injuries and ergonomics problems increase during his last two years at the plant.

"It's lack of training," he said. "You know why people have pain? Because they don't know how to sharpen their knife or they don't know how to do something right."

Garcia said he used to have more time to watch workers and correct them, but supervisors were given less time after Tyson took over.

"We used to have trainers at our lines," he said. "Now they're all working somewhere else. I don't have enough time to do everything."

On the other hand, he said, "Sometimes people don't follow the rules." And he suspects some workers have faked injuries to get out of work or, in the case of several workers at one position reporting injuries at once, to slow production speed.

"It hasn't happened a lot, but it happens," he said. Hernandez agreed workers used to receive more one-on-one attention before Tyson took over. Now, he said, "I see there's nobody else to train them, or maybe train them for only a couple of minutes. Then they're on their own.

"Workers know about safety," he said. "The problems start when they start taking workers from the line. That's when the unsafe acts start."

That's what plant employee Maria Mendez believes happened to her. In August 2001, the Pasco mother of two slipped on a wet floor outside the women's locker room and broke her right wrist. She was transferred from one light duty, or restricted, job to another, until she ended up on what she called the bone belt.

There, she bent over a waist-high conveyor belt, hooking 8- to 10-pound pieces of bone with a hand-held hook and lifting them over her shoulders to another belt overhead. It would not have been that hard with two good arms, she said, but she only had one.

After about six months, "I started feeling the pain of my wrist going down into my shoulder," she said. "I told the nurse, 'I can't do this, the pain is too much.' "

The nurse did not reassign her to another job, but gave her ibuprofen to ease the pain. About three weeks later, Mendez said, she was working on the bone belt when she "felt a burst" in her left shoulder. Her arm fell helplessly to her side.

"The pain was burning, and I couldn't move my arm," she said. "It was terrible." She went back to the nurse, who gave her ibuprofen and kept her for about an hour. Then she was put back to work picking bits of bone from meat trim passing by on a conveyor belt, using her right arm because her left was numb.

Now, Mendez said, she can't make a fist with her right hand, and her grip is weak. Her left hand bears a scar on the lower palm from a July 2003 carpal tunnel surgery, and her knuckles pop painfully when she opens and closes the hand.

"I feel bad, because neither hand works," she said. "I'm not going to be able to work somewhere else."

McGaugh acknowledged accidents are bound to happen, and said ergonomics injuries are statistically inevitable in meatpacking work. In some cases, he said, workers need to be told they're not physically suited to the difficult work.

But he rejected the contention that company policies or working conditions have made the Wallula plant more dangerous. "If there is an increase in the numbers, there is an increase in the expectation to report (injury or pain)," he said.

The plant's four full-time nurses and nurse manager evaluate every worker at the first report of injury or pain, on both an objective basis -- signs of swelling, range of motion -- and on the employee's complaints.

If there are no objective findings, the worker is sent back to work, McGaugh said. But if that worker returns with another complaint, he or she is immediately put on light duty -- and the injury becomes "a recordable" on the plant's OSHA log.

Some "75% to 80% of recordables are resolved in-house," or without a doctor visit, McGaugh said. "What we do is that we expect, no matter how minor an injury or illness, we expect 100% compliance in reporting," he said. "When we catch it early, it remains a minor problem."

Ergonomic-related problems account for about 40% of all recordable injuries at the plant, McGaugh said, but because they develop slowly, workers and supervisors are trained to watch for them. Improvements in the past several years have brought fewer medical problems, he said.

McGaugh also stressed the plant's "neighborhood safety watch program," instituted at the beginning of this year, which encourages both workers and supervisors to watch for unsafe acts.

"Safety is an evolution," he said. "When you have a household of 1,800 people, you have to rely on each other. Too many times, team members rely on management for safety."

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