News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), March 6, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Copyright 2005 News & Observer
News & Observer

March 6, 2005, Sunday

LENGTH: 2693 words

HEADLINE: State probes safety at plant

BODY:

TAR HEEL -- Every day, 30,500 hogs enter a sprawling complex of metal buildings in Bladen County, emerging hours later in the form of 6 million pounds of shrink-wrapped pork chops and other meat products.
The job of killing, cutting and packaging is performed by 6,000 people at the Smithfield Packing Co. plant, the world's largest pork slaughterhouse.
The plant in Tar Heel, about 100 miles south of Raleigh, has been described by some as a harsh and dangerous workplace where people toil until their bodies give out and they either quit or get fired. The latest such salvo came in January, when an international human rights organization accused the company of widespread employee abuse.
Smithfield fired back the same day, saying the report was full of inaccuracies and false information. Injuries at Smithfield factories have been declining in recent years as the company has focused on safety, a company spokesman said.
But what really goes on inside the walls of the massive plant 100 miles south of Raleigh remains unknown, even to the state agency charged with protecting North Carolina workers.
No one at the N.C. Department of Labor can say today whether employees at Smithfield or anywhere else are safe on the job. No one knows which work sites have the most injuries.
By law, three or more employees must be hurt in an accident, or a worker must die, before their boss is required to pick up the phone and call the state. That means tens of thousands of injuries every year may never be accounted for.
Companies are required by law to provide a safe work environment for their employees, and most do. But few will ever see a state inspector on their property to confirm it.
Although the Labor Department now focuses almost all its planned inspections on industries with high injury rates including meat-packing plants its staff of 110 inspectors reaches fewer than 6,000 of North Carolina's 230,000 workplaces every year.
When the state initiated such an inspection at the Tar Heel plant last week, it was only the second planned inspection there since Smithfield began its operation in Bladen County 13 years ago. It could be up to six months before the results of the inspection will be made public.
The only North Carolina office that knows firsthand about injuries on the job is the N.C. Industrial Commission, which handles workers' compensation claims. The commission doesn't communicate with the Labor Department, however.
Its 28-year-old computer system is incapable of sorting and analyzing claims by employer, according to its chairman, Buck Lattimore.
This has created a worker protection system that relies almost entirely on employees to report problems, leaving most companies to regulate themselves.
"We can't inspect any place we want just because someone says there's an issue there," said Kevin Beauregard, the Labor Department's assistant director of safety and health. "It all starts with the willingness of employees to talk to us. If they don't, we probably won't be able to address their problem."
Ray Hall didn't have a problem at first.
He was among thousands of people in Eastern North Carolina who signed up to work at the Tar Heel plant in the past decade. To them, Smithfield offered opportunity.
The company pays higher wages than many employers in the area. It also offers health insurance, a retirement savings plan, an employee assistance program and discounts on meat for workers and their families.
"I loved the job," said Hall, 42, who lives in Fayetteville.
He made $ 11.60 an hour hooking split hogs at the conveyor belt big money for a man in his early 40s who never finished eighth grade.
The large sides of pork barreled down the belt, 3 seconds apart. Hall's job was to wrestle them into position, sink two hooks into them and slide the 50-pound pieces of meat to an adjacent table. There he clipped them in place so other workers could quickly cut out the loins.
In an eight-hour shift, he'd hook more than 9,000 sides. An automatic counter made sure he and his co-workers kept up the pace.
"Those lines flew," he said.
Eventually, the furious pace took its toll. On April 12, Hall said, a year after he started work at Smithfield, he felt something pull in his back. His supervisor sent him to the company health clinic across the street from the plant. A nurse told him he had just pulled a muscle and sent him back to work, Hall said.
Ergonomic injuries caused by repetitive motions continue to plague workers in the meat-packing industry, even though government statistics show such injuries have decreased in the past decade.
A January report by the Government Accountability Office says the industry's rates of carpal tunnel syndrome (6.8 cases per 100 workers in 2001) and tendinitis (3.5 cases per 100 workers) remain higher than in manufacturing as a whole.
Such injuries are often harder to prove than open, bleeding wounds or broken bones.
Hall insists he signed a form saying he had suffered a work-related injury. The company's medical files show no record of that clinic visit. Hall says the document "disappeared."
By the next day, his pain had become so severe that the company nurse asked him to see an outside doctor. An MRI showed two herniated discs in his spine.
Smithfield said then, and still maintains, that the injury was not work-related, Hall's medical documents show.
Hall says he didn't know in April to insist on workers' compensation, the insurance system that guarantees North Carolinians who suffer injuries on the job 66 percent of their weekly pay, up to $ 674, until they recover.
He tried once to return to work and was taken out in a wheelchair when the pain in his back became unbearable. In August, after the doctor said he remained unfit to work, Smithfield fired him.
Terry M. Kilbride, a Raleigh lawyer, estimates that he has handled 80 workers' compensation cases involving Smithfield employees. On behalf of Hall, he filed a complaint with the Industrial Commission in September, alleging that Smithfield had wrongly denied his client compensation for a work-related injury.
But contested claims can take many months to be heard; and without his paycheck, Hall was going broke. He and his girlfriend, who still works at the plant, worried that they would lose their home.
In January, Smithfield offered Hall $ 20,000 to settle the matter. Hall accepted, against the advice of his attorney.
"He accepted a short-term fix for a long-term problem, mainly because he couldn't make it," Kilbride said. "That's a sad fact for a lot of my clients."
Today, Hall remains unemployed. He has been unable to continue his medical treatment since he lost his health insurance.
The Human Rights Watch report, published in January, has barely made a ripple in North Carolina. The New York-based, independent watchdog organization, which exposes war crimes, labor violations and other human rights issues worldwide, was hoping for a rapid government response.
"It's disappointing," said Lance Compa, a lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the author of the 175-page report.
Compa spent a year interviewing more than 60 workers, company officials and union organizers at Smithfield's Tar Heel plant. His conclusion: The company violates internationally recognized human rights because it exposes workers to dangers, coerces injured employees into silence, denies them compensation, and crushes their efforts to form unions.
A Smithfield spokesman dismissed his report as "old news."
"We place top priority on the safety, health and well-being of our employees," said Jerry Hostetter, the company's vice president of investor relations and corporate communications. "We know our efforts are working because we have seen a 31 percent reduction in worker injuries in our facilities over the last few years."
Still, animal-slaughtering and processing plants record some of the highest injury rates in North Carolina: 9.2 cases for each 100 workers in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles the data from interviews with about 8,000 North Carolina employers that are granted anonymity in return for sharing such information.
Compa questions the accuracy of the numbers. "There is enormous pressure not to report injuries," he said. "Especially with injuries that are not visible to the naked eye, the company can always say that you didn't get hurt at work, you got hurt at home moving furniture or working on the car."
The problem has been exacerbated, Compa thinks, with the influx of immigrants to the meat-packing industry.
Forty-two percent of employees in the nation's meat-packing plants are Hispanic, the GAO says. Smithfield declined to discuss the demographic makeup of the work force in the Tar Heel plant.
"They're often afraid to get their name in the system because they're not citizens," Compa said.
From 1998 to 2001, nonfatal injuries in North Carolina meat-packing plants dropped from an annual rate of 18.3 per 100 workers to 9.2, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That dramatic decline, mirrored nationwide, is a direct result of better safety and health programs, industry officials say.
But Compa and the GAO suggest that underreporting skews government surveys conducted to track occupational injury and illness rates. Among the GAO's recommendations to the U.S. Department of Labor: Set up inspection programs that specifically target workplaces that report a large reduction in injuries.
As a state that runs its own occupational safety and health program, North Carolina would be required to adopt such a program.
After a devastating 1991 fire that killed 25 people in a Hamlet, N.C., poultry processing plant, the state boosted its inspection program and enacted new laws to ensure that such an accident would never happen again. But even those changes didn't give North Carolina more leeway to inspect workplaces suspected of violating the law.
Government agencies continue to be constrained by state and federal court rulings that shield employers from capricious and unwarranted government inspections. Unless a work site happens to be scheduled for a planned inspection, inspectors must have some evidence of wrongdoing before they can show up.
Last year, the General Assembly appropriated money for the Industrial Commission to modernize its computers, a job that Lattimore, the commission chairman, said should be finished in 2007. Then it would be feasible for the Labor Department to have access to the 60,000 workers' compensation complaints filed annually and gain a clear picture of where workplace injuries occur.
For now, workers usually provide the best clues. Since Smithfield opened its Bladen County factory 13 years ago, employees at the plant have filed 14 complaints prompting inspections.
Allen McNeely, head of the state's occupational safety and health program, wishes more workers would pick up the phone.
"It puts us to the defensive rather than where we want to be," he said of the Human Rights Watch report. "It's better when they come straight to us."
Maria Carmona, like Hall, never called when she began to hurt. She didn't even know there was an agency investigating workers' complaints.
Carmona, now 38, was taken by ambulance from the Tar Heel plant to a hospital in Lumberton in April after the pain in her swollen shoulder became so severe that she had difficulty breathing.
Surgery two months later showed tendinitis and shoulder arthrosis, according to her medical records. The problem develops when cartilage in the shoulder begins to wear out.
Carmona had spent the previous four years cutting meat and tossing it on a conveyor belt, repeating the same motions over and over eight hours a day.
About 20 people worked side by side at her station. Carmona said the work was so hard that as many as four people in her group would quit in a single day. She stuck around because of the money: $ 10.60 an hour, more than eight times what she earned in her native Mexico.
"It pays well, but it kills you," is her assessment of work at the Tar Heel meat-packing plant.
The pain in her left shoulder began about a year after she started working there.
When Carmona didn't show up for work two weeks after her surgery she contends she had not recovered enough to return she was fired as well. She, too, found a lawyer who brought Smithfield to the bargaining table.
In October 2004, they settled for $ 15,500. After paying the attorney's fees and medical bills, Carmona said she was left with about $ 6,000. Today, she works as a baby sitter for friends in her small house in St. Pauls. It's a lot easier than cutting meat, but she's only earning about $ 50 a week.
If her shoulder ever heals, she may take a drive out to Smithfield to fill out another application.
"I still want to return to my old job," she said.
By Karin Rives, Kristin Collins and Michael Easterbrook
THE COMPANY: Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, with $ 7 billion in 2004 revenue, is the largest hog producer and processor in the world. In North Carolina, it employs 7,300 at six plants. Smithfield Packing Co. is a subsidiary.
The company announced plans last fall to build a 180,000-square-foot ham manufacturing plant in Kinston that will employ 206.
THE TAR HEEL PLANT
--Slaughters 30,500 hogs a day, or nearly 32 a minute, during two eight-hour shifts.
--Employs 6,000 workers who kill, split, cut up and package the meat. Smithfield also has contract workers who clean the factory at night and provide other services.
--Every day, 6 million pounds of packaged meat leave the factory by truck, making the plant the largest pork-processing facility in the world.
THE N.C. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR: Has 110 compliance inspectors charged with policing 230,000 North Carolina workplaces. It conducted a record 5,580 inspections in fiscal 2004, up from 1,193 in 1991.
Inspects when:
--A worker writes or calls in a complaint and agrees to sign that complaint (workers' names are not shown to employers). The number to call is: (800) NC-LABOR (625-2267), or (919) 807-2796. Complaints can also be filed online at www.nclabor.com.
--A work site is selected by a computer for inspection, as part of a random inspection schedule. High-hazard industries get priority.
It conducted 21 inspections at the Tar Heel plant between 1992 and February 2005. Of those, 14 were prompted by workers' complaints, two by accidents, and one by the random inspection schedule. Three others were classified as "monitoring," "follow-up" or "referral," usually from another government agency.
Since 1992, the company has been fined a total of $ 71,334 for minor and serious violations at the Tar Heel plant. One recurring theme has been insufficient training for new employees.
Poor training resulted in a worker's death in November 2003, the first in the plant's history, records show.
Glenn Birdsong, 25, of Fayetteville died when he was overcome by chemical fumes and fell into a large tank.
THE UNION: The United Food and Commercial Workers has been trying to organize workers at the plant for more than a decade. A collective bargaining contract would, among other things, strengthen worker safety programs at the plant, the union contends.
The union lost elections at the plant in 1994 and in 1997.
In December, the National Labor Relations Board ordered a new union election at the plant after it determined that the company had used unfair labor practices, including threats against employees, to try to quash the union campaign.