Meat, Lies and Op-Eds

The American Meat Institute didn't take kindly to a Washington Post Op-Ed last month by Lance Compa and Jamie Fellner describing the horrendous working conditions faced by meatpacking and poultry workers.

Compa and Fellner, authors of a report by Human Rights Watch issued last January entitled “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” described "the cuts, amputations, skin disease, permanent arm and shoulder damage, and even death from the force of repeated hard cutting motions," the fact that the companies do little to prevent these injuries (even though solutions are well known) and the lack of government protections.

But J. Patrick Boyle, president and chief executive of the American Meat Institute, writing a response in the Post, claims that Compa and Fellner's article "bears no resemblance to the reality of today's U.S. meat and poultry industry, or to our documented and successful efforts to enhance workplace safety."

Now I'm all for "balance" in our newspapers, there are two sides to every story, yadda, yadda. But I would think that a news organ as respected as the Washington Post would at least insist on a modicum of truth when accepting a response to one of their op-eds. In this case, they failed miserably. Instead of a fact-based response, we have a commercial for the AMI.

So where's the beef? Let's look at some of the myths and facts.

According to Boyle,

• It doesn't make good business sense to let workers get injured because "Each time we have to replace a valued, experienced employee, the cost of recruiting, hiring, and job and safety training for a new employee can easily exceed $5,000."
  
  Truth: I find this hard to believe, considering that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported that turnover in some plants can exceed 100% in a year.
  
  
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a 67 percent decline in total injuries and illnesses since 1990.
  
  Truth: This is probably the biggest lie. First, the 67% drop is based on a change in BLS reporting methodology which Boyle never mentions.
  
  Second, the data is based on reported injuries and there is massive underreporting of injuries, because immigrant workers are afraid they will lose their jobs or be reported to Immigration, managers refuse to report repetitive stress injuries as work-related, insisting that they happened because of the employees' activity away from work.
  
  Finally, the BLS data does not include the night shift cleaning employees, who do the most dangerous work, but are generally employed by contractors. Instead of being counted as part of the meatpacking industry, they're counted in the same industrial category as building janitors and hotel room cleaners. (This is the same problem that has been identified in the refinery industry.)
  
  
• The United Food and Commercial Workers union estimates that it represents 60 percent of the red-meat-packing workforce, so the industry is clearly not anti-union.
  
  Truth: Something doesn't quite compute. According to the GAO,

  46 percent of workers in the meat products industry were union members, a figure that had remained stable since the 1970s. However, by the end of the 1980s, union membership had fallen to 21 percent. Declining rates of unionization coincided with increases in the use of immigrant workers, higher worker turnover, and reductions in wages.



• Processers don't force employees to work at unsafe speeds. In fact, "line speeds are based on a thorough assessment by systems engineers that ensures that tasks can be adequately and safely performed by a worker in a prescribed time." And anyway, "Line speeds, as well as food safety regulations, are monitored and enforced by nearly 8,000 federal inspectors who are in plants at all times."

Truth: Check out the article below this and then tell me how safe the line speeds are. In addition, the federal inspectors that Boyle talks about are not OSHA or worker safety inspectors, they are Department of Agriculture inspectors who are concerned about the quality and safety of the meat, not the safety of the workers. According to the GAO,

Line speed is regulated by USDA to permit adequate inspection by food safety inspectors. According to USDA, when the maximum speeds were originally set and when they are adjusted by the agency, the safety and health of plant production workers is not a consideration.

Boyle knows this. He's just hoping Washington Post readers don't know this.

So what, according to Boyle is the root cause of the apparent dementia plaguing Compa and Fellner? The root cause of this distorted picture of the American workplace is apparently that too many of today's journalism and sociology students have been contaminated by required reading of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, "a moving fictional account of an immigrant's plight in a number of industries....It's a bit like relying on "Oliver Twist" for a picture of modern child care."

According to Boyle,

If Compa and Fellner can't accept the idea that we do the right thing just because it's right and we have a strong collective conscience, maybe they can believe that we do it because it's also financially beneficial and required by federal regulations. Either way, we are proud of our workplace safety improvements and committed to further progress.

So who's living in a fantasy land? In fact, listening to J. Patrick Boyle glorify the meat packing industry is a bit like listening to Donald Rumsfeld tell us that victory is right around the corner in Iraq.

The American Meat Institute and the Washington Post should be ashamed.

When Good Reporters Go Bad: Confusion Reigns About Health Threats

It’s no wonder that most Americans can’t figure out what the hell the Bush administration is doing to the environment and to their health when you get articles like this.

The Washington Post seems to have taken a perfectly good political reporter (Juliet Eilperin) and assigned her to write an article about how the Environmental Protection Agency is addressing community exposure to a potentially toxic chemical.

The result isn't pretty.

I mean, it’s not like there’s a shortage of political news in this town for her to write about, what with the administration trying to destroy Social Security, take away peoples’ right to sue doctors or corporations who harm them, torturers and liars running our Justice and Defense Departments and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.

A little background. I wrote about this problem here before. In short, the EPA has fined DuPont $340 million for not reporting that their chemical, C-8 (an ingredient in Teflon) was contaminating the drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio. DuPont claimed that they didn’t have to report the release because the law says that they only have to report the release of chemical that harm people, and there’s no proof that C-8 is harmful to humans. EPA is doing a study of the chemical.

Here are some excerpts from the article. See if you can figure it out:

The Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday that low-level exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical used to make Teflon, could pose "a potential risk of developmental and other adverse effects" on human health.

***

The EPA report, which is based on animal studies, said there is some evidence C-8 can cause cancer and immune deficiencies in rats, but it does not conclude whether these problems could surface in workers or those who drink C-8 contaminated water.

***

The EPA also found that the chemical could boost people's levels of cholesterol and fats called triglycerides, which might increase the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke.

This conclusion mirrors the finding of a study DuPont issued on Tuesday. That study found no health risks associated with C-8 but identified elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels in workers exposed to the chemical.

***

DuPont welcomed the assessment, saying the company "is committed to continue working with the regulatory and scientific communities and others in industry to gain additional understanding of [perfluorooctanoic acid] to assure protection of public health, safety and the environment."

***

Kenneth A. Cook, (President of the Environmental Working Group, advocacy organization that first raised questions about possible health risks of C-8] questioned why the agency did not consider whether humans might be at higher risk of testicular, pancreatic and other cancers that have been linked to the chemical in animal studies.

Well that’s perfectly clear, isn’t it.

The get a clearer picture of what’s going on, you’ll have to travel with me to the website of the Environmental Working Group (EWG). To make a confusing story clearer, EWG’s analysis of the EPA’s risk assessment states that

The agency substantially tilts the assessment in DuPont's favor first by summarily discounting and then by outright ignoring significant scientific studies pointing to increased risks for heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, testicular cancer, and numerous other health harms. For some of the most critical health risks, such as those on the immune system, studies have yet to find a safe dose, yet EPA has excluded these effects altogether in this new assessment without explanation.

No wonder DuPont’s happy.

Cook suspects foul play:

"There's a big difference between sound science and tilted science, and at every turn in this important process, EPA officials favored DuPont. We don't know if DuPont lobbyists played a role or if these were just Agency mistakes. But for those who were expecting a thorough and fair review, this is a huge disappointment."

Industry exerting undue influence over EPA? In this administration? I'm shocked, shocked, I say. Shocked! Truly shocked, SHOCKED. Shocked to the nth degree. Yes, shocked.