Yet another example (here, and here, for instance) of a federal agency whose primary concern is the welfare of the industry it purportedly regulates....
Meat Packing Industry Criticized on Human Rights Grounds:
The nation's meat packing industry has such bad working conditions that it violates basic human and worker rights, said Human Rights Watch in a report issued Tuesday.
... In a report issued today, Human Rights Watch, often echoing Upton Sinclair's “The Jungle,” found that jobs in many beef, pork and poultry plants were so dangerous that the industry violated international agreements promising a safe workplace.Noting that the industry's injury rate was three times that of private industry over all, the report describes plants where exhausted employees slice into carcasses at a frenzied pace hour after hour, often suffering injuries from a slip of the knife or from repeating the same motion more than 10,000 times a day. The report describes workers being asphyxiated by fumes and having their legs cut off and hands crushed.
“Meat packing is the most dangerous factory job in America,” said Lance Compa, the report's author. “Dangerous conditions are cheaper for companies - and the government does next to nothing.”
..
In his research, Mr. Compa, who is a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, focused on three companies: Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods and Nebraska Beef. He spent more than a year preparing the report and based it on interviews with workers, company responses, regulatory reports, judicial rulings and court testimony.“Nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered from working in a meat or poultry plant,” the report said. “Meat and poultry industry employers set up the workplaces and practices that create these dangers, but they treat the resulting mayhem as a normal, natural part of the production process, not as what it is - repeated violations of international human rights standards.”
The report said that many companies pressured injured workers not to file worker compensation when they are injured as a way to save the companies money on medical bills and worker compensation payments.
