Injury Rate Soaring, Workers at Meatpacking Plant Say

DAKOTA CITY, Neb. — At a local union meeting last fall, about 35 workers from IBP Inc.’s meatpacking plant here were asked how many of them had been injured on the job. All but one raised their hands.

“I just started yesterday,” explained the one young man who had not been hurt.

“Give him another week,” shouted an older worker.

“At one time or another, everyone I work with has been injured,” added 35-year-old Rita Christian, who has painful ganglion cysts on both wrists, repetitive-motion injuries she developed from cutting beef carcasses with a rib saw every day at IBP. “I don’t know anyone in the plant who hasn’t been hurt.”

Over the last two decades, Dakota City-based IBP, a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., has become a dominant force in the American beef slaughtering business. Its facility here, a small town just outside Sioux City, Iowa, is one of the biggest of its highly efficient slaughtering and processing plants.

But in the last few years, declining consumer demand for red meat, along with deflation in the prices of many agricultural products and other commodities, has forced IBP, formerly Iowa Beef Processors, to slash unit labor costs in order to try to keep its prices down and its market share up.

Union leaders charge that IBP has tried to cut its costs and retain its dominant position in its deeply troubled industry by speeding up production without adding many new workers--while seeking labor contract concessions at the same time.

Now, many IBP workers, who were locked out of the Dakota City plant by management in a labor dispute that began last December, seem to agree that injuries at the plant have soared in the last few years as the “chain speed,” the speed of the production line carrying beef carcasses through the plant for slaughtering and processing, has climbed.

In fact, the hidden costs of the nation’s determined drive to improve its competitive edge, which workplace safety experts are concerned may inadvertently leave more and more American factory workers injured, seem apparent here at IBP.

IBP officials deny that safety is a problem here and say that changes in the production system are always evaluated to be sure that workers aren’t under too much stress. The company also insists that the safety issue is a bargaining ploy being used by union leaders and contends that workers in Dakota City are not concerned about current safety conditions.

But virtually all of the workers interviewed here said that injuries worsened in the early 1980s, when the pressures to increase production began to build.

“I’ve been in IBP for 15 years, and every year the injuries get worse and worse,” charged Bonnie Geisinger, 52, whose arm has been permanently swollen from injuries suffered on the line.

“It’s rough out there, and the speed on the line is a lot of it,” added Kelly Draayer, an IBP worker who had hand surgery last year after developing carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive motion injury common among IBP workers. “It goes so fast that if you start working at 5:30 in the morning, you are stacked up by 6 a.m., and the line is starting to back up with meat,” Draayer said. “Then, you are running too fast to keep up.”

Line Speeded Up

Workers and union officials estimate that between 1981 and 1986, the chain speed on the slaughtering floor at Dakota City increased more than 22%, from 225 head of cattle an hour to 275 per hour. They added that, in some parts of the processing department, the speed rose 55%, from 90 per hour in 1981 to 140 per hour last year. Meanwhile, employment remained relatively stable during the same period.

Local union officials say that workers were thus loaded down with too much work and were suffering injuries in increasing numbers.

George Spencer, a spokesman for IBP, declined to provide specific figures on any increases in the chain speed at Dakota City. But Spencer stressed that IBP always conducts engineering studies before it increases chain speeds, to ensure that the increases won’t place too much stress on its production system or workers.

Moves Studies First

“Any increase in chain speeds in our operations is preceded by careful analysis by our industrial engineers,” said Spencer. “And most often, any increase in chain speeds is accompanied by an adjustment to our mechanical operations. So, chain speeds may have increased in some instances, but that may represent an adjustment in the mechanical and conveyance systems which were applied to the production line, and may not result in any significant increase in workloads for our workers.”

Still, injuries had apparently reached crisis proportions at IBP before the lockout shut the plant down.

The United Food & Commercial Workers Union, which represents workers at the Dakota City plant, obtained some of the official injury logs IBP submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1985. Those documents showed that the plant’s injury and illness rate for the year was 37%--meaning more than one-third of the work force was being injured annually.

At the same time, the plant’s lost workday rate was 23%; thus, nearly a quarter of the work force was injured seriously enough to miss at least a day of work during the year.

The union says the lost workday rate was 43% higher than the average for the meatpacking industry, which is already one of the most dangerous manufacturing industries in the country.

The fast pace of production and the constant use of arms and hands in repetitive cutting motions with heavy knives has especially led to more and more cases of carpal tunnel syndrome among workers at IBP.

Frequently mistaken for arthritis or tendinitis, carpal tunnel is caused by a swelling of tendons in the wrist, which then painfully compress the “median nerve,” which sends impulses from the brain to the hand. Carpal tunnel, which is now being blamed for a growing number of repetitive motion injuries throughout the manufacturing sector, can frequently lead to severe nerve damage, and the crippling of the hand or wrist, making it impossible for workers to grip or pick up everyday objects.

“The doctor said my wrists just wore out, they just couldn’t take the speed,” said Gary Shadbolt, a 32-year-old IBP worker with carpal tunnel syndrome. “So every day, it takes an hour after I wake up for my hands to wake up.”

Meanwhile, UFCW officials insist that injury rates at Dakota City have been even worse than the high levels IBP reported in its official logs submitted to OSHA, and charge that the company has lied to the government about how badly safety has deteriorated at Dakota City.

The union filed a complaint with OSHA against IBP in January, alleging that the company kept two separate sets of injury logs in 1985; the one set submitted to OSHA reported far fewer injuries than were reported on a separate set later obtained by the union. During a three-month period in 1985, the company reported to OSHA that there had been 160 injuries or illnesses in one part of its processing department, but company logs obtained by the union show there had been 1,800 injuries and illnesses in the same area of the plant during the same period.

“We found work-related ganglion cysts that were operated on, infected cuts, back and hand problems that required job changes, accidents like a side of beef falling on someone . . . yet none of these cases was reported on the log submitted to OSHA,” charged Lewie Anderson, a UFCW vice president and director of the union’s packinghouse division.

OSHA spokesman Terry Mikelson said that OSHA investigators are now conducting a comprehensive review of the injury records in the Dakota City plant, in response to a complaint filed by an IBP worker in late November. He added that the agency is also now studying the documents and worker affidavits the UFCW turned in with its January complaint, and also plans to conduct a full-scale inspection of the plant this year.

“The union’s charges about our safety program are misleading and completely inaccurate,” said IBP’s Spencer.

“I think it is more than coincidence that the fuss being made over this issue occurs when we are involved in a major labor dispute,” added Spencer. “The issue of safety seems to be more of an international union PR tactic, rather than of deep concern to the local workers.” Spencer added that OSHA visited IBP’s Dakota City plant seven times in 1985 and 1986, although OSHA’s Mikelson says the agency never conducted a full-scale plant inspection during any of those visits.

Meanwhile, high production speeds, mounting injuries, wage cuts and poor employee benefits--IBP production workers have no pension plan--have led to astronomical turnover rates among the Dakota City work force.

Bill Schmitz, business agent of UFCW Local 222, which represents IBP workers in here, said that 6,000 different people have worked at IBP in the last three years, filling just 2,900 jobs on two shifts. In 1986 alone, more than 1,500 employees quit work at the plant, according to Schmitz.

“The rate of turnover is higher among new workers than it is among the established work force,” acknowledged Spencer. “It is work that requires physical labor, and many may develop sore joints early on and get discouraged.”

In fact, just before the lockout began, turnover was so high that nearly 42% of the work force had less than two years’ experience in the plant, according to Schmitz.

“Most people are quitting because the work is so hard,” said Schmitz. “A lot of people just burn out,” he added. “They go home and their hands are sore, their backs are sore, and they say: ‘I don’t want to be a cripple the rest of my life.’ After all, once they get carpal tunnel, they’ll basically be done with industrial jobs,” Schmitz added. “Other companies will screen them for injuries, and they will never work again in a factory.”

Bonnie Geisinger is one such worker who has been crippled out of the work force. “I have a one- to 10-pound restriction on how much I can lift, and I can’t do any pushing, pulling or grasping,” said Geisinger, who has been off work receiving workers compensation since last July. “The doctors have told Iowa Beef that I will never be able to work in the packinghouse again, and nobody else will hire me with my restrictions.”

Added Schmitz bitterly: “You are forcing these people into a life of poverty.”

Unable to keep or attract Americans to work at Dakota City, IBP has turned to recruiting newly arrived Southeast Asian refugees to meet its constant need for new labor.

By the time the lockout began, in fact, between 600 and 800 Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese were in the plant’s work force of 2,900. Today, about 500 are still waiting in Dakota City for the labor dispute to end, hoping to go back to work, according to Chanthee Vohanh, a Laotian organizer for the UFCW here.

IBP has also sent a few people to recruit more refugees in Southern California and other areas of the country with high concentrations of Southeast Asians. Walter Barnes, chief of the California Office of Refugee Services in Sacramento, said IBP tried to recruit Southeast Asian refugees for jobs at Dakota City in both the Central Valley and Orange County in 1986.

‘Dependable Workers’

Most of the Southeast Asians working at the plant were already in the Midwest when they were recruited, but Nga Soukrasmy, the unofficial leader of the Laotian community in Dakota City, said a large group of Cambodians came from California to work at the plant last fall.

Spencer acknowledges that IBP has recruited Southeast Asians, partly because “our employee requirements exceed the availability of workers within a reasonable distance. We’ve also found the Southeast Asians to be very excellent and dependable workers.”

Still, as injuries among the Southeast Asians began to mount before the lockout, many of them were becoming more and more American in their bitterness toward management.

Said Khamphanh Seuasoukseng, a Laotian who worked at IBP for six months before he suffered a back injury requiring surgery: “I hate the company.”