OSHA under siege - Occupational Safety and Health Administration

North Carolina Congressman Cass Ballenger has been leading a crusade against what he calls "the Gestapo" over at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Ballenger claims his proposal to disarm OSHA of its enforcement power and turn it into a friendly consulting service for business has been a big hit outside the Beltway.

"If you leave Washington, D.C., this bill is one of the most popular things there is out in the country. I have not talked to anybody back home that doesn't think it's a great idea," Ballenger boasted to the National Journal

Back home in Ballenger's district, Mary Williams isn't surprised about that. "Ballenger hasn't heard anything bad because the only people he's probably talking to are his buddies over at the country club. He's not talking to people like me." Ballenger and Williams have both spent most of their lives in the western hills of North Carolina. But aside from an Appalachian twang, they have little in common. Ballenger inherited his family's business in Hickory and still holds at least a $1 million stake in the plastic-packaging firm. Not surprisingly, he views fellow business owners as benevolent leaders of America. While acknowledging that workplace-safety problems exist, he stresses that this is not because businesses don't want to protect their workers. The problem, he says, is that most are too afraid to ask OSHA for help.

Mary Williams (who agreed to tell her story only under a pseudonym) has a different perspective. For more than ten years, she worked the production line at a chicken-processing plant in Morganton, twenty miles from Hickory, in Ballenger's district. She doesn't recall a whole lot of benevolence towards workers or anxiety about OSHA among her bosses. She does remember the day they discharged her. Gutting, deboning, and chopping millions of chickens at dizzying speeds had left her body too crippled by carpal-tunnel syndrome to be of any use to her employer, Case Farms, Inc. She was earning less than $7 per hour.

Williams says if Ballenger did ask her opinion of his OSHA reform bill, she would have only one thing to say to him: "Why don't he come down here and try to do this work for a while? I could talk myself blue in the face, but he wouldn't understand until he saw it for himself." Ballenger and his allies in the anti-OSHA crusade would do well to take her up on the invitation. A few days on the line at Case Farms might help them understand why most workers wish that OSHA would inspire more fear, not less.

In OSHA's twenty-five-year history, the agency has hardly built up what one would call a formidable army of safety enforcers. In Ballenger's home state, the so-called OSHA Gestapo has so few inspectors that it would take them fifty-five years to inspect every workplace once. Fines for serious violations (in which someone could be or has been injured or killed) average only $1,024, according to the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project, a nonprofit organization.

While the regulatory burden is already light, Ballenger's new bill would make compliance with job-safety laws almost completely voluntary. Workers would have to be killed, seriously injured, or exposed to continuous danger before OSHA could enforce the law. In response to the bill, groups like the Occupational Safety and Health Project that have spent years trashing OSHA for being too soft on businesses are now rallying to the agency's defense. Weak enforcement is better than no enforcement. And that is the choice they face.

One of the most disturbing provisions of the bill would make it impossible for workers to blow the whistle on health and safety problems without risking retaliation from their employers. Now anyone can report an alleged violation to OSHA anonymously, either individually or through a union representative. Under the Ballenger bill, employees would have to report the complaint first to their boss and give the company a chance to correct the violation before filing with OSHA. This wouldn't be a problem if every boss was the grandmotherly type. In the poultry business, though, that sort is hard to find.

In May 1995, three workers requested a meeting with management at Case Farms to discuss safety concerns, including accelerated speeds on the production line. The company had them arrested for trespassing and led out of the plant in handcuffs.

Case Farms makes it clear that safety is the workers' responsibility--not the company's--by charging workers for safety supplies. Metal mesh gloves can cost as much as $55, and rubber boots go for about $17. When you add in hairnets, goggles, ear plugs, and aprons, the total cost can add up to more than $75-no small sum for someone making $6.35 an hour, the going wage at Case Farms.

Williams's first job at the plant was cutting off the oil sacs under the birds' tails. She eventually mastered every task on the line, and says she liked her job, especially when she was able to develop more efficient work techniques. Over the years, though, she says conditions in the plant deteriorated. "When I first started, the speed on the line was forty-five birds per minute. Then seventy, then eighty, now they're up to ninety, sometimes even faster. At that crazy speed, how can you help but have accidents?"

Another worker reported that a machine that cuts off chicken wings is so dangerous at the current line speed that in one recent month its operators suffered thirteen accidents, including severed fingers and bad cuts. Workers also complain that chemicals used to reduce bacteria have caused dizziness and eye injuries. Case Farms denies that it has a poor safety record, but refuses to make public the company accident reports required by OSHA.

Williams has also observed a dramatic shift in Case Farms's work force, from nearly all white to mostly Guatemalan and Mexican. Father Ken Whittington, a local Catholic priest, sees a connection between the worsening plant conditions and the arrival of the immigrant workers. "These folks did not appear out of the clear blue," he says. "They were brought here because they were seen as people who could put up with anything, who could stand abuse and stand in chicken guts all day long and take a minimum wage."

Language barriers and fear of deportation prevent many immigrants from speaking out about health and safety problems. One Guatemalan reportedly slipped on a grease patch, landed on machinery, and injured his testicles. When he first reported it to his bosses, they ridiculed him and he was too embarrassed to demand to see a doctor. Days passed and the pain grew worse, so he complained again, but they just shoved some papers at him and said he had to fill them out before getting treated. Since the forms were only in English, he gave up.

Charges of worker intimidation are not unique to Case Farms. In 1994, 3,000 workers filed claims with the Labor Department that they were fired or disciplined for speaking out about dangerous working conditions. John Jordan of the Laborers' International Union of North America says that intimidation is especially severe in the poultry industry, where most workers are people of color with few alternative job opportunities. If the Ballenger bill becomes law, Jordan claims that no complaint from a poultry worker would ever reach OSHA. Anyone who went through the first step of reporting a violation to the boss would simply be fired before they could report it to OSHA."

By the late 1980s, Mary Williams began feeling dull pains from the middle of her palms up to her elbows. "My arms would swell and go numb and then I noticed I couldn't wear my rings anymore.

These were the beginning signs of carpal-tunnel syndrome, a type of repetitive-strain injury. According to the Labor Department, these injuries are the fastestgrowing job hazard, with 302,000 cases diagnosed in 1993, compared to only 22,600 in 1982. Poultry processing has the third-highest carpal-tunnel rate (meatpacking is first and auto assembly is second).

OSHA claims to have made some progress during the past decade in reducing repetitive-strain injuries by forcing particularly dangerous plants to redesign work stations "ergonomically" to fit the job to a worker's physical limits. By 1990, OSHA had issued fines totaling $3 million for more than 800 ergonomic violations. The effort has focused on industry powerhouses such as Perdue, which has been cited for violations at four of its chicken-processing plants. In response, Perdue has installed new machinery to do much of the routine work, and the company has introduced job rotations, exercise routines, customized knives, and longer breaks. Some labor activists complain that the company's enforcement of rotations and breaks is spotty and that injuries still persist. Perdue, on the other hand, boasts that while the program required a hefty initial investment ($10 million in one plant alone), the effort has saved money in the long run by reducing workers' compensation costs by 70 percent, including those for repetitive-strain injuries.

Ergonomics is rather unpopular with Ballenger's crowd. According to Representative Henry Bonilla, Republican of Texas, "Ergonomics is an overly ambitious, burdensome, and possibly the most expensive and far-reaching and intrusive regulation ever written by the federal government." The Ballenger bill would strip OSHNS power to enforce ergonomic protections. It would even ban data collection and analysis related to repetitive-strain injuries.

Without government pressure, it is unlikely that the concept of ergonomics will ever make its way into Case Farms, which, like most poultry processors, pretends that repetitive-strain injuries do not exist. Williams estimates that on any given day, fifteen to twenty of Case Farms's 450 employees see the plant nurse about pains in their arms. lbe standard treatment is wrist bandages and ibuprofen. "When I asked to see a real doctor, they threatened to fire me, so I didn't go at first," she says. "Then the pain eventually got so bad that I threatened to call a lawyer and they finally let me go.".

The doctor diagnosed carpal-tunnel syndrome, but Case Farms's insurance carrier for workers' compensation initially refused to accept that her injury was work-related. This reaction is not unusual. One of Ballenger's fellow Osha-bashers, Representative Charles Norwood, Republican of Georgia, has expressed similar skepticism by suggesting that workers might be getting repetitive-strain injuries not from their jobs, but from too much tennis or skiing.

"Sure, maybe if I was Andre Agassi! He might play enough tennis to get carpal-tunnel from doing that," says Williams. "But how many poultry workers do you know who play tennis forty hours or more a week?"

There might be less resistance to the idea of repetitive-strain injuries if they didn't cost so much to treat. Currently, one dollar out of every three spent on workers' compensation goes to this type of injury. Care for a single patient can amount to $20,000.

After Williams's first diagnosis, Case Farms's insurer went shopping for a less expensive one, to no avail. One doctor after another confirmed that Williams had carpal-tunnel syndrome and should see a specialist for possible surgery. The doctors also ordered Case Farms to give her less strenuous tasks, but the company refused to comply, forcing Williams to continue her normal routine. After three years and six identical diagnoses, the insurer finally allowed her to see a specialist, who diagnosed longstanding carpal-tunnel synddrome and scheduled surgery. The insurer promptly canceled the appointment, claiming it was seeking a second opinion.

Meanwhile, Williams's condition deteriorated. "The pain was so bad that I couldn't sleep at night," she says. "M arms would go numb and I'd have to shake them over the side of the bed to get the feeling back. When I drove, I had to steer with my palms pressed flat against the wheel because I couldn't grip it."

After stalling for another year, the insurer finally agreed to the surgery, after which Williams was to return to work for "light duty," meaning no gripping, pulling, or overhead lifting.

At first, Case Farms cooperated, allowing her to do paperwork and inspections. But within a few months, Williams says, the company began pressuring her to fill in on the production line. "A friend told me the word was that the company wanted to send me right back to the same jobs that had given me the injury in the first place. They said I had just been looking out for myself when I got the surgery. I wasn't a `company woman.'"

A year and a half later, Williams hit her breaking point. The surgery, delayed for four years, had failed to repair the damage to her arms. As she struggled to keep up with the line, the crushing pain drove her to tears and she begged to be relieved. She made a hysterical call to her doctor, who complained to the insurer about the way Case Farms was treating her. Shortly thereafter, Williams was discharged. She believes the insurer pressured her employer to let her go. "They were tired of paying for what Case Farms was doing to me," Williams said.

While Williams struggles to begin a new life outside the plant, her former co-workers have started to make demands of the company. The trespassing arrests in May prompted a strike of about 300 workers. They returned to work four days later, but with plans to begin an organizing drive. In June, they voted in the Laborers International Union, joining fewer than 20 percent of poultry workers who are unionized. Phyllis Palmieri, who has provided legal services to Case Farms workers, says the company mistakenly assumed that the Latino workers wouldn't speak out about health and safety violations. "They have a strong sense of collectivity that's largely cultural, somewhat religious. They believe that an injury to one is an injury to all." Having the union behind them has already helped the workers win some minor concessions. However, the Laborers' John Jordan believes that the Ballenger bill will limit what they can accomplish, especially since unions would no longer be able to shield workers from retaliation by filing safety complaints on their behalf. "The bill would devastate unions'--and all workers'--ability to pursue a safe and healthy workplace."

These sentiments are echoed by many activists who say that despite OSHA's grave shortcomings, the agency's fines and threats of fines are sometimes the only effective way to force employers into line. Deborah Berkowitz of the United Food and Commercial Workers claims that this has been especially true with repetitive-strain injuries.

Despite enormous costs, it was not until OSHA began focusing its enforcement efforts on these job hazards that most industries began paying attention to them." When North Carolina passed legislation in 1992 making municipalities subject to OSHA fines, violations against city employees declined dramatically, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Project.

The attack on OSHA is only one of a series of current Congressional efforts to roll back the hard-fought gains of working people. Some of Newt Gingrich's "revolutionaries" are also attempting to legalize company unions, abolish overtime pay, outlaw union shops, and repeal laws that guarantee prevailing wages for construction workers on federally funded projects.

With 130 sponsors, Ballenger's OSHA reform bill stands a good chance of passing. To gather more votes, Ballenger will no doubt continue to conjure up the image of safety-minded plant managers, paralyzed by their fear of big, bad OSHA. As Case Farms workers can attest, it is an image that clashes sharply with reality. Doing business the Case Farms way is the norm in the poultry industry because it is profitable. (Case Farms earned $29 million on sales of $120 million in 1994.) Only a fool would expect such companies to change voluntarily.

Nobody understands that better than Mary Williams, who today remains severely disabled. "If I don't get the barrette in my hair right on the first try in the morning, I have to just forget it. I can only stand the pain of trying once a day."

Her husband has had to take over many of the household chores, which he finds humiliating. "I have to admit he's threatened to leave me a few times because of this. But what can I say? I'm not going to get no better."

One thing that especially bothers Williams is when she sees other Case Farms workers walking around with bandages on their wrists: "I know where they're headed, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

Sarah Anderson is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Bernardo Issel, a Washington-based activist, provided translation and research assistance for this article.

COPYRIGHT 1995 The Progressive, Inc.
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