Trump’s USDA Moves to Make Meatpacking Work More Dangerous

When Aster Abrahame injured her back at work a few years ago, the pain was so severe that she struggled to perform her job — processing pork loins at breakneck speeds at a JBS Foods meatpacking plant in Worthington, Minnesota. The company sent her to its doctor, who she says performed no examination or test, prescribed a painkiller and told her to report to work the next day. Abrahame’s job is already among the most dangerous in the country. Now the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking steps to remove regulatory protections and permit faster processing lines for pork and poultry companies. The end goal is to allow meatpacking plants to set their own speeds, a spokesperson for the Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service told Sentient in an email.

“The rule for pork and poultry processing line speed will create [a] new maximum speed option but ultimately the decision for what line speed to utilize will be made by each individual plant,” the spokesperson wrote. No new plants may obtain a waiver in the meantime, the spokesperson added, and extensions will only apply to those that have one.

Abrahame spent an excruciating, sleepless night after the company doctor sent her on her way, and in the morning went to her own physician before taking off work for a few weeks. She didn’t qualify for workers’ compensation and received no pay for the time off. The plant issued a strike against her attendance record, however, and Abrahame went back to work, even though she was still in pain.

“I didn’t want to lose my job. After three weeks, I just decided, ‘I have to go back to work,’” says Abrahame, 44, who has worked the processing line for 10 years despite the pain that shoots through her chest and shoulder. “I have kids, I have bills.” Meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers, like Abrahame, are not only at risk of physical duress and injury, but also experience rates of depression that are four times higher than the national average.

The government’s statement that “extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries” is false, labor advocates say — and that the USDA’s own data shows otherwise. A recent USDA study found a correlation between the speed at which workers process or butcher meat and their risk for musculoskeletal disorders.

Abrahame says she has seen plenty of injuries that should raise concerns about the Trump administration’s deregulatory move here. “I see wrist injuries, shoulder injuries. Some people have back injuries. It’s all the company workers — this is how we work here,” says Abrahame, who is now a shop steward for her union with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, which represents 17,000 workers in meat packing and processing and other industries in Minnesota.

Removing Limits on Line Speeds

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in March that the Food Safety and Inspection Service will extend waivers allowing pork and poultry producers to process meat at a faster pace than the previous time limits prescribed, and begin immediate rulemaking to codify these higher limits.

Worker advocates and union groups say it’s important to understand that the government only regulates the speed at which animals are “eviscerated,” a part of the processing where workers remove internal organs from carcasses. 

Evisceration work is largely automated these days. Just two percent of employees at modern plants work the evisceration line, according to the National Chicken Council, with eviscerations capped at 140 birds per minute and 1,106 hogs per hour.

The government doesn’t regulate the speed at which workers process meat by hand, which constitutes the rest of the processing to prepare meat for sale and runs more slowly.

The two are related, however, Debbie Berkowitz, practitioner fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University tells Sentient.

The evisceration rate “sets the speeds in the rest of the plants to a degree,” says Berkowitz, who is also a former chief of staff and senior policy advisor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Berkowitz has extensively studied processing speeds and written about the danger of raising them, as well as about processors’ safety.

She and others point to the USDA’s research published in January on pork and poultry plants that shows workers at a higher risk for injury when they work faster, as Sentient previously reported. Researchers looked at musculoskeletal injury rates for workers at plants that had waivers to eviscerate animals faster than the regulatory limit. Six pork processors, which eviscerated at speeds greater than 1,106 animals per hour, and 15 large poultry plants whose waivers allowed them to increase evisceration speed by a quarter to 175 birds per minute.

Eighty-one percent of poultry processors and nearly half of pork processors were at high risk for injury, the researchers found. The risk was associated with the rate at which workers handled individual parts per minute, or what the government referred to as “piece rate.”

Forty percent of poultry processor workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity work-related pain in the year before; 42 percent of pork processors workers reported severe to “upper extremity pain.”

The numbers are “higher than I’ve ever seen in any kind of industry,” Berkowitz says. “They’re astronomical.”

Researchers found that the relationship between evisceration speed and how fast workers hand-processed meat varied depending on the plant, but worker advocates say the bottom line is that workers are more likely to get hurt when they’re forced to work faster.

A permanent rate increase means “Injuries will increase and it’s going to be a lot worse,” Berkowitz says.

Berkowitz and others say that in addition to sustaining injuries, workers who get hurt on the line fear speaking up because it could cost not only their job, but their ability to stay in the U.S. Meatpacking and poultry producers are disproportionately refugees and noncitizen immigrants, and “this administration has declared a war on immigrant workers even if they’ve been here a decade,” Berkowitz says. “Workers are going to get scared to bring up any complaints at all.”

That fear is true in many immigrant communities, and especially heightened for meat processors, says Julia Coburn, director of projects and strategic initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, who said people still talk about major Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, such as the 2008 Postville raid or the raids under the first Trump administration.

“A lot of the trust has been broken–or was never there,” Coburn says. “Today we’re seeing a lot of fear being heightened by what they’re hearing in the news.” After Trump’s March 1 executive order declaring English the official language of the U.S., for example, Coburn said fear began to spread that it was illegal to speak Spanish in public.

Workers Continue to Push for Protection

Though the government puts a cap on the evisceration rates, workers and advocates said it’s unclear what the actual speed particular plants are running. That information is treated as a trade secret, says Ruth Schultz, meatpacking director at Abrahame’s union, UFCW Local 663.

Workers in Worthington, Minnesota are negotiating a new contract with JBS, pushing for the plant to post line speed standards for every line in each department, train workers to monitor lines and empower them to alert management when speeds are too high. So far, the company has said no, but the union won’t budge. JBS did not respond to Sentient’s request for comment.

As it stands now, the contract allows for one “walking steward” per shift to time lines throughout the day by counting the number of pieces of meat processed by thousands of workers, Shultz says. But according to Shultz, workers have seen supervisors turn down the speed of the conveyor belt when the steward walks by, then turn it back up after they’re gone. That’s one reason the union is committed to the proposal, Schultz says.

“The expectation that’s there above all is that workers behave like machines…the ultimate priority is keeping the process running at absolute top speed and everything is secondary, including bodily function,” says Coburn. “It’s horrifying.”