New Trump Rules Will Make Meat Processing a Lot Deadlier

The industry spent big to get faster line speeds. Experts say it will increase injuries to workers and make the food you eat less safe.

The country’s poultry and swine processing plants, already incredibly dangerous workplaces, are poised to get a green light from the Trump administration to vastly speed up the work. In February, the Department of Agriculture released two proposed regulations to increase evisceration line speeds for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The swine plant proposal removes the current maximum of 1,106 hogs an hour and instead imposes no limit at all, allowing companies “to determine their own line speeds,” which has never happened before. The proposed poultry rule, meanwhile, allows all chicken plants to run at 175 birds per minute, a limit that has only applied previously to plants involved in a pilot program. Turkey processing plants could increase from 55 to 60 birds per minute.

The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers: It also threatens to let more food-borne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.

The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds.

Now that these companies have cozied up to the second Trump administration, they are on the verge of getting what they’ve long sought. Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian behemoth JBS, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Tyson donated $1 million. The proposed rules are “just doing the industry’s bidding,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University who worked at OSHA for six years.

The administration is also misusing the findings of federal research into worker safety in poultry and swine plants, according to the two scientists who led the research, to argue that faster line speeds won’t hurt workers. In their public comments, the scientists state that “the results of our study do not support the Proposed Rule” in both poultry and swine. They argue that, until the high risk of injury and pain in these plants is mitigated, the agency “should not allow or facilitate increased line speeds.”

“They’re looking at part of the research and they’re ignoring........

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