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Ain’t that America.
A news segment from Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS this past week exposed how poultry workers in the Carolinas are losing their body parts. And, how Bush’s administration had a hand in it.
The segment was based on what reporters from the Charlotte Observer found after launching a year-long investigation into the safety records at one of the top ten poultry corporations in the nation: House of Raeford Farms. In a 6-part news series called, “The Cruelest Cut,” reporters exposed how House of Raeford Farms had failed to keep records of worker injuries to avoid OSHA inspections and fines. Injuries such as loss of fingers, hands, arms, other serious injuries workers suffered, even deaths.
...The workers, most of them immigrants, had been afraid of talking to anyone about what was happening because they feared deportation. These workers were also suffering from serious muscular injuries such as carpel tunnel, tendinitis, etc. The average poultry worker does about 20,000 cuts of chicken a day! The repetitive movements have left many of them disabled and unable to work with their hands again.
It’s shameful, and this goes on with the Bush Administration’s facilitation. You can read the entire Charlotte Observer expose here, and you can see video from the Moyers’ report and the transcript here. A snippet of a portion on the Bush Administration’s role in allowing falsification of injury reports by business is below the fold.
And remember, McSame wants to continue more of the same—coddling the businesses that engage in this kind of worker exploitation because it’s all about the free market. Besides, most of the people working in these plants getting limbs cut off are brown people who can’t vote, so what me worry?
NARRATOR: The logs the reporters were examining are known as 300 logs. They’re required by OSHA and are intended to serve as an accounting of serious jobsite injuries and illnesses. Osha uses 300 logs to help determine how safe plants are, and whether or not they need inspection.
The reporters would use them to help determine whether or not the companies were under-reporting injuries.
But it was something the logs didn’t contain that would help them answer a broader question: why did official statistics make the poultry industry seem so much safer than experts believed it could possibly be?
AMES ALEXANDER: There used to be a column on injury logs where companies were supposed to record all repetitive motion injuries. Uh, and this essentially gave OSHA inspectors a very quick idea of how common repetitive motion problems like carpal tunnel, like tendonitis, were. Uh, and then, uh, under pressure, uh, from the industry, OSHA removed that column.
NARRATOR: It was OSHA under the Bush administration that removed the column in 2002. The result, according to Ames Alexander?
AMES ALEXANDER: OSHA essentially made it easier for companies to hide these sort of repetitive motion injuries. One plant we looked at, uh, in 2001, it had 150 repetitive motion injuries. After they removed the column, they had fewer than 10.
NARRATOR: The Bush administration also repealed a collection of rules put in place at the end of the Clinton administration. The rules, which formed a national ergonomics standard, would have required employers to correct workplace conditions likely to cause repetitive-motion and other injuries.
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Pam Spaulding on 02:00 PM •
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I caught this episode a few weeks ago —it was fascinating, even though the subject of OSHA standards in chicken plants and small-town investigative print journalism don’t typically interest me that much.
They should show this documentary in intro journalism courses.
Charlotte isn’t exactly a small town. Maybe instead of showing the documentary, they should use the series, because without the work of the print journalists, there wouldn’t have been a documentary.
???
I know Charlotte is not a “small town”. But this kind of investigative journalism is no longer a feature of papers like the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, etc—smaller newspapers, however, like the Charlotte Observer, still do it from time to time. Newspaper journalism, especially from smaller papers that aren’t usually on the national radar, doesn’t usually call out to me—I probably wouldn’t have set aside specific time to watch this episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal (a show I don’t usually watch, anyway). But I was flipping through the channels and caught this episode, and it was really captivating .
Sorry not to be politically correct about it?
Also, yeah, I realize that without the journalists at the Observer, there would be no documentary, but then so what? Without the Rolling Stones there would be no Gimme Shelter—does that mean people shouldn’t watch that film? Why shouldn’t journalism students be reminded of what the whole point of all this is (or used to be, at least), what they are supposed to be aspiring to? Confused…
For those who haven’t read _Fast_Food_Nation_, this is no surprise (the book dwells mostly on the human costs of the food industry, and I don’t mean dietary, but slaughterhouses et al). He discusses the dual sets of injury logs, the speed of the lines, the types of injuries sustained, and the powerlessness of the workers. RSIs are inevitable, especially as studies have shown that RSIs go way up under stress (because the whole body is tensed) such as the pressure to work fast and the worry of losing your crummy job. I like eating poultry, but frankly I’d rather kill chickens myself than know that the person who did it for me is mired in these circumstances.
Oops, that’s HAVE read = no surprise. (Blame my keyboard RSI.)
Your first comment sounded to me like “Normally newspapers are so boring, but this time the TV actually made it interesting.” I didn’t say they shouldn’t see the documentary. I just would hope that journalism students wouldn’t be bored with investigative journalism, and as a learning tool, you can see more of _how_ a story was got by reading the print version (IMO). I also get frustrated because so many people who care about politics on a national level really are not engaged at the state and local level, where we actually see the impact of those policies, as this series shows. They read the NYT on-line for free but can’t be bothered to look at their local paper. So when I read this “the subject of OSHA standards in chicken plants and small-town investigative print journalism don’t typically interest me that much” I kind of get my hackles up. There are editors out there who would not have even wanted to allow these reporters to pursue this because, in their minds, readers aren’t interested in OSHA standards at chicken plants. Those editors, apparently, have a pretty accurate sense of what interests readers. Good thing that wasn’t the mentality of the editors at the Charlotte Observer.
We love to bash the MSM and it deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, but there still are really good reporters doing really good work under very trying circumstances. And a lot of them are working for mainstream publications and those publications are supporting their work and giving it a platform. Even at the New York Times and Washington Post. If it wasn’t for the New York Times, we wouldn’t know about warrantless wiretapping. If it wasn’t for the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, we wouldn’t know about CIA black prisons. That doesn’t excuse Judith Miller, but let’s not paint them all with the same brush.
Your first comment sounded to me like “Normally newspapers are so boring, but this time the TV actually made it interesting.” I didn’t say they shouldn’t see the documentary. I just would hope that journalism students wouldn’t be bored with investigative journalism, and as a learning tool, you can see more of _how_ a story was got by reading the print version (IMO).
*eyeroll*
Look, I’m not sure whether I just didn’t express myself very well, or what. But that’s nothing even approaching what I meant by either of my two comments in this thread. Whatever can of worms I opened, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that to be truly politically correct I had to personally be interested in Every Little Thing, all the time. I read newspapers, but the nuts and bolts of the process of investigative print journalism is not one of my particular areas of interest. Neither is chicken processing, to be perfectly honest. Or the specifics of OSHA legislation. When I was flipping through the channels that particular night, I saw that was the only vaguely watchable thing on and thought “Chicken plants? Charlotte newspaper? Boring....”, except it ended up being absolutely fascinating.
I kind of thought that was a compliment, to all concerned (Moyers’ team, the Observer’s team, etc etc etc). My mistake, I guess.
I don’t really feel like getting into an internet argument about journalism curricula. Not a particularly tempting use of my Friday afternoon, sorry....?
I, also, am not interested in having an internet argument about journalism curriculum. You’re the one who brought up showing it to journalism students.
Look, I guess I didn’t express myself clearly either, because by my second comment, I was trying to say that I obviously misinterpreted your first comment, and was helped to understand what you meant by your second comment, but wanted to explain what _I_ meant by my first comment because you said you didn’t get what I was getting at.
It is just part of Bush’s ‘Healthy America Plan’. We will all be disgusted at common slaughterhouse practices. Knowing there is no hope of government reform or legislation, the only ethical option will be to boycott factory farm operations. Since for most of us, this will mean becoming vegan, Americans will eat a healthier diet.
And you thought the free market didn’t work. . .
In before holier-than-thou vegetarian/vegan trolling.
I worked on a book by an anthropologist who went “undercover” to do research at a chicken processing plant (in Alabama? It was awhile ago). It was fascinating/disgusting. I was (and am) a vegetarian so it didn’t change any of my consumption habits. But it did really shine a light on the labor practices, which I hadn’t known that much about.
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I caught this episode a few weeks ago —it was fascinating, even though the subject of OSHA standards in chicken plants and small-town investigative print journalism don’t typically interest me that much.
They should show this documentary in intro journalism courses.