TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091691/0916102.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.1 KB | 193 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 28

ACCIDENTS

Death on The Shop Floor


A murderous fire in a North Carolina poultry plant underscores
the dangers of America's workplaces

By RICHARD LACAYO -- With reporting by Joe Kane/Atlanta and Elaine
Shannon/Washington


    Nobody who worked at the Imperial Food Products plant in
Hamlet, N.C., had much love for the place. The job -- cooking,
weighing and packing fried chicken parts for fast-food
restaurants -- was hot, greasy and poorly paid. The conveyor
belts moved briskly, and the few rest breaks were so strictly
timed that going to the bathroom at the wrong moment could lead
to dismissal. But in the sleepy town of 6,200 there was not much
else in the way of work. So most of the plant's 200 employees,
predominantly black and female, were thankful just to have the
minimum-wage job. Until last week, that is.

    The morning shift had just started when an overhead
hydraulic line ruptured, spilling its volatile fluid onto the
floor. Gas burners under the frying vats ignited the vapors and
turned the 30,000-sq.-ft. plant into an inferno of flame and
thick, yellow smoke. Panicked employees rushed for emergency
exits only to find several of them locked. "I thought I was
gone, until a man broke the lock off," says Letha Terry, one of
the survivors. Twenty-five of Terry's fellow employees were not
so lucky. Their bodies were found clustered around the blocked
doorways or trapped in the freezer, where the workers had fled
in vain from the fire's heat and smoke.

    The disaster brought to light the mostly invisible body
count of the American workplace. By some estimates, more than
10,000 workers die each year from on-the-job injuries -- about
30 every day. Perhaps 70,000 more are permanently disabled. The
fire also exposed the weakness of measures for ensuring job
safety. The 11-year-old Imperial Food Products plant had never
been inspected. Like a lot of American workplaces, it fell
through the gaping cracks of a system in which there are too few
inspectors, penalties are mostly trifling, and the procedures
for reporting dangerous conditions can leave workers to choose
between risking their jobs and risking their lives.

    "The tragedy that occurred in Hamlet is a direct result of
10 years of the Reagan-Bush philosophy of letting industry
police itself," says Deborah E. Berkowitz, top safety expert for
the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
"There's a USDA inspector in every poultry plant to protect
consumers from getting a stomachache, but there's nobody
protecting people from getting killed."

    By almost every measure, America's regulatory safeguards
have grown threadbare. At the top of the frayed system is the
21-year-old Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the
federal body that attempts to oversee the nation's 6 million
workplaces with just 1,200 inspectors -- down from a high of
1,388 in 1980. A strained operation at best, OSHA was stretched
to the breaking point by Ronald Reagan, who came to office
persuaded that businesses should police themselves. Under him,
OSHA's budget fell one-fourth.

    OSHA has begun a turnaround under Gerard G. Scannell, a
former safety chief at Johnson & Johnson who was chosen to head
the agency in 1989. After years in which it rarely issued
safety guidelines, OSHA has begun adopting them wholesale --
though critics complain it too often approves rules drawn up by
the industries it is supposed to supervise. Scannell has also
brought eye-catching fines against offenders, including $3.5
million against Arco Chemical and a record $4 million against
Phillips Petroleum, after giant explosions at their plants left
40 dead. The agency "is more effective today than it has been
in any time in its history," insists Alan McMillan, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health.

    But OSHA still lacks the clout to protect most American
workers. By one important measure, the jobsite is safer:
work-related fatalities have dropped from 12,500 ten years ago
to 10,500 last year. But that is partly because there are fewer
jobs these days in some of the most lethal industries, including
steel, shipbuilding and logging. Meanwhile, job-related
illnesses and crippling injuries are on the increase. "The
walking wounded are a part of the cost of doing business," says
Bruce Raynor of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers
Union.

    Twenty-three states have devised their own regulatory
schemes, which exempt them from federal scrutiny, but the
results have been mixed. North Carolina, where the Hamlet fire
took place, has one of the worst systems. Under federal
guidelines, the state should have 116 inspectors. Instead it has
just 27 to oversee 163,053 employers. Last week the Charlotte
Observer reported that in 1990 inspections declined 35% from the
previous year and the state returned $453,000 in unspent federal
money that could have been used to perform more inspections.

    Changes in the American economy have left employees more
vulnerable, especially the ones in unskilled blue-collar jobs.
Labor unions, which can step in to remedy unsafe conditions, now
represent just 18% of the work force. Some of the most
injury-prone industries, like food processing and textiles, have
clustered in right-to-work states across the South, where labor
organizers get the kind of welcome that used to greet Freedom
Riders.

    The merger-and-acquisition craze of the past decade also
led to imprudent cost cutting. The elimination of relief crews,
forced overtime and deferred (meaning neglected) maintenance
have resulted in tired workers and worn equipment -- a deadly
combination. There are further dangers in industries like oil
and petrochemicals, where subcontracting has become a common
money-saving move. Barely trained newcomers, many of them
aliens with an imperfect grasp of English, are put at the
controls of dangerous machinery, with predictable results. In
Texas six major explosions at chemical plants and refineries
have killed 47 workers in the past five years and injured 1,000
more. Subcontract employees were believed to have been at fault
in two, the blasts at Arco and Phillips.

    The hazards of poultry factories are typical of the
conditions that workers face in many industries. With the demand
for chicken rising as it gains on beef in the American diet, the
assembly lines in poultry plants move twice as fast as they did
a decade ago, often butchering employees as well as poultry.
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health, 1 in 5 poultry workers has been seriously injured in the
hands, wrists or shoulders.

    In addition to severe cuts, the most common problems are
the chronic disabilities that go under the heading of
repetitive-motion trauma. Line workers, who gut, clean and
divide hundreds of birds each day, typically perform the same
movement from 60 to 90 times a minute, thousands of times a day.
When the human body is pressed to imitate the tireless actions
of a machine, it revolts. The result is chronic tendinitis and
carpal-tunnel syndrome, a painful condition of the wrists and
forearms that can leave a worker virtually crippled even after
corrective surgery.

    Like many dangerous industries, poultry processing has the
advantage of a docile work force. Not only is the complaint proc
ess an intimidating bureaucratic tangle, but the plant workers
are often poorly paid and uneducated women. Anxious to keep
their jobs -- despite an average industry wage of just $5.50 an
hour -- they are unlikely to make waves. Many of the 25 who
died in last week's fire were so poor that the Textile Workers
Union sent dresses and men's suits to Hamlet for use as burial
clothes.

    This fall Congress will hold hearings on a bill designed
to toughen the regulatory system. Sponsored in the House by
Michigan Democrat William Ford, the bill would require any
company with more than 11 employees to set up a
worker-management safety committee empowered to enforce jobsite
safety rules. "Then there's no reason for an inspector to show
up to unlock a door," says Franklin Mirer, safety director for
the United Auto Workers. "The workers can do it."

    Labor organizers and workers' rights groups are calling
for stronger measures. Some want an independent investigative
body, like the National Transportation Safety Board, with the
power to examine accident sites and set in motion industry-wide
changes to save lives in the future. Another proposal in the
Ford bill is more to their liking. It would make it easier for
OSHA to bring criminal charges against individual employers who
are repeat offenders. "Everyone knows that the subway worker
who killed five people in New York was indicted for murder,"
says Joseph A. Kinney, executive director of National Safe
Workplace Institute in Chicago. "When are we going to be asking
for indictments against the owners of Imperial Food?"

    And why not? When the recklessness of employers becomes
lethal, perhaps it is time to call it a crime -- and act
accordingly.