Every day at Tyson Foods’ cavernous meatpacking plant in Holcomb, Kansas, 6,000 cows clamber off waiting 18-wheelers. They’re watered, then ushered into the kill box. After the heads, hides, and hooves are removed, the carcasses are sawed in half, checked by U.S.D.A. inspectors, and sent down conveyor belts to be butchered, boxed, and bar-coded by 3,800 workers in 2 shifts. The journey takes 40 minutes.
After 11 p.m. the procession halts, and the sanitation crews move in. The only slaughterhouse job worse than eviscerating animals is cleaning up afterward. These “third-shift workers” wade through blood and grease and chunks of bone and flesh, racing all night to hose down the plant with disinfectants and scalding water. The stench is unbearable.
The cleaning crew is not employed by Tyson, however. Packers Sanitation Services, the nation’s largest cleaning contractor to the food industry, staffs the hard-to-fill night shift jobs. Packers pays their workforce $11.86/hour, 1/3 less than what production employees earn.
“Such is the genius of outsourcing,” writes Businessweek (Jan.8, 2018). In an era of heightened concern about food safety, meat and poultry producers are happy to pay sanitation companies for their expertise. The sanitation companies also assume the risk of staffing positions that only the desperate will take—largely undocumented immigrants. And they relieve the big producers, such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride, of responsibility for one of the most dangerous factory jobs in America.
No one knows exactly how many sanitation workers get injured on the job, as OSHA doesn’t require plants to report contractors’ injuries. Judging from Packer Sanitation’s record, the nightly storm of high-pressure hoses, chemical vapors, blood, grease, and frantic deadlines, all swirling around pulsing belts, blades, and blenders, can be treacherous. Packers has the 14th-highest number of severe injuries—defined as an amputation, hospitalization, or the loss of an eye—among the 14,000 companies tracked by OSHA. Adjusting for size, Packers tops the danger list by a wide margin, with a rate of 14 severe injuries for every 10,000 workers. Its amputation rate of 9.4 dismemberments per 10,000 workers is 5 times higher than for U.S. manufacturing workers as a whole.
Classroom discussion questions:
- As the boom for cheap protein creates yet more demand, how can operations managers deal with the 3rd shift issue?
- Who is most responsible? OSHA? Tyson? Packers?
To add to the post, the Journal (Jan. 13-14, 2018) just wrote that America is producing more meat than ever.
“Farmers and meatpackers produced a record 99.7 billion pounds of red meat and poultry in 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. They are on track for an even bigger slaughter this year.
Tyson Foods Inc., Sanderson Farms Inc. and other meat companies are building new plants that are expected to push U.S. meat production up 3.8% in 2018, the biggest increase in more than 20 years.
“We have a world that has a growing middle class that’s demanding protein,” said Dean Meyer, a farmer near Rock Rapids, Iowa who built a new hog barn and cattle feedlot to grow his sales to nearby slaughterhouses run by Tyson, JBS and others. “We think that’s a great opportunity.”
The U.S. beef-cattle herd has expanded by 12% over the past four years. Meat companies produced a record 47.7 billion pounds of poultry in 2017, and slaughtered hogs at a faster pace than ever before”.