On March 17, the USDA extended waivers that currently allow some meatpacking plants to process pigs and chickens at faster speeds and announced it is starting the process of permanently changing the rule so that all plants could speed up their processing going forward.
In a press release, the agency said it would also reduce the amount of worker safety data plants are required to provide and that the changes would ensure meatpackers can meet demand. “America leads the world in pork and poultry production, and we are committed to ensuring our producers remain competitive on a global scale without being held back by unnecessary bureaucracy,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in the release.
Republican agriculture leaders Senator John Boozman (R-Arkansas) and G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) applauded the decision, as did industry groups including the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute, the trade group that represents the country’s biggest meatpackers. Meat Institute CEO Julie Anna Potts said it showed Secretary Rollins will eliminate hurdles to efficient production of safe meat and poultry. “We appreciate her wasting no time to support innovation in our industry. We look forward to working with the Secretary and our livestock and poultry suppliers to provide certainty to the supply chain and to allow additional companies the opportunity to utilize this system,” she said.
However, Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents more than 15,000 poultry workers, said workers cannot safely process meat at the faster speeds. “Increased line speeds will hurt workers—it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite—and increased production speeds will jeopardize the health and safety of every American that eats chicken,” he said in a statement.
Trump’s USDA started this same process during his first term, initially granting waivers to speed up meat production at the start of the pandemic, but the Biden administration withdrew the rule that would have permanently increased speeds. Biden’s USDA then allowed some plants to run at faster speeds and launched studies to measure impacts on workers.
When the results of those studies were released in January, Republicans and industry groups pointed to them as proof that faster speeds are safe, while worker groups said they showed evidence of dangerous conditions. The studies did not find a clear correlation between slaughter line speed and worker injuries, but workers who had a higher “piece rate,” a different measure of individual job pace, did have increased risk of injury. And the studies found 81 percent of poultry workers and 46 percent of pork workers, regardless of line speeds, had increased risk of musculoskeletal disorders and reported high rates of moderate to severe upper extremity pain. (Link to this post.)
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