Cover photo by Earl Dotter.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published its annual workplace injury and illness report for 2023.  And it appeared to be very good news: “Private industry employers reported 2.6 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2023, down 8.4 percent from 2022. Serious injuries and illnesses involving days away from work were also down by 20.1%.

Some of the decrease was due to fewer COVID cases among health care workers: “The respiratory illness incidence rate in the private industry health care and social assistance sector decreased to 44.1 cases per 10,000 full-time-equivalent workers in 2023.”

But some of the allegedly best news came from the  highly hazardous poultry sector, as reported by Food Safety News (FSN):

For the first time since the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began recording injuries and illnesses information in 1994, the incidence of occupational injuries and illnesses within the poultry sector’s slaughter and processing workforce has fallen below all general industry manufacturing.

The poultry industry’s rate of 2.6 injuries per 100 full-time workers was below the rate of 4.7 for similar agricultural industries and lower than 3.6 for the entire food manufacturing sector, all of the manufacturing industries at 2.8, and all of the general industry at 2.7.

That’s a whopping 89 percent decrease from 1994.

Poultry processing is extremely dangerous work. Most of the workers are immigrants, and poultry industry employers are not known for being the leading vanguard of workplace safety.

So if accurate, these numbers are very good news.

But there is strong reason to doubt the numbers,  according to workplace safety and health expert Debbie Berkowitz.  In a Letter to the Editor of FSN, Berkowitz explains why these numbers merit a closer look.

Berkowitz was Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor at OSHA during much of the Obama administration, and is currently Practitioner Fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. She also directed the health and safety program for the United Food and Commercial Workers union for ten years.

I am reprinting her full letter below.

Letter to the Editor: Workplace injury numbers in poultry industry need closer look

As FSN noted recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that poultry slaughter plants had a huge and unprecedented reduction in the number of workers injured this year: the industry injury rates were more than halved from the year before.  The BLS data also showed that poultry plants reduced their most serious work injuries that involve lost time or restricted duty by more than two thirds in just one year. What the FSN story didn’t report was that these numbers are based on data collected and reported by the industry, and the data are not checked or validated. Though the FSN story led with a celebration of these numbers, there are very serious questions about these self- reported numbers and whether they are real or a mirage.

Over the past decade three government agencies (USDA, OSHA and NIOSH) have found that the poultry industry’s self-reported injury numbers are seriously underreported. Congressional investigations also documented this in a 2021 Congressional Committee report that found that the poultry industry flagrantly underreported the number of their workers sick with COVID-19 by two thirds.

Many of us were startled to see this one year unprecedented decrease in self-reported cases by the industry. For those of us that follow worker safety in the industry, we didn’t hear from workers about any new improvements or changes that would lead to this drop.  The last published studies of repetitive trauma injuries, like carpal tunnel syndrome, in poultry plants were performed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in 2012 and 2014.  NIOSH performed medical exams and found alarmingly high rates of carpal tunnel syndrome among line workers — rates from 34 percent to 42 percent.

Taking a closer look at these BLS numbers may help explain why they may be a mirage: BLS numbers are calculated from a company’s self-reported injury logs that contain only those injuries/illnesses that the company deemed were work related and where the worker received medical treatment from a doctor.  If the plant does not send workers to a doctor for treatment, they would have very few cases on their logs.

In poultry plants, government investigations found that injured and ill workers were seen in onsite health units and rarely referred to a doctor for medical evaluation and treatment.  The onsite clinic staff only provided first aid to the injured worker—not ‘medical treatment’ that would be considered a ‘recordable’ injury.

A  recent article in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics documented myriad government investigations in big poultry plants that found that the onsite health clinics routinely send injured and ill  workers back to  jobs that cause their injuries,  instead of sending workers to a doctor for a diagnosis and treatment. In some cases, workers went to the onsite clinics dozens of times with the same injury, never to be sent to a doctor.  In these cases, effective treatment was delayed, and workers’ injuries worsened leading to surgery and other bad outcomes.

When a worker’s condition worsens and they then go to see a doctor on their own, the companies claim these injuries are not work related. The companies don’t pay for the medical treatment, and the injuries are not recorded. Studies and investigations also found that workers may be intimidated into not reporting work related injuries and illnesses for fear of losing their jobs.

The high turnover in the poultry industry, between 60 percent to 150 percent a year,  is often thought to be a consequence of injured workers who can no longer do the job, don’t get to be seen by a doctor to get adequate diagnosis and  medical treatment to recover —and must leave the industry. Of course, these injuries are also not recorded on the companies’ logs.

A closer look behind these numbers is warranted. What incredible improvements implemented last year have led to this drop? Are these low recordable injury rates really a reflection that the companies are much safer?

Unseen Health Problems?

To make matters worse, in a comment on Ms. Berkowitz’s letter, Dr. Pat Basu, who spent 36 years at the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), notes that there is a whole category of workplace illness that is not reported to BLS

With 36 years of experience in FSIS, I agree with Ms. Berkowitz’s reporting that the meat and poultry industry routinely under-reports workplace injuries. In addition, with the recent implementation of increased line speeds , there is an effort to control the incoming pathogens through the increased overuse of antimicrobial sprays in most plants. Worker exposure to these products, such as Peroxyacetic acid (PAA), causes damage to the lungs, eyes, liver, and kidney and goes unreported as these injuries are not externally visible.

Like the laborers exposed to the dust in coal mines (resulting in pneumoconiosis), these meat and poultry plant workers’ lives are also cut short by a work-related disability that is never counted by the industry reports.