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Vol. 72/No. 27      July 7, 2008

 
Study: gov’t agency hides workplace injuries
(front page)
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
Although the U.S. Department of Labor claims that workplace injuries and illnesses have been at “all-time lows,” a study by researchers at the University of Illinois found that 83 percent of an alleged drop from 1992 to 2003 is due to changes in record-keeping by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As much as 69 percent of injuries and illnesses never make it into government reports.

Among the record-keeping changes, OSHA no longer requires an injury be recorded if a worker returned to the job the day after the injury. It is a common practice in the meatpacking industry, for example, for employers to tell employees too injured to work that they must report to the job for “light duty.”

OSHA has stopped collecting data at workplaces and instead relies on employers to provide the information.

Companies are increasingly listing workers who once would have been considered their employees as “independent contractors” who are therefore not included in accident statistics.

Companies have many motivations to cover up their safety record—if they report fewer injuries and work-related illnesses, they are less likely to face an OSHA inspection. Fewer reported injuries mean lower workers compensation insurance premiums. For some industries, lower numbers mean a better chance of winning lucrative government contracts.

“The Cruelest Cuts,” a series of articles earlier this year in the Charlotte Observer, exposed how some of this works in the multi-billion-dollar poultry industry, in particular poultry giant House of Raeford Farms.

Government statistics show a decade-long decline in poultry worker injuries nationwide. House of Raeford’s 800-worker plant in West Columbia, South Carolina, reported no repetitive stress disorders or carpal tunnel syndrome over a period of four years. “Experts say that’s inconceivable” in an industry where workers routinely make more than 20,000 cutting motions per shift to keep production at 150 to 160 birds a minute, the Observer reported.

The newspaper found that the company kept figures low in its plants by refusing many workers’ requests to see a doctor, bringing some workers back to the plant hours after surgery, failing to record injuries on government safety logs, and threatening to fire workers.

The company wants “people who do not complain,” said Belem Villegas, a former employment supervisor at the company’s Greenville, South Carolina, plant, referring to the many undocumented Latino poultry workers.

One manager kept a list of workers without papers who could be fired if they caused problems, Villegas said.
 
 
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Construction worker killed at Las Vegas site
No worker has to die on the job!  
 
 
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