The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Controversial change lets chicken plants go faster
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is now allowing more chicken processing plants to operate at faster speeds, a controversial move that some fear will hurt workers and chicken consumers by lowering safety standards.
The administration recently published new criteria for chicken plants applying for waivers to existing limits on how fast processing can go. Plants that receive a waiver from the Trump administration will be able to process up to 175 birds per minute, up from the old limit of 140 birds per minute.
The National Chicken Council praised the move and noted that each individual plant must meet stringent criteria to obtain a waiver. But labor and animal rights group decried the change as a capitulation to big business.
The move comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s push to eliminate speed limits entirely in the pork processing industry and at a time when the United States has an abundance of chicken in grocery stores and warehouses. Foreign buyers, especially China and Mexico, have slowed U.S. meat purchases as Trump’s trade war escalates.
The result is that chicken sitting in cold-storage warehouses is at its highest level since 2006, and domestic prices of boneless chicken breasts have slumped in recent months, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Trump’s USDA published the new guidelines on Sept. 28, the day after the widely watched Senate testimony of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school.
A spokesman for USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said the timing was entirely coincidental, and the final criteria came out the day the agency held its monthly Safe Food Coalition meeting. But consumer and labor rights activists believe it was part of an effort to quietly push through the contentious new rule.
“The Trump administration doesn’t care that this change will exploit workers and harm public health and animal welfare. This is all about increasing profits for the poultry industry,” said Deborah Berkowitz, a director at the National Employment Law Project and former senior policy adviser for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Obama administration.
Labor Department data show that injury rates for poultry workers are 60 percent higher than the national average for all private industry, and illness rates are more than five times as high. John Howard, the longtime director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has said that faster line speeds play a role in injuries.
The National Chicken Council says pilot programs at faster speeds have worked fine and that other countries allow processing above 140 birds a minute, meaning the United States is losing ground to global competition if it doesn’t do this.
“The safety of our food and our employees are our top priorities, and we would never advocate for any policy that would negatively affect either. The safety record of plants operating at 175bpm (birds per minute), both in the U.S. and in dozens of countries all over the world, has been proven time and
again,” said Thomas Super, a National Chicken Council spokesman.
In order to get a waiver, a chicken plant has to have the latest safety measures in place, including checking properly for salmonella, and a good track record for a minimum of 120 days. The plant must also oper- ate under “good commercial practices,” meaning chickens are slaughtered in a way that stops their breathing before they are scalded.
Twenty plants already had the right to operate at faster speeds because they were part of a pilot program. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service approved five more plants to operate at the high rate shortly after the Sept. 28 notice. Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, the two largest chicken producers in the United States that control nearly half the market, already have several waivers each.
A USDA spokesman said t he agency has “taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency to the public” by outlining what it takes to get a waiver.
In September 2017, the National Chicken Council asked the FSIS to eliminate the speed limit entirely for companies that are in compli- ance with safety standards.
When the USDA asked for comment about ditching the limit, more than 100,000 responses poured in, includ- ing several thousand from poultry workers begging the government not to do this. Protesters appeared outside the USDA building in diapers, saying the chicken processing lines are already moving so quickly that workers don’t have time for bathroom breaks.
In January, the USDA said that it would keep a speed limit in place, but that it planned to set up waiver process that would be accessible to all companies, not just those that were part of the pilot program.
The typical pay for a poultry processing worker is about $25,000 a year, according to the Labor Department, and many reports have shown the chicken industry is increasingly using immigrants and refugee labor in its plants.