America's Most Dangerous Factories

Saturday, December 30, 2006 | 0

By David Michaels

Meat factories continue to be among the most dangerous places to work in America. According to a devastating article in the Dallas Morning News, "thousands of illegal immigrants gravitate toward meatpacking plants in places like Cactus, Texas" where each year more than one out of every ten workers gets injured carving meat on fast moving conveyer belts. The line speed requires exhausted workers wielding the sharpest of knives or hooks to make hundred of cuts an hour. OSHA inspectors are rarely seen in these factories.

One worker at the Swift & Co's Cactus, Texas plant described it:

They're going to make the chain longer and raise it. You can hear the people screaming because they're exhausted. On Friday, you could hear them screaming because it was 2:37 [p.m.] and the meat wouldn't stop coming.

The astronomical injury rates in meat factories are compelling evidence of the abject failure of OSHA to address even the most obvious and preventable of hazards.

The crippling effects of meat packing work is not a secret - every few years, similar expos