Southern Catfish Workers Charge They’re Being Crippled by Their Jobs : Labor: Employees say repetitive tasks injure their wrists, arms and shoulders. Some claim boom industry’s employers are to blame.
Joyce Howard, 25, is angry and hurting. Shooting pains run through her wrists, her arm muscles ache, and she’s out of work.
Her pain, she says, came from fileting 75 to 100 pounds of catfish an hour for four years at a processing plant here. It is fast, repetitive work--rippers, for example, are required to gut 32 fish a minute, and headsaw operators must behead one a second--all for $4.30 an hour.
Her ailment continues despite surgery and therapy. She gets no paycheck because her bosses won’t find her a different job at the plant. “We’re treated like slaves, not like humans,” she said of the plant’s 921 employees, who are mostly black and female.
“They treat us so bad because there’s nothing else here but fish,” said Margaret Howard, Joyce’s 32-year-old sister who ripped open catfish at the plant until repetitive stress injuries struck her last year.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently cited their former employer, Delta Pride Catfish Inc., for “willful” violations of federal safety and health standards and fined the company $32,000. The company--the nation’s largest processor of fresh fish--has appealed the citation and refuses to comment on specific charges like those made by the Howard sisters.
The situation is repeated throughout the South, where processing plants have sprung up to take care of the nation’s ravenous appetite for alternatives to red meat, typically paying assembly line workers $4 to $6 an hour. In some places, chickens are the products, but the Delta region of Mississippi is catfish country, producing an estimated 80% of the nation’s annual catfish supply.
Miles of Mississippi landscape once filled with soybeans and cotton now are dotted with 90,000 acres of neat, man-made catfish ponds. The industry markets 342 million pounds of catfish a year, rakes in $340 million in sales and enjoys a 25% annual growth rate. A. de Jean King, OSHA area director in Jackson, Miss., calls it “another industrial revolution.”
The industry has been beset by injuries caused by repetitive motions. So far, OSHA has not developed a regulation covering job conditions that cause cumulative trauma disorders, although a spokesman in Washington said one would be created “pretty soon.”
But OSHA does require a “safe and healthy environment” in workplaces, and the enforcement actions against food processors are accelerating.
Here, in Sunflower County, catfish farming was “treated as a savior” as it grew dramatically during the last decade, King said. The company, which pumped almost $20 million in salaries into this area’s economy, enjoyed a flood of positive publicity.
But now in this quiet little town of 13,000--about 60% black--complaints about plant conditions abound. Scores of employees have reported the wrist, arm and shoulder problems--known as cumulative trauma disorders--stemming from repetitive motions.
Such motions, associated with cutting and typing jobs, can strain arm and wrist tendons, causing pain and swelling. They have been linked to conditions ranging from tendinitis to carpal tunnel syndrome, an extremely painful disorder that eventually can leave sufferers without the use of their hands.
The catfish workers complained to OSHA that the fast work pace led to their injuries and that plant officials subsequently refused them medical attention and information on worker compensation benefits.
Unlike the old days, when cotton was king around here, today’s catfish workers have a funnel for their complaints, the United Food and Commercial Workers International union. Deborah Berkowitz, the union’s director of safety and health, accused the company of “flagrantly taking advantage of people,” adding that when she saw what the work had done to workers, “my socks were blown off.”
At the Local 1529 building here, Rose Turner, a union representative, summed up workers’ complaints, declaring: “These catfish farmers think they can run these farms the way they ran their plantations.”
The battle is being fought all the way to the nation’s capital, where the House Government Operations subcommittee on employment and housing held hearings last year and declared in its report that “repetitive-motion injuries are wreaking emotional and financial havoc upon millions of American workers and their families.”
The report urged more federal government help in combatting the problem, but many analysts doubt that will happen. Sar Levitan, director of George Washington University’s Center for Social Policy Studies, said of President Bush: “If you read his lips, you know there is no money” to finance more government assistance. Thus, Levitan concludes: “The people who have always been at the bottom of the economic barrel will remain there.”
The OSHA citation, dated Dec. 19, said that workers who were being treated for repetitive-motion injuries “were placed in the same or similar work activities which had led to the problem, contrary to accepted medical practice.”
It also said employees “were exposed to possible serious harm due to the administering of first aid by untrained floor supervisors, who provided pain medication, anti-inflammatory drugs and wristlets to employees at their work stations.” The citation urged a series of changes in work methods to prevent the injuries in the first place.
Delta Pride officials issued a three-page statement saying the company “has been implementing a program of ergonomics” and asserting that it is the company’s practice “to maintain the highest possible level of health and safety activities for our employees in the workplace.”
Hugh Warren, executive vice president of the Catfish Farmers of America, defends the company as clean and safe, declaring that it “looks like a hospital.” The dispute, he said, is like “any labor union-management situation.”
But Roger Doolittle, a Jackson, Miss., attorney hired by the union to help workers get compensation, argued that the company “wants a guarantee that (the injured workers) will not be hurt again. That’s tantamount to saying they won’t be able to work there again.”
Disputes aside, Warren and other catfish industry analysts see nothing but clear sailing in the market boom. Currently, Warren said, Americans eat seafood at a rate of 19.8 pounds per person each year, including three-quarters of a pound of catfish.
If each person ate one more pound of catfish a year, Warren said, the industry would have to double its output as well as its use of feed, processing plants and employees.
“You can see why there’s so much excitement,” he said.
There is no excitement for people like Margaret Howard, who said her arms and wrists hurt so much that her nerves got bad and caused her hair to fall out. She recently got a part-time job as a custodian in a hospital, but after three operations she faces an uncertain future in this area’s limited job market.
“In the Delta, once you’re crippled, there’s nothing you can do,” Berkowitz said.
