Fatal Fire May Stir OSHA Action

That powerful muckraker, Upton Sinclair, shocked the nation in 1906 when he described the filth in Chicago’s slaughterhouses and the horrors of working in them. But he fell short of his real goal--helping the workers.

Rachel Scott, in her own searing expose of workplace dangers, “Muscle and Blood,” recalled that Sinclair said he wasn’t thinking about the scandal of impure foods when he wrote his classic, “The Jungle.”

Wrote Sinclair: “I wished to frighten a country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims and entirely by chance I stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing to the meat supply of the civilized world. I failed in my original purpose.”

Government inspection of meat began soon after Sinclair’s book was published, but it wasn’t until 1970 that the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed. OSHA has slowed, but, unfortunately, hasn’t stopped job-related deaths and injuries. Thousands of workers still are killed on the job each year, and millions of others are hurt or become ill.

Tougher, better-enforced workplace safety laws would have prevented the horrible deaths of the 25 people who died in a fire Sept. 2, when they were trapped behind locked doors at Imperial Food Products, a North Carolina poultry processing plant.

It would be a fitting memorial to them if the tragedy accomplished what Sinclair’s book did--focus national attention on the dangers workers face daily on their jobs and the food-poisoning risks that result from inadequate enforcement of pure-food laws.

At a congressional hearing on workplace safety last week, survivors described the gruesome fire in Hamlet, N.C.

The few congressmen at that hearing were moved by the stories of futile screams for help from burning, suffocating workers who pounded in vain on plant doors that were bolted shut--apparently to prevent pilfering of chicken parts.

Maybe the grisly accounts will add a sense of urgency to the long-standing need to revamp the health and safety act. Maybe the Democrat-controlled Congress will get around to it in the next few months.

If it tries to do so while President Bush is in office, expect a veto. Bush, like former President Ronald Reagan and many of their supporters in the corporate world, seems to have a greater horror of government regulation than of mayhem in the workplace.

The poultry plant disaster might also renew interest in the government’s inadequate inspections for food-poisoning hazards in the more than 2.5 billion pounds of chicken we eat each year.

True, government inspectors are in the plants. But they have less than one second per chicken to spot any contamination; the birds whiz along production lines at a rate of up to 90 a minute.

In fact, a health inspector was in the Hamlet plant. He ignored workplace safety problems, because his orders were only to look at problems with the chickens, not the workers.

And there was no federal or state safety inspector anywhere near Hamlet. Nationwide, there are just 1,200 federal inspectors--and 800 inspectors employed by the states--to enforce the weak occupational safety and health law in nearly 5 million private work sites in the United States.

The law doesn’t worry employers much. They can expect an inspector to check on them once every 75 years; even those who operate hazardous jobs are routinely checked only once every 13 years. The many employers who try to maintain a safe workplace do so out of enlightened self-interest, not because of the inadequate law.

Hundreds of thousands of employers aren’t so enlightened, however.

Cynics might say the poultry plant fire won’t stir the nationwide anger sparked by Sinclair’s writings, or by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York, where 146 mostly young, white women died, many behind locked plant doors. Most of the Hamlet poultry workers were older black women.

Rep. William D. Ford (D-Mich.) and other members of Congress, pressured by organized labor, are using the Hamlet deaths to generate support for rewriting health and safety laws.

The AFL-CIO’s Margaret Seminario was right when she said that the heart of the reform proposal is a provision that would require employers to develop health and safety programs. Employees would have a voice, through joint worker-management committees, and protection from retaliation if they demand elimination of hazardous conditions.

Poultry plant workers need help badly. They must rapidly slit the bird’s body from anus to breast, remove the intestines, cut the chicken into parts and package them in the extreme heat of scalding tanks and cooking-oven rooms or in the cold of freezer units and chill tanks. The injury rate in this occupation is one of the highest.

The pay ranges from $4.50 to $6.50 an hour, usually without fringe benefits unless the worker belongs to a union. A union contract adds about $1 an hour to the pay, along with medical coverage and other benefits.

The hard, low-paying poultry jobs are mostly in Southern states; traditionally, they have been filled primarily by black women. Recently, however, illegal Mexican immigrants began pouring into the plants, welcomed by employers because they will work for even lower pay and seldom complain.

The United Food and Commercial Workers has started a major organizing drive among poultry workers. Valerie Ervin, director of that and other UFCW organizing campaigns, said most of the 186,000 workers in that industry now realize the need for union protection.

The union wasn’t trying to organize workers in the Hamlet plant, however. “We didn’t know it was there,” Ervin said.

Still, the tragedy may help not only the UFCW campaign, but could spur congressional efforts to reform the nation’s badly outdated safety laws and improve the inspection of poultry producers.