For Meatpackers, Walkout Was Step Forward and Back

Outside the slaughterhouse, the picket line was a parade of pain: A man missing three fingers. A woman’s face sliced by a badly healed scar. A veteran worker limping, his hips thrown into an unnatural tilt by a fall on the fat-slicked concrete floor.

Nearly all the strikers marching in the foul breeze were immigrants and refugees, and they wanted the world to know how bad it was inside the plant, one of 11 beef factories owned by industry giant IBP Inc.

They shoved their hands forward, showing how their joints creaked like old, rusted hinges, tracing the cuts made in surgery or by their own slipped knives. “We are no better than the machines,” said one worker. “When they can’t use us anymore, they throw us away.”

A month ago, bolstered by what now seems a naive belief in the power of their own stories, and without the initial support of their own Teamsters local, the workers walked out, taking on the largest meat-processing company in the world.

Today they return to work disappointed, after narrowly approving a new contract that fails to address several key demands, including the right to stop the production line when worker or food safety is threatened.

The company defends its safety record, saying it has spent millions of dollars on safety equipment.

“We were fighting against a giant,” said Melquiadez Pereyra, who led the June 4 procession out of the plant. “We couldn’t do it by ourselves.”

The Walulla strike, which hobbled plant operations for a month, was the most recent and dramatic indication of a changing dynamic between the large corporations that dominate meatpacking and immigrants who do most of the production work.

“I see it as kind of a wake-up call,” said Mark Grey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa, who has studied the shift toward immigrant labor in meatpacking for more than a decade.

“If it’s gotten to the point where a largely Latino work force is willing to take on the company over safety, it shows the nature of their relationship has changed.”

But its outcome also illustrates the difficulties such workers face in bargaining with global businesses that can shift production from one factory to another while waiting out a strike.

Although about two-thirds of the plant’s 1,300 employees maintained the picket line, the strike had no noticeable impact on IBP’s bottom line, said John McMillin, an analyst with Prudential Securities. The publicly held company, with 42,000 employees and a product line that ranges from hides to deli meats, had nearly $13 billion in sales last year.

John Rabine, a Teamsters vice president who stepped into the negotiations after striking workers refused to deal with their local representative, said the resulting contract was disappointing but that “the level of expectation was probably beyond what was attainable.”

The agreement raised starting wages from $7 to $8.50 per hour but cut the company’s retirement contribution. IBP also agreed to expand its worker-management safety committee and added language recognizing “that mutual respect and individual dignity in the workplace will be and must be recognized.”

IBP executives have dismissed most employees’ claims as “strike rhetoric” and defended the plant’s safety record as improving and better than most.

However, the company, and its Walulla plant in particular, have been cited numerous times by federal and state regulators for failing to implement employee and food safety measures. In June 1998, Washington state health and safety investigators cited IBP for serious violations, including failure to maintain dry flooring, which could result in falls. An earlier inspection cited the company for failure to maintain safety guards on equipment and platforms.

In November, U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors issued a notice of enforcement action after inspectors at the Walulla plant found “a pattern of problems” that could affect food safety. USDA spokeswoman Beth Gaston would not elaborate on the problems, which were corrected by IBP, but said the agency remained concerned and sent bilingual compliance officers to interview striking workers last month after they complained that meat had not been cleaned after falling on the floor.

Several labor activists, attorneys and university researchers who have followed the transition of meatpacking to a high-speed production process over the last two decades compared current injury rates with those described by Upton Sinclair in his gruesome expose of the industry in Chicago nearly a century ago.

“If you work in the meat-processing industry for any amount of time, you will get hurt,” said Greg Denier of United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents workers at many meat plants, including half a dozen owned by IBP. “And for the most part, it isn’t necessary.”

Industrywide, about a third of U.S. meatpacking workers were hurt on the job last year, a rate far higher than that of any other manufacturing industry--but better than the 45% rate of a decade ago.

Most injuries are musculoskeletal, stemming from the hundreds of small, repetitive motions workers make every hour on the production line while whittling down sides of beef to small, easily packaged pieces.

IBP spokesman Don Willoughby conceded that slaughtering and meat cutting remain ugly and dangerous jobs and that IBP has found it increasingly difficult to fill them as the U.S. labor market tightens and the federal government cracks down on illegal immigration.

Industrywide, employee turnover is greater than 50% a year and could be as high as 80%, said Grey, the professor who studied the meatpacking industry. IBP executives said their employee churn is lower, although they would not provide numbers. Spokesman Gary Mickelson said the company has reduced turnover at the Walulla plant by a third in recent years.

To fill the chronic job vacancies, IBP recruits heavily in northern Mexico and immigrant-rich cities such as Santa Ana. It also draws from refugee populations, most recently from Bosnia.

Emboldened by the labor shortage and encouraged by a handful of Latinos with more than 10 years’ experience at the plant, workers in Walulla were ready to take action June 4, when a protest over fast line speeds grew into a spontaneous walkout.

“At first you feel frustrated because you don’t know English, you don’t know where to go, and the government moves very slowly,” said Pereyra, a native of Sinaloa, Mexico, who has worked at IBP for 11 years. “After a while, you start to see that you have rights and there are laws.”

Although workers at Walulla asked for higher wages and benefits, the central issue--according to dozens of strikers interviewed--was production-line speed and staffing. The combination of those two factors determines how much time a worker has to handle each piece of meat.

During normal operations, for example, Maria Saucedo said she has about 30 seconds to cut tendons and trim fat and bone from a 30-pound round cut, part of the upper portion of the rear leg of a cow.

But when the eight-person crew on her line is short-staffed--as it often is these days--remaining workers must cut faster or the meat will pile up at their stations.

At those speeds, workers--who wear heavy aprons, hard hats and steel-mesh safety gloves--don’t have time to take the frequent, short breaks recommended by ergonomics experts to avoid repetitive motion injuries.

“We’re supposed to change our gloves every 20 minutes, because they get wet and cold and covered with blood,” Saucedo said. “But sometimes we go three or four hours before we can do that.”

The fast pace and infrequent breaks put workers at extreme risk for injuries, from contorted “trigger fingers” to diminished strength. Many complain they can no longer button their shirts, squeeze their hands into a fist or carry a bucket of water.

“I run hot water on my hands for half an hour in the morning just to open them,” said Cuban-born Irene Bravo, who has had eight operations on her shoulder and hands in her six years at IBP’s Walulla plant. “Where can I go now? Who’s going to give me a job?”

Fast line speeds also have led to traumatic injuries. Rosa Tafoya said meat was piling up at her station when a piece slipped toward the floor. As she grabbed for it, she sliced a three-inch gash into her cheek. After a night in the local emergency room, Tafoya was back on the line the next day at 6 a.m.

Several workers complained they were unable to take bathroom breaks, and as a result, had soiled themselves.

The production line shuts down twice during a normal shift--for one 15-minute rest and a 30-minute lunch break. The workday at the Walulla plant was recently reduced to seven hours and 56 minutes. Workers said the change was made to avoid a second 15-minute break. IBP said only that it was the result of “an ongoing disagreement over the interpretation of a state law governing employee breaks.”

IBP spokesman Mickelson said industrial engineers set safe staffing and line speeds after observing the production process and that those safe speeds are always maintained.

“Employee injury and illness prevention is important to IBP from both a human and economic standpoint,” Mickelson said in a written response to questions. “We do not want to do anything to endanger our employees.”

Slowing the production-line speed while maintaining current staffing levels would almost certainly reduce musculoskeletal injuries in meatpacking, said Don Cochran, a University of Nebraska industrial engineering professor who is helping to write new federal ergonomics standards for the industry.

But government regulation of those speeds is unlikely, he added. “That’s a very touchy issue. The line speed is an economic decision. It’s a very competitive industry, and the profit margins are very small.”

Indeed, meatpacking is typified by thin margins and ruthless competition. “The average pretax margin for IBP is about 2%, compared to most other food companies I follow, where the margin is about five times that size,” Prudential’s McMillin said.

“Certainly there is pressure to run a faster line,” he said. “They’re selling a commodity, and at the end of the day there’s not a lot of leeway room. If they don’t have low production costs, these people are going to be out of a job altogether.”

IBP, originally Iowa Beef Packers, grew from a single meatpacking plant in that state to a global meat-processing giant with 48 plants that turn out everything from hides to tallow for glue--all by pioneering the modern meat production line.

The company divided a job once performed by skilled butchers into hundreds of distinct operations that could be carried out by unskilled, low-wage workers.

Inefficient competitors--such as Columbia Foods, which owned the Walulla plant before IBP bought it in 1976--were quickly forced out of the market. Over a painful two decades, the industry gelled into a handful of major players, led by IBP.

“IBP put the industry where it is today,” said Grey. “They introduced these efficiencies and these incredibly low profit margins, where the only way they can make money is in the aggregate. They were the first to target immigrants and refugee populations for labor.

“It’s just a matter of time before these [labor] issues began to pop up,” he said. “In many ways, the things they started are now coming home to roost.”