A government report says the injury rate for meat industry workers has improved greatly yet injuries are more common than in the rest of the manufacturing sector, reports Harvest Public Media. “But injuries in the meat industry are also likely to be under-reported,” it says.
In an update of a 2005 report, the Government Accountability Office said it found situations that would lead to under-reporting. They ranged from language barriers that dissuaded workers from filing a report to work performed by companies that send their employees into meat plants under contract. The GAO report said the limitations of data collecting “raise questions about whether the federal government is doing all it can to collect the data it needs to support worker protection and workplace safety.”
The North American Meat Institute, a trade group, said non-fatal injuries and diseases were a record low 5.5 percent, compared to 9.8 percent in 2004. “Nor did the meat and poultry industry even make the cut in a recent Time analysis looking at the top 20 most dangerous jobs in America based on work place fatalities,” said NAMI. Much of the reduction was due to improved ergonomics, it said.