The fines for safety lapses are so low that meatpacking companies have little incentive to improve working conditions, says a story by Harvest Public Media on NPR. When Ralph Horner, an employee at JBS’s Greeley, Colorado, beef facility was caught on a conveyer built and choked to death, JBS paid just $38,500 in fines. And that was more than most cases, according to Herb Gibson, director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Denver office, which inspects the massive Greeley plant. Every day, the plant’s 3,000 employees process roughly 5,600 head of cattle.
Meatpacking is notoriously dangerous, with beef and pork producers suffering the most injuries. While government statistics show that meatpacking and poultry processing plants are safer than they were a decade ago, there’s no way that OSHA, with only 2,000 inspectors, can properly oversee each plant and all the other millions of businesses under its purview.
“Unfortunately, it would take OSHA a hundred years to get to every workplace, just once to inspect,” says Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow with the National Employment Law Project, and a former senior OSHA official. “So really a lot is up to the company.”
Until this year, Congress hadn’t allowed OSHA to raise fines to account for inflation in 25 years. For a company like JBS, whose Brazilian parent company, JBS S.A,. reported $650 million profit in 2014, the agency’s penalties are no more than a slap on the wrist. It’s worth noting that “if the Greeley plant was found to be polluting a nearby river, the fines from the Environmental Protection Agency could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says NPR.
“Yes, [the fines for worker injuries are] embarrassingly low,” says Berkowitz. “And because of that it’s unclear what kind of deterrent effect it really has.”