Accidents Death on The Shop Floor

By Richard Lacayo

Nobody who worked at the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, N.C., had much love for the place. The job -- cooking, weighing and packing fried chicken parts for fast-food restaurants -- was hot, greasy and poorly paid. The conveyor belts moved briskly, and the few rest breaks were so strictly timed that going to the bathroom at the wrong moment could lead to dismissal. But in the sleepy town of 6,200 there was not much else in the way of work. So most of the plant's 200 employees, predominantly black and female, were thankful just to have the minimum-wage job. Until last week, that is.

The morning shift had just started when an overhead hydraulic line ruptured, spilling its volatile fluid onto the floor. Gas burners under the frying vats ignited the vapors and turned the 30,000-sq.-ft. plant into an inferno of flame and thick, yellow smoke. Panicked employees rushed for emergency exits only to find several of them locked. "I thought I was gone, until a man broke the lock off," says Letha Terry, one of the survivors. Twenty-five of Terry's fellow employees were not so lucky. Their bodies were found clustered around the blocked doorways or trapped in the freezer, where the workers had fled in vain from the fire's heat and smoke.

The disaster brought to light the mostly invisible body count of the American workplace. By some estimates, more than 10,000 workers die each year from on-the-job injuries -- about 30 every day. Perhaps 70,000 more are permanently disabled. The fire also exposed the weakness of measures for ensuring job safety. The 11-year-old Imperial Food Products plant had never been inspected. Like a lot of American workplaces, it fell through the gaping cracks of a system in which there are too few inspectors, penalties are mostly trifling, and the procedures for reporting dangerous conditions can leave workers to choose between risking their jobs and risking their lives.

"The tragedy that occurred in Hamlet is a direct result of 10 years of the Reagan-Bush philosophy of letting industry police itself," says Deborah E. Berkowitz, top safety expert for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "There's a USDA inspector in every poultry plant to protect consumers from getting a stomachache, but there's nobody protecting people from getting killed."

By almost every measure, America's regulatory safeguards have grown threadbare. At the top of the frayed system is the 21-year-old Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal body that attempts to oversee the nation's 6 million workplaces with just 1,200 inspectors -- down from a high of 1,388 in 1980. A strained operation at best, OSHA was stretched to the breaking point by Ronald Reagan, who came to office persuaded that businesses should police themselves. Under him, OSHA's budget fell one-fourth.

OSHA has begun a turnaround under Gerard G. Scannell, a former safety chief at Johnson & Johnson who was chosen to head the agency in 1989. After years in which it rarely issued safety guidelines, OSHA has begun adopting them wholesale -- though critics complain it too often approves rules drawn up by the industries it is supposed to supervise. Scannell has also brought eye- catching fines against offenders, including $3.5 million against Arco Chemical and a record $4 million against Phillips Petroleum, after giant explosions at their plants left 40 dead. The agency "is more effective today than it has been in any time in its history," insists Alan McMillan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health.

But OSHA still lacks the clout to protect most American workers. By one important measure, the jobsite is safer: work-related fatalities have dropped from 12,500 ten years ago to 10,500 last year. But that is partly because there are fewer jobs these days in some of the most lethal industries, including steel, shipbuilding and logging. Meanwhile, job-related illnesses and crippling injuries are on the increase. "The walking wounded are a part of the cost of doing business," says Bruce Raynor of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

Twenty-three states have devised their own regulatory schemes, which exempt them from federal scrutiny, but the results have been mixed. North Carolina, where the Hamlet fire took place, has one of the worst systems. Under federal guidelines, the state should have 116 inspectors. Instead it has just 27 to oversee 163,053 employers. Last week the Charlotte Observer reported that in 1990 inspections declined 35% from the previous year and the state returned $453,000 in unspent federal money that could have been used to perform more inspections.

Changes in the American economy have left employees more vulnerable, especially the ones in unskilled blue-collar jobs. Labor unions, which can step in to remedy unsafe conditions, now represent just 18% of the work force. Some of the most injury-prone industries, like food processing and textiles, have clustered in right-to-work states across the South, where labor organizers get the kind of welcome that used to greet Freedom Riders.

The merger-and-acquisition craze of the past decade also led to imprudent cost cutting. The elimination of relief crews, forced overtime and deferred (meaning neglected) maintenance have resulted in tired workers and worn equipment -- a deadly combination. There are further dangers in industries like oil and petrochemicals, where subcontracting has become a common money- saving move. Barely trained newcomers, many of them aliens with an imperfect grasp of English, are put at the controls of dangerous machinery, with predictable results. In Texas six major explosions at chemical plants and refineries have killed 47 workers in the past five years and injured 1,000 more. Subcontract employees were believed to have been at fault in two, the blasts at Arco and Phillips.

The hazards of poultry factories are typical of the conditions that workers face in many industries. With the demand for chicken rising as it gains on beef in the American diet, the assembly lines in poultry plants move twice as fast as they did a decade ago, often butchering employees as well as poultry. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1 in 5 poultry workers has been seriously injured in the hands, wrists or shoulders.

In addition to severe cuts, the most common problems are the chronic disabilities that go under the heading of repetitive-motion trauma. Line workers, who gut, clean and divide hundreds of birds each day, typically perform the same movement from 60 to 90 times a minute, thousands of times a day. When the human body is pressed to imitate the tireless actions of a machine, it revolts. The result is chronic tendinitis and carpal-tunnel syndrome, a painful condition of the wrists and forearms that can leave a worker virtually crippled even after corrective surgery.

Like many dangerous industries, poultry processing has the advantage of a docile work force. Not only is the complaint process an intimidating bureaucratic tangle, but the plant workers are often poorly paid and uneducated women. Anxious to keep their jobs -- despite an average industry wage of just $5.50 an hour -- they are unlikely to make waves. Many of the 25 who died in last week's fire were so poor that the Textile Workers Union sent dresses and men's suits to Hamlet for use as burial clothes.

This fall Congress will hold hearings on a bill designed to toughen the regulatory system. Sponsored in the House by Michigan Democrat William Ford, the bill would require any company with more than 11 employees to set up a worker-management safety committee empowered to enforce jobsite safety rules. "Then there's no reason for an inspector to show up to unlock a door," says Franklin Mirer, safety director for the United Auto Workers. "The workers can do it."

Labor organizers and workers' rights groups are calling for stronger measures. Some want an independent investigative body, like the National Transportation Safety Board, with the power to examine accident sites and set in motion industry-wide changes to save lives in the future. Another proposal in the Ford bill is more to their liking. It would make it easier for OSHA to bring criminal charges against individual employers who are repeat offenders. "Everyone knows that the subway worker who killed five people in New York was indicted for murder," says Joseph A. Kinney, executive director of National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago. "When are we going to be asking for indictments against the owners of Imperial Food?"

And why not? When the recklessness of employers becomes lethal, perhaps it is time to call it a crime -- and act accordingly.

With reporting by Joe Kane/Atlanta and Elaine Shannon/Washington