Fowl Play In the Slaughterhouse

In my hometown of Gainesville, Ga., there's a statue of a broiler hen, a monument to one of the longtime mainstays of the region's economy. Today I live in Kansas, where beef is king and bovine statuary is common. And over in the Corn Belt, the winner of the annual football game between the universities of Iowa and Minnesota takes home a big bronze hog representing both states' favorite farm animal.

Public art honors these doomed objects of our affection for their contribution to the American diet and economy. Recent years have also brought growing awareness of the often-cruel conditions under which they are raised and slaughtered.

But as far as I know, there are no monuments to the workers who kill and process cattle, hogs, chickens or other livestock. And in one of the nation's most grueling and dangerous industries, laws meant to protect those workers are often inadequate and getting worse.

Foreseeable and preventable

In its January 2005 report, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants, the organization Human Rights Watch amassed a mountain of data and personal testimony demonstrating that everyday conditions in plants from North Carolina to Nebraska to Arkansas violate a host of international human-rights standards.

The report concludes that the risk of injury in the beef, swine and poultry industries is "constant, foreseeable and preventable."

One of the most common problems is repetitive-motion injury. A 2002 Fortune magazine article reported that while the overall injury rate in poultry plants was more than double the average for private industries, "poultry workers are 14 times more likely to suffer debilitating injuries stemming from repetitive trauma."

Look through the Human Rights Watch report or Eric Schlosser's 2001 bestseller, "Fast Food Nation," and read the ghastly stories of workers' lives in any of the meat-processing industries. Then pick one of the jobs they describe, a single task, and try to imagine repeating it all day long, as quickly as you can.

Better yet, take two 5-pound weights, hang them on hooks above your head, pull them down, and then repeat the cycle maybe 15,000 times in an 8- to 12-hour day. Be sure to do this in the dampest possible conditions, with the temperature either above 90 or below 50 degrees. Imagine that the weights are panicky live animals with beaks and claws. If you need a break, you might try cutting half-frozen chickens apart with dull scissors for a while.

If your hands, wrists or back don't ache the next morning, repeat the process five or six days per week until they do. Don't worry -- they will.

Repetitive-motion injuries are commonplace throughout the slaughtering and processing industries, but they are epidemic in poultry work. Very large numbers of the relatively small animals pass through a plant each hour, requiring workers to repeat their actions more often than in beef or pork plants.

On a recent visit to Gainesville, home of the chicken monument, I asked Dr. Nabil Muhanna, a local neurosurgeon, about one of the poultry industry's most common repetitive-motion problems, carpal-tunnel syndrome. He pointed to his own wrist to show me where the median nerve passes between the bones of the wrist on one side and the transverse carpal ligament on the other. That is, he said, how the nerve is naturally "packaged."

The pain of carpal-tunnel syndrome is caused by an inflamed median nerve.

But some of the hand and arm motions required of poultry and meat workers, if they're repeated enough times, cause inflammation of the nerve. The resulting severe pain can be relieved by cutting through the ligament to loosen the "packaging," but the wrist remains weak. For decades, Dr. Muhanna has been slitting the transverse carpal ligaments of poultry workers, as well as performing surgery to relieve the misery associated with other of their work-related conditions, such as lumbar stenosis and disk disease.