Last week, the US Department of Agriculture announced sweeping plans to increase slaughter line speeds at pork and poultry plants — a move that could further endanger workers who already process animals at a breakneck pace and suffer high levels of injury.
Workers in poultry plants don’t actually kill the chickens — that task is automated on what’s called the evisceration line, a conveyor belt that kills the chickens and removes their organs, which facilities can currently operate at a speed of up to 140 birds per minute. The chicken carcasses are then moved to another part of the plant where workers in cramped and cold conditions cut them up, handling dozens of birds per minute, to be packed for supermarkets and restaurants. Pork plants can currently operate at up to 1,106 pigs per hour.
For decades, the meat industry has been pushing to both speed up slaughter lines and replace federal inspectors with company employees, wishes that the USDA — under both Republican and Democratic administrations — have granted to varying degrees. Now, the Trump administration plans to give the industry perhaps its biggest win on the issue yet, which worker safety advocates say will make one of the most dangerous jobs in America even worse.
In the short term, the USDA will allow a few dozen chicken and pork processing plants that already have temporary waivers to operate slaughter lines faster to continue to do so. But the agency’s longer-term plan is much more consequential: enacting a rule that will allow all pig and chicken slaughterhouses to increase slaughter line speeds.
This comes at the same time as the Trump administration promises mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, who make up a significant share of the slaughterhouse workforce.
The meat industry has celebrated the move: The National Pork Producers “extended deep appreciation” to the USDA for its plan and the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute expressed similar sentiments.
Worker safety advocates, on the other hand, are alarmed.
“Increased line speeds will hurt workers — it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite,” the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents over 15,000 poultry workers, wrote in a statement.
The debate over slaughter line speeds
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, workers in slaughterhouses — who make fast, repetitive motions with sharp knives during long shifts — suffer from injuries at far higher rates than those in all of private industry.
But Debbie Berkowitz, who served as a chief of staff and senior policy adviser at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under President Obama, told me the reality is far worse than even these numbers suggest. Numerous government agencies, including the USDA, she said, have found the BLS’s estimates to be undercounts, and Berkowitz noted that the injury rates are self-reported by meat companies, not tallied up by government inspectors.
Slaughterhouse workers have also complained of wage theft, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and denial of bathroom breaks.
Exactly how fast the Trump administration will allow meat companies to operate their slaughter lines is unclear — the agency has begun work on a draft rule but didn’t provide details. During President Trump’s first term, the USDA granted or renewed waivers to over 50 chicken slaughter plants, allowing them to increase line speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175. It also sought to eliminate line speed limits at pork facilities altogether, which a federal judge blocked in 2021, arguing the agency failed to consider how it would impact worker safety.
In response, the USDA commissioned studies comparing chicken plants that operated their slaughter lines at 140 birds per minute to those operating up to 175 birds per minute, and pork plants that operated at the standard 1,106 hogs per hour and then sped up.
They found that 81 percent of workers at poultry plants and 46 percent at pork plants are at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, like carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis.
That risk didn’t stem directly from the speed of the automated evisceration lines — the studies found no correlation between the two. But they did find a correlation between risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders and each employee’s workload, or “piece rate” — the number of animals or pieces of meat they cut up per minute. If an individual employee’s workload goes above a certain pace, the researchers found, they’re more likely to get injured.
“There is no doubt from this study that the speed at which workers have to process chickens or swine is directly tied to risk of musculoskeletal disorders,” said Berkowitz.
In the study, some slaughter plants operating at faster slaughter line speeds added enough staff or automation to make up for the higher workload, but most did not — which increased injury risk.
Trump’s USDA and meat industry groups have conveniently ignored that critical finding about employee workload — their press releases about the benefits of speeding up slaughter lines fail to say anything about increasing staffing to prevent injury. The temporary waivers that allow slaughter plants to speed up slaughter lines don’t require increased staffing, and the USDA didn’t respond to a question as to whether its proposed rule would mandate it.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has already called for additional staffing, in addition to “improved reporting of workplace injuries, expanded access to early and adequate medical treatment, and job modifications that minimize ergonomic stressors.”
Ultimately, Berkowitz said, the meat industry “runs the USDA — it’s a very captive agency.” And she balked at the USDA and meat industry celebrating a study that found 81 percent of poultry workers and 46 percent of pork workers experiencing such high rates of injury risk: “Are you saying that’s acceptable?”
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