(Fwd) FW: Poultry violations
Rick Welsh (rwelsh@gaes.griffin.peachnet.edu)
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 16:52:33 -0500
> >From New York Times
> February 10, 1998
>
>
> Overtime Violations at Poultry Plants
>
> By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
>
> EW YORK -- Federal inspectors found that more than 60
> percent
> of the nation's poultry processing plants violated
> overtime laws, the
> Labor Department announced on Monday.
>
> The inspectors, who examined 51 of the nation's 174 poultry
> plants, also
> found widespread safety problems, among them frequent back
> injuries that
> usually occurred when workers slipped on wet and greasy
> floors.
>
> Deputy Secretary of Labor Kathryn Higgins said that federal
> inspectors
> conducted the survey, first, to encourage the industry to
> improve working
> conditions and, second, to better understand conditions in
> plants
> populated by immigrant, low-wage workers.
>
> Federal regulators said the most frequent overtime
> violations
> involved the
> industry's undercounting of the hours worked by chicken
> catchers, who
> travel to farms to catch chickens and take them to the
> plants.
>
> These officials said 60 percent of the plants failed to pay
> the chicken
> catchers proper overtime, while 51 percent failed to pay
> workers properly
> for job-related tasks before and after work, like cleaning
> up
> and putting
> on safety equipment.
>
> Greg Denier, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial
> Workers
> Union, said "that 60 percent are not in compliance with the
> wage-and-hour law shows that they're an outlaw industry."
>
> But officials with the National Broiler Council, the
> industry
> association,
> defended the poultry plants by asserting that the level of
> violations was
> high mainly because the Labor Department was enforcing the
> law
>
> differently from the way it previously had.
>
> David Wylie, a lawyer for the council, said that for 60
> years
> federal
> officials had regarded chicken catchers as agricultural
> employees, who are
> not covered by federal overtime laws, rather than as
> industrial employees,
> who are covered.
>
>
> --
>
>
Rick Welsh
Southern Region SARE Program
University of Georgia
Georgia Station
1109 Experiment St.
Griffin, GA 30223-1797
phone: 770-412-4788
fax: 770-412-4789
e-mail: rwelsh@gaes.griffin.peachnet.edu
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with "unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".