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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 11, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Meat inspectors' union reveals raw truth

'The Jungle' revisited

By John Catalinotto

"A corporate honor system [for ensuring food safety] cannot pass the laugh test as a substitute for federal inspection. Otherwise it will be just another fecally- souped-up honor system vulnerable to more frequent abuses than the status quo."

So says Dave Kroeger. And he should know.

Kroeger is the president of the Midwest Council of Food Inspection Locals of the Government Employees union. This summer, even before the E. coli scandal at Hudson Foods broke, he issued a statement slamming the Clinton administration's proposal for a new Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system.

The August recall of 25 million pounds of beef made everyone aware that the next bite of a hamburger may bring you more harm than mere acid indigestion. But to find out what's really going on with the government's new plans for meat inspection, a good place to start is with the workers who poke, prod and carefully observe the thousands of cattle slaughtered daily--the food inspectors.

The HACCP plan would have the food industry use modern science to identify sources of potential contamination. But it relies on the corporations themselves to set up and carry out the procedures.

In his statement, Kroeger writes that Midwest inspectors "don't believe that much or most of the meat and poultry industry can `self-police' themselves regardless of their rosy rhetoric. HACCP's most egregious weakness is its dependency on company records made out by company employees who are doing the inspections."

The number of actual government inspections dropped from 21,000 in 1981 to 5,000 a year ago. With the HACCP plan, inspections will continue to drop.

The food inspectors' union facetiously refers to HACCP as "Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray." Many of its members worked in quality control for agribusiness before switching hats. They know through first-hand experience how corporations will skimp on safety to increase production, spurred by the drive for profit.

Kroeger reports about how "a plant employee working on a boning line accidentally opened an abscess [an infection site in the slaughtered animal]. Knowing the right procedures, [the worker] stopped the line for disposal and clean-up.

"A plant management support person who happened to be in the area came over to see what was happening. Upon seeing the open abscess, this person remarked that it's only a small abscess so clean-up wasn't necessary!

"Fortunately, the management person was ignored, as in a union plant there would have to be a procedure before firing the employee for doing something right. But what would this person's (company's) standards be for acceptable versus unacceptable amounts of pus in a product? The public's expectation is zero."

Another example: "An inspector told of a slaughter plant that needed someone to operate the electronic scale on the kill floor, as the scale person [had] called in sick. The Quality Control person was the only employee sufficiently trained, so he ran the carcass scale all day. No one else made any of the checks that he usually did for whatever QC plan the company had.

"[Yet] several days later the inspector looked through the file [and] all usual [QC] records were in place for that one day and showed no deficiencies. ... These records were fiction."

Kroeger adds that most inspectors in the Midwest Council believe that unless there is more intense oversight by the inspectors, "HACCP could have a harmful affect on consumer protection."

An Australian meat inspector, commenting on Kroeger's article, wrote: "From my experience company management will produce as much product as possible within a limited time to impress others in their hierarchy and maximize profits. They will overlook many regulations in the scope of doing this and are often exposed by on-plant inspection personnel."

The inspectors' stories, collected by their union, make it clear that even those quality-control workers who want to do an honest job will be pressured by management to speed up the slaughter. Without on-site inspections that are not under the control of the company, and without an effective way of punishing offending meatpacking firms, there will be more diseased meat, chicken and shellfish on the market.

The union representing the overworked inspectors themselves calls instead for the government to deploy many more inspectors and implement a real food-safety program aimed at protecting the public health, not the companies' profits.

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