The Hormel Foods (HRL) plant in Fremont, Neb., is a sprawling complex, just across the Union Pacific tracks on the southern edge of town. Every day of the week, some 1,400 workers arrive before dawn and emerge in the midafternoon, chatting briefly in the parking lot before fanning out onto the highway. It’s a routine with few surprises, but inside the plant, a grand, if largely ignored, experiment is under way, one that is testing the limits of industrial production—and worker and food safety.
Each working day, more than 10,500 hogs are slaughtered here—that’s 1,300 hogs per hour
Each working day, more than 10,500 hogs are slaughtered here—their carcasses butchered into parts and marketed as Cure 81 hams or Black Label bacon, the scraps collected and ground up to make Little Sizzlers breakfast sausages. That’s 1,300 hogs per hour, a 33 percent jump in the last decade. To make that happen, Hormel invested $7 million in a plant expansion in 2005 and added an additional 20,000 square feet in early 2012 to meet demand for its signature product, Spam. “We’ve been fortunate enough to be doing business in Fremont, Neb., producing Spam since 1947,” Donnie Temperley, then the plant manager, told the local newspaper. “The people at the plant are very proud of what they do. They’re outstanding employees.”
What few people, even at the Fremont plant, appreciate is that its remarkable production increases stem from a special program piloted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1997. The program cut the number of Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors on the processing line from seven to four and permitted participating companies to accelerate line speeds in five pork-processing plants: Excel in Beardstown, Ill.; Hatfield Quality Meats in Hatfield, Pa.; Farmer John in Vernon, Calif.; Quality Pork Processors (QPP) in Austin, Minn.; and Hormel Foods in Fremont.
The idea for the program sounded promising: If plants hired their own quality-assurance officers to sort out diseased carcasses and parts before they reached government inspectors, then, proponents theorized, there would be fewer carcasses for the USDA to inspect and reject. This weed-out of diseased animals earlier in the process would reduce the chance of food contamination; it would also allow plants the flexibility to devise their own inspection processes, rather than adhering to rigid cookie-cutter requirements; and, best of all, these efficiencies would streamline production, reducing the cost of pork for consumers.
Almost from the moment the program was fully implemented in 2003, the participating meatpackers saw huge benefits. In 2004, Excel and Hatfield achieved the largest production increases (measured by total number of swine) of any two packers in the U.S. The other three plants accelerated production for Hormel—not just at the official Hormel plant in Fremont, but also at QPP, which bills itself as a “custom packer” for Hormel, and at Farmer John, which Hormel purchased at the end of 2004. Thus, for the last decade, Hormel’s three cut-and-kill operations—the plants that supply all 9.4 million hogs annually for its operation nationwide—have been among these select five plants that have profited from dramatically increased line speeds.
Hormel’s corporate strategy since the start of the millennium has been to expand into new product lines and buy up existing brands such as Lloyd’s Barbeque to get its pork into a wider range of ready-made products—and reap greater profits. In 2007, Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Ettinger announced that Hormel was generating $1 billion in annual sales from products introduced since 2000. That number has since doubled.
But if packers have been delighted by the increased output, workers’ rights advocates say that runaway production increases have also jeopardized safety. While employees have always experienced challenging conditions along the cut line, Darcy Tromanhauser, program director for Immigrants & Communities at the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, warns that line speeds in meatpacking plants are now “dangerously fast.” In September a coalition of civil rights groups, led by Nebraska Appleseed and the Southern Poverty Law Center, called on the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the USDA to “reduce the speed of the processing line to minimize the severe and systemic risks faced by workers,” such as repetitive stress injuries and cuts and amputations, which affect meatpacking workers at alarming rates.
A Fremont worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals in the workplace, describes a recent incident involving a “gut snatcher,” the person responsible for pulling innards from the abdominal cavity. One day last year, the snatcher still had one of his hands inside the carcass when a saw cut through the spine of the animal and sliced off four of his fingers. “I think he lose two of these,” the witness says, pointing to his middle and ring fingers. Then as if an afterthought, he adds that he too has lost part of a finger—the tip of his left pinkie—to a rib cutter. And his wife also lost her index finger, severed by a fat trimmer. In every case, he says, “they washed it up but never stopped production.”