The U.S. meat and poultry industry employs more than 500,000 workers and keeping those workers safe is one of the top industry priorities. For the last 25 years, worker safety has been a non-competitive issue, meaning companies openly share best practices to help improve safety for all. During this period, the meat industry partnered with the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create the first industry specific, voluntary ergonomic guidelines, and numerous other new safety steps and programs have been implemented as standard practices. Data show these have worked, with the industry reporting all-time lows for worker injury and illness rates in the most statistics released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Still, many questions persist about worker safety, so the Meat Institute developed a new Glass Walls video to take viewers inside plants to see many of these steps in action. The video features Tom Young, Smithfield Foods’ senior director of corporate safety and chairman of the Meat Institute Worker Safety Committee, discussing the various procedures and equipment companies use to keep workers safe.