cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/53152091
Following an anonymous complaint in February, OSHA inspected the plant and fined Smithfield Foods $9,931.60 after observing workers’ exposure to “amputation hazards.” This was preceded by serious citations in 2021, 2023, and 2025.
Working in a slaughterhouse is extremely dangerous. In the US, there are approximately two amputations per week, primarily due to the industry’s poor working conditions and excessively fast pace.
[…]
As reported by KWQC, the leaders also acknowledged “community concerns” over a backlog of rendering material – animal waste, internal organs, and decaying meat – being stored outside the plant, causing a strong, unpleasant smell in the city.
If you have to measure your employee amputation rate in incidents PER WEEK you have a serious problem.
I took that to mean that many incidents across the entire industry in the country, rather than at a single location or even for a single corporation.
In the US, there are approximately two amputations per week
How in the actual fuck is this not on the news?
Is that a real number?
DuckDuckGoes to OSHA
Yup. Looks like it might be.
I cannot possible fathom how this is not
the numbers show that it’s no picnic for the workers, either — many of whom are immigrants or refugees
Oh.
:(
Fuck.
This is so terribly wrong.
There even have been two different human rights watch reports (In 2019 & 2005) on the meat industry working conditions, but it still doesn’t get much press
Don’t worry we’re also giving workers horrible PTSD too
As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine, if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you
Every year hundreds of billions of animals are kept in torturous conditions on factory farms. About 1% of the billions of factory farmed chickens per year are boiled alive (the color of their meat looks different when they’re not killed before being boiled).
Every year about 1-3 trillion fish are slowly (can take 10 minutes) tortured to death (crushing and/or suffocation) by fishing companies and factory farms.
Huh. I thought America super cared about workers’ rights? Welp back to work, this limb won’t sever itself!
Because the news is filled with what Trump says and thinks 24/7
Amputation is a broad term. Could be fingers.
Oh, well never mind then.
I’m just saying it could be why it’s not on the news. Jesus, groupthink is strong on lemmy recently.
The hive mind has judged your perceived empathy, and found it lacking.
Oh a 10K fine, that’ll show them! The system works as intended. The only way to stop the amputations and death is a union.
A union? Don’t you know that unions demand union dues? Wouldn’t you rather use that money to buy a video game? Buying a video game sounds much better than stopping amputations and deaths at work don’t you agree?
Holy fucking shit, is this real?
Yes it is true, unions really do demand dues, so better pocket that money for when gta VI drops amirite
That’s so bad it almost looks like a pro union group created it as rage bait but, nope, it’s legit. Gross.
buy all the video games you want, you’ll never own them.
we’ve really turned this world into shit on shit on shit haven’t we?
I’ve seen that picture before, but I haven’t noticed before now that it is by someone called Delta. Which is pretty funny (to me), because there is a union in Norway (for people employed by municipalities) called Delta (website in Norwegian, didn’t see any option for English).
That insignia indicates it’s Delta Airlines
Delta Dental is the big name in Statesian dental insurance, so I had to look up their logo too.
It’s Delta airlines, one of the biggest US airlines.
Haha nice, maybe delta is a wolf in unions clothing, eroding trust in unions from the inside :P
That is fucking insane. I’ve seen places get $10k in fines for not putting labels on pipes. Those machine should have been shutdown and not allowed to run if the operators were exposed to amputation hazards. That inspector must have been in someone’s pocket
Criminal negligence for thee, not for mee.
Those horrific machines are the safest they have and they’re still unsafe. It wasn’t long ago that the salmon packers would injure out with terrible injuries due to the fact that their job involves a VERY sharp knife and a blinding pace. Slit median nerves mean you can’t hold much, so ya spot them by their floppy left hand.
This is China type shit.
That’s from the government. You can demand (and usually get) a fairly large sum of money for a work related amputation (the amount varies on what is amputated. A toe is less expensive than an arm or an eye. I haven’t looked at the tables in a while, but there are generally agreed upon amounts for each body part in actuarial tables).
Oh yeah but my point is people probably prefer to keep their limbs in the first place. So that’s where the joke fine comes in.
As long as there is a price on your limbs, corporations will just consider them a business expense.
Isn’t Smithfield the company that was videoed grinding up moldy bread still in the plastic packaging for use as pig feed?
Yep, more than just moldy bread, and more than just Smithfield
One of the more surprising ways plastics end up in the food system happens on livestock farms in a practice called garbage feeding. Legal in 27 states, the practice is shown in a 2022 video taken by a maintenance technician at a grain elevator owned by Smithfield, where bread in plastic wrappers was being processed into feed. The video went viral, and an executive from Smithfield responded to say most plastic is vacuumed out onsite. The technician disagreed, but there is no agency that inspects or oversees the process to tell for sure.
Awesome. This is one of those moments when the system truly impresses with creative ways to make profit.
The meat, dairy, egg, etc. industry has no shortage of creative ways to be horrible in search of slight gains. For instance
Forced molting, sometimes known as induced molting, is the practice by some poultry industries of artificially provoking a flock to molt simultaneously, typically by withdrawing food for 7–14 days and sometimes also withdrawing water for an extended period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_molting
Or one particularly bizarre one from the shrimp farming industry
Eyestalk ablation is the removal of one (unilateral) or both (bilateral) eyestalks from a crustacean. It is routinely practiced on female shrimps (or female prawns) in almost every marine shrimp maturation or reproduction facility in the world, both research and commercial. The aim of ablation under these circumstances is to stimulate the female shrimp to develop mature ovaries and spawn.[1] The practice has drawn criticism from animal welfare advocates due to concerns about pain, distress, and long-term impacts on shrimp health and behaviour.[2][3]
Holy fucking shit
Also, worth checking out the Wikipedia categories with a long list of the questionable things. There’s so much more than what I listed, sadly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethically_disputed_business_practices_towards_animals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethically_disputed_research_practices_towards_animals
There’s a lot of topcis that aren’t even articles on Wikipedia too
Or if you want to see something more visually disturbing, there’s a good documentary called Dominion which covers a lot of these industries horrifying practices
Awesome. I’m in pure awe at this innovation.
The mighty force of capitalist innovation.
Did you know that before capitalism, nothing was invented?
Which makes you wonder how they invented capitalism but then again not really.
Moldy bread is used to make bread crumbs for human consumption all day long…
A quick ddg search pulled up nothing, so do you have a source for this?
The meat grinder demands more meat.
Capitalism + deregulation be like
The USA is a third world country shit hole
We Banana Republiced ourselves…
Banana republicans.
Hang on, is this why there is another meat recall? Are we about to get The Jungle 2?
$9,931.60 fine. I guess rounding it up the $68.40 would have been too excessive.
I worked at a place where we got chewed because someone leaned a pallet up against the wall and apparently that’s a $5k fine if osha sees it. Had us all thinking that was silly but really the place was pulling in $2m a day and they really cared more about business image than us. We probably blew $5k just receiving and storing all the owners African hunting trophies.I have definitely heard of this dog shit company before, and not for the other crazy things listed so far in this thread
