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- Up one level
- Amazon doesn't report its warehouse injury rates -- but we have an inside look
Will Evans, Reveal - The Center for Investigative Reporting, PBS Newshour, Nov 27, 2019
- Inside Alabama’s Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs
The South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price. by Peter Waldman, BloombergBusinessweek, March 23, 2017, On June 18, Elsea was working the day shift when a computer flashed “Stud Fault” on Robot 23. Bolts often got stuck in that machine, which mounted pillars for sideview mirrors onto dashboard frames. Elsea was at the adjacent workstation when the assembly line stopped. Her team called maintenance to clear the fault, but no one showed up. A video obtained by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows Elsea and three co-workers waiting impatiently. The team had a quota of 420 dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more than 350, says Amber Meadows, 23, who worked beside Elsea on the line. “We were always trying to make our numbers so we could go home,” Meadows says. “Everybody was always tired.”
- Unsafe at these speeds
Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb 28, 2013 Every day in Alabama, thousands of people report to work at vast poultry processing plants. Inside these frigid plants, workers stand almost shoulder-to-shoulder as chicken carcasses zip by on high-speed processing lines. Together, small teams of workers may hang, gut or slice more than 100 birds in a single minute. It’s a process they’ll repeat for eight hours or more in order to prepare birds for dinner tables and restaurants across America. This grueling work serves as the foundation of a lucrative industry that supplies the country’s most popular meat, a protein source that Americans devour at a rate of more than 50 pounds per person every year. ... Nearly three-quarters of the poultry workers interviewed for this report described suffering some type of significant work-related injury or illness. In spite of many factors that lead to undercounting of injuries in poultry plants, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reported an injury rate of 5.9 percent for poultry processing workers in 2010, a rate that is more than 50 percent higher than the 3.8 percent injury rate for all U.S. workers.