We are delighted to welcome Civil Eats as a new media partner for #ORFC23. Civil Eats Audience Engagement Editor, Bridget Shirvell, shares what to expect from their ORFC online session on the human impacts of industrial animal agriculture, and how this connects to their recent investigative series, Injured and Invisible.
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections
Over the last decade, more than 1,000 people have died in the animal-agriculture industry in the U.S. However, because of a legal exemption, very few of those incidents were reported to or investigated by the federal government.
In January 2022, Civil Eats, an independent, nonprofit online news and commentary site about the American food system, began researching injury and fatality rates among animal-agriculture workers in the U.S., the people toiling away in rural, isolated regions raising our country’s hogs, chickens, and cows in increasingly industrialised facilities.
While factory farms are often discussed in the context of animal welfare and their environmental and community impacts, the mostly immigrant workforce that keeps them running is rarely part of the conversation. We wanted to understand how this country’s increasingly automated and crowded animal feeding operations might be affecting worker safety in an industry that already ranks third of all occupations for fatalities.
The result of our efforts is the five-part investigation, “Injured and Invisible,” a deep dive into the bounds of OSHA protection for the animal-ag workers, as well as worker risks, including acute injuries and long-term illness, and the corporate trickery that sometimes obscures those harms from public view.
The series describes in detail how an appropriations rider that has passed every year since 1976 restricts OSHA’s ability to regulate the vast majority—96 percent—of animal-ag operations that hire workers in this country. Over a recent decade, 85 percent of deaths related to animal-ag were not reported to the federal agency, in part because of the rider.
On January 6th, join Civil Eats for the panel presentation on the series, “Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The Human Impact of Animal Agriculture,” at the ORFC Online. Associate Editor Christina Cooke will moderate a talk with experts about worker conditions and the lack of government protection in animal agriculture. Learn how the ag lobby continues to discourage worker protections under the guise of protecting “family farms” and how states and advocacy groups are finding solutions.