A Mississippi slaughterhouse that supplies chicken to Chick-fil-A is directly to blame for the death of a 16-year-old worker who was sucked into equipment in July and killed within minutes, the OSHA said Tuesday.
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Probably a combo of a supervisor getting in the way + a bunch of undocumented employees too terrified of being arrested & deported to do anything against their employer (who has almost certainly threatened to sic ICE on them & ensure they never see their families again if they ever step out of line)
(And by "probably" I mean "virtually guaranteed to be" because fuckers like these HAVE used that exact tactic against undocumented workers in order to keep them "in their place.")
Pt 2 "OSHA officials say that while a manager was supervising in & around the area prior to and during the accident, "procedures were not utilized to disconnect power to the machine."
Pérez was the 2nd person to accidentally die at the plant after getting sucked into a machine in a 2-year period. "
SORRY, but a SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD, a C H I L D, got sucked into a DEBONING MACHINE, and took MINUTES to die !! And the narrative here is must-pay-a-fine-of-over-$200,000. That is PEANUTS to a company like this, WHAT THE FUCK. Put them the fuck out of business.
IMO if an employee dies on company time due to negligence, the owner of that company should be held responsible for that employee's death. Protect your workers or go to jail.
Safety procedures don't have to be good, believe it or not. There is very little mechanism to stress test procedures if the management doesn't want it to be, and OSHA is toothless to a fault. You're on your own in America, despite the laws on the books.
I would believe food processing has more inspections, but I fundamentally don't trust in the self-inspection that the modern regulatory state requires. It's not optional, there aren't enough resources, and they don't pursue bad actors like Amazon who smear industrial accident victims. It's a mess.
They would have food safety inspections, but those inspectors aren't looking for safety issues.
Hell, the food safety regulations in the US were originally created after outrage generated by people reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was *meant* to stoke outrage about working conditions
At the core it comes down to venture capital and late stage capitalism. The human owners can justify the cost of paying fines and they don't care about the human cost (Boeing, CFA). That's because the regulatory hammer is meant to tap people who make mistakes, who can't afford a $100M payout.
So, the fines are meant for midsize companies, but all the companies are LLC monopoly conglomerates divorced from their physical operations fattened by a lack of sec action. Companies can just murder people and the "good faith" case law insulates bad faith companies like Tesla.
My foster mom was a fraud investigator and plant safety analyst. Safety measures are written in blood. If they TRULY followed all safety protocols (doubt) then it means their protocols are flawed and need to be changed immediately so this doesn't happen again.
afterwards or one where they knew exactly what the dangers were but they didn't legally HAVE to reduce them or legally did have to reduce them but it was cheaper to pay a fine and nothing changed and no one was held accountable.
I watch a couple of channels on YouTube that cover accidents and disasters through history, including a lot of industrial accidents, and it's always infuriating when you get to the end of the video to find out whether it's going to be one where no one knew the danger and they changed all the rules
I think it's a reasonable question to ask who's allowed to tell OSHA to increase the fines on worker deaths and let us citizens know so we can kick them in the face until they hand over the entire company to the workers.
Unfortunately, it’s Congress that approves the amounts that a company can be fined. If they believe their investigation shows potential criminal activity, they forwarded it to the Justice Department to decide whether they will charge or not. OSHA doesn’t have the teeth to go after serious offenders
Oh?! Mississippi .. trying to turn the corner on 1860. Wait, actually it’s just fine with 1860. Confederate partisans revived from that era would still feel right at home there. So little has changed.
If someone doesn't go to jail after being found responsible for the death of a kid, then it's not really a punishment. It's just a tax on murdering your employees (and I guarantee they'll appeal & end up paying much less). They'll just raise chicken prices to include the cost of killing a few kids.
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Minutes??
Jesus fuck man.
Wherever will they find the loose change to pay the fine?
Pérez was the 2nd person to accidentally die at the plant after getting sucked into a machine in a 2-year period. "
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/newsreleases/2024/01/OSHA20240036.pdf
$200K?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! 🤬🤬🤬
Everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddamn!
The company says all safety procedures were followed. Surely that means the procedures aren't fit for purpose?
And the fine... $200k FFS.
Hell, the food safety regulations in the US were originally created after outrage generated by people reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was *meant* to stoke outrage about working conditions
Now I'm wondering how they clean the machine afterwards. And not wondering about what I'll eat at Chick-Fil-A.
most of them are the latter.
I fucking hate it here.
I'm down for that.