Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [26]
“Like a cruise through Disney World’s Pirates of the Caribbean, to survey ergonomists’ theories is to glimpse the exotic and the absurd, occasionally amusing, and some grisly,” Scalia claimed in 1994. For seven years he didn’t let up: ergonomics is founded on “junk science.” Repetitive-stress injuries might not exist at all. Heavy lifting does not cause back strain. Reported increases in repetitive-motion injuries are caused by feeding frenzies created by doctors, reporters, and hysterical workers, a form of mass hysteria. Scalia even managed to popularize (in limited circles) an obscure word from the Greek, iatrogenesis, meaning a disorder caused by the diagnosis or treatment of a physician. What’s wrong with workers is not their wrists, backs, shoulders, or hands—it’s in their heads, he claimed. And it’s put there by “the medical and legal professions, by management, unions, governments and the media.” A veritable cabal of suspect institutions, all joined in league to protect larcenous cookie flippers.
Sherry Durst* is not, like Scalia, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. She graduated high school in Tchula, a town of two thousand in the Mississippi Delta. She has never heard the word iatrogenesis, but she’s smart enough, as Lyndon used to say, to tell chicken shit from chicken salad.
Durst is a small, attractive twenty-two-year-old, with large eyes and a generous smile. While Eugene Scalia was the solicitor general of the Labor Department, Sherry Durst was one of the people he was supposed to be working for.
On the same March morning in 2000 when lawyer/lobbyist Eugene Scalia raced to the front of the Department of Labor hearing room to take the lead in the industry fight against ergonomics protection for workers, Durst got up and took her three-year-old son to the neighbor who takes care of him while she works. She then drove twenty miles to the Freshwater Farms catfish-processing plant, just east of the Yazoo River in Belzoni. She put on an apron, a hair net, special latex gloves, and a pair of rubber boots. She walked into the refrigerated plant and took her station on the thin black rubber mat next to the conveyor belt. At the start of the conveyor belt, live catfish spilled out of holding tanks and began to move in Durst’s direction.
By the time the judge made his opening remarks and Scalia finished his first twenty minutes of testimony, Sherry Durst had skinned one thousand catfish. For eight to ten hours a day, Durst grabs a catfish off the conveyor belt, presses one of its sides against a set of blades mounted on a high-speed rotor, then flips the fishand repeats the process. Then she grabs another, and another, and another. If the line was running fast on March 13, 2000, Durst would have skinned twelve hundred fish before Scalia completed his brief morning testimony.
By the time Judge Vittone adjourned the ergonomics hearing at noon and the lawyers and lobbyists scrambled for cabs to make their lunches at the Red Sage or Olives, Durst had skinned between thirty-six hundred and four thousand catfish. Moments before each live fish arrives at the skinning station, it is stunned by electric shock, beheaded by one woman, and eviscerated by another, who jams each fish’s intestinal cavity against a stationary vacuum pipe called a “long gun.” In order to keep her job at Freshwater Farms, Durst has to skin a minimum of twelve fish a minute. At times, a white supervisor stands behind her with a stopwatch, calculating minutes and catfish. Durst never falls below fifteen, at times hits twenty, and has skinned more than twenty-five catfish a minute.
“It’s hard work,” she said. “You stand on the floor, sometimes eight to ten hours a day. You can imagine how it feels. When the line is moving fast, all you can do is grab the fishes as fast as you can and turn them over on one side and then the other. You lose count.” Workers get a morning break from ten to ten-fifteen—“where we have