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By Root 1377 0

“IBP’s management was aware of, and participated in, this practice,” the Iowa Supreme Court noted. IBP nurses regularly entered false information into the plant’s computer system, reclassifying injuries so that they didn’t have to be reported to OSHA. Injured workers who proved uncooperative were assigned to jobs “watching gauges in the rendering plant, where they were subjected to an atrocious smell while hog remains were boiled down into fertilizers and blood was drained into tanks.” According to evidence introduced in court, Diane Arndt had a low opinion of the workers whose injuries she was supposed to be treating. The IBP nurse called them “idiots” and “jerks,” telling doctors that “this guy’s a crybaby” and “this guy’s full of shit.” She later admitted that Wilson’s back injury was legitimate. The Iowa Supreme Court concluded that the lies she told in this medical case, as well as in others, had been partly motivated by IBP’s financial incentive program, which gave staff members bonuses and prizes when the number of lost workdays was kept low. The program, in the court’s opinion, was “somewhat disingenuously called ‘the safety award system.’”

IBP’s attitude toward worker safety was hardly unique in the industry, according to Edward Murphy’s testimony before Congress in 1992. Murphy had served as the safety director of the Monfort beef plant in Grand Island. After two workers were killed there in 1991, Monfort fired him. Murphy claimed that he had battled the company for years over safety issues and that Monfort had unfairly made him the scapegoat for its own illegal behavior. The company later paid him an undisclosed sum of money to settle a civil lawsuit over wrongful termination.

Murphy told Congress that during his tenure at the Grand Island plant, Monfort maintained two sets of injury logs, routinely lied to OSHA, and shredded documents requested by OSHA. He wanted Congress to know that the safety lapses at the plant were not accidental. They stemmed directly from Monfort’s corporate philosophy, which Murphy described in these terms: “The first commandment is that only production counts… The employee’s duty is to follow orders. Period. As I was repeatedly told, ‘Do what I tell you, even if it is illegal… Don’t get caught.”’

A lawsuit filed in May of 1998 suggests that little has changed since IBP was caught keeping two sets of injury logs more than a decade ago. Michael D. Ferrell, a former vice president at IBP, contends that the real blame for the high injury rate at the company lies not with the workers, supervisors, nurses, safety directors, or plant managers, but with IBP’s top executives. Ferrell had ample opportunity to observe their decision-making process. Among other duties, he was in charge of the health and safety programs at IBP.

When Ferrell accepted the job in 1991, after many years as an industrial engineer at other firms, he believed that IBP’s desire to improve worker safety was sincere. According to his legal complaint, Ferrell later discovered that IBP’s safety records were routinely falsified and that the company cared more about production than anything else. Ferrell was fired by IBP in 1997, not long after a series of safety problems at a slaughterhouse in Palestine, Texas. The circumstances surrounding his firing are at the heart of the lawsuit. On December 4, 1996, an OSHA inspection of the Palestine plant found a number of serious violations and imposed a fine of $35,125. Less than a week later, a worker named Clarence Dupree lost an arm in a bone-crushing machine. And two days after that, another worker, Willie Morris, was killed by an ammonia gas explosion. Morris’s body lay on the floor for hours, just ten feet from the door, as toxic gas filled the building. Nobody at the plant had been trained to use hazardous-materials gas masks or protective suits; the equipment sat in a locked storage room. Ferrell flew to Texas and toured the plant after the accidents. He thought the facility was in terrible shape — with a cooling system that violated OSHA standards, faulty wiring that threatened