Workers in a pork processing plant, 2016. Photo courtesy of U.S. General Accountability Office.
Take a seat in the Break Room, our weekly roundup of labor news in Minnesota and beyond. This week: USDA allows higher line speeds at meat processing plants; illegally fired federal workers get called back with more layoffs looming; 630 mine workers laid off on Iron Range; and 120 nursing home workers plan to strike next week.
USDA allows higher line speeds at meat processing plants
The Trump administration announced it will allow faster line speeds at pork and poultry processing plants, potentially increasing risks to thousands of workers in a grueling and dangerous industry.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said on Monday the agency will extend waivers to to facilities to maintain higher line speeds while moving toward making the speed increases permanent.
The agency also said it would stop requiring plans to submit worker safety data, which will still have to be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “Extensive research,” USDA said, “has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries.”
Industry leaders celebrated the move, having long sought to eliminate evisceration line speeds. Union leaders warned the policy will lead to more worker injuries, and consumer advocates said it could compromise food safety as the industry confronts the outbreak of bird flu.
“Increased line speeds will hurt workers – it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite – and increased production speeds will jeopardize the health and safety of every American that eats chicken,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents over 15,000 poultry workers at facilities across the southern United States.
Earlier this year, under the Biden administration, the USDA released a pair of studies that found 81% of poultry processing workers and 46% of pork processing workers were at high risk for musculoskeletal disorders from the fast, repetitive movements of chopping up carcasses hour after hour. Two out of five workers surveyed said they experienced moderate to severe pain over the previous year, though many never reported it to managers.
As the USDA asserted, the studies did not find that workers’ risk for injury increased significantly with the speed of the evisceration line, which is a highly automated part of the process in which the organs are removed and the carcasses are cleaned and inspected.
However, on the more labor intensive part of the line where workers cut and trim carcasses, the researchers found workers’ risk for injury did increase with their workloads.
The USDA is primarily concerned with supporting the industry and food safety — rather than worker safety — and only regulates the speed of the evisceration line and not the speed of the cutting and trimming later in the process. The agency also doesn’t regulate staffing levels, which is an equally important variable to workers’ safety.
“To us, the most important finding is that there are not enough workers in these facilities to get the job done safely,” said Dr. Robert Harrison, a principal investigator on the two studies and a professor at the University of California-San Francisco specializing in occupational medicine.
He said line speeds could likely increase safely so long as it’s accompanied by increased staffing.
In his first term, the Trump administration sought to eliminate line speed limits for pork processors, which was blocked by a federal judge in Minnesota following a challenge from unions. After that, certain pork processing facilities — including Quality Pork Processors in Austin — were allowed to operate above the regular threshold of 1,106 pigs per hour while submitting data used to evaluate the effect on workers for the USDA study.
Poultry processing plants with waivers may process up to 175 birds per minute, up from a previous limit of 140 birds per minute, but still much slower than other countries, including Canada and Germany.
In 2023, Minnesota adopted new standards for large meat and poultry processing facilities, which are required to take steps to reduce workplace injuries through additional training. Meat and poultry processing facilities must also have ergonomic programs to assess the risks of musculoskeletal disorders and provide employees a way to report injuries.
The industry has a spotty record when it comes to protecting its workers and seeking to use its influence with Trump to get around regulations: ProPublica obtained emails and other documents in 2020, for instance, showing that the industry had “ignored years of pandemic warnings, tried to overrule public health officials and exposed vulnerable workers and their communities to COVID-19.” Documents unearthed in a wrongful death lawsuit and by congressional investigators added more details to the reporting.
Federal agencies begin calling back illegally fired workers
Federal agencies began reinstating thousands of fired workers, though placing most on paid administrative leave, after two judges ruled the Trump administration’s indiscriminate firing of probationary employees was illegal.
As the Reformer reported this week, the firings cut across a broad swath of government services: helping veterans access benefits, helping cities comply with environmental regulations, and helping the public find information on the government’s thousands of websites. Two of the workers interviewed by the Reformer were reinstated this week as a result of the lawsuits, one of which was brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison with 19 other state attorneys general.
Trump has appealed the reinstatements while his administration pursues even greater cuts to the federal workforce, about a third of whom are veterans.
This week, U.S. Rep. Angie Craig with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith held a news conference with workers from Veterans Affairs to decry the administration’s plans to slash the agency by upwards of 80,000 workers.
The agency has grown in recent years in response to the massive increase in veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan needing services as they age, as well as an entirely new benefit from a 2022 toxic exposure law known as the PACT Act. The law was intended to help veterans following the military’s use of open air burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Jacob Romans, a nurse at the Minneapolis VA and president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669, said since the PACT Act passed in 2022, 740,000 veterans signed up for care through the VA, a 33% increase.
“It is not sustainable,” Romans said, citing increasing volume while cuts erode 15-20% of the workforce. “We have already been experiencing extreme staff shortages at the Minneapolis VA, where we are being mandated to work 16-hour shifts.”
630 miners laid off on Iron Range
Cleveland-Cliffs will temporarily idle two iron mines — Hibbing Taconite and Mincorca Mine — in northern Minnesota, laying off approximately 630 workers amid a slowdown in the U.S. automotive industry contending with worsening consumer sentiment, high interest rates and now looming tariffs from the Trump administration.
In a statement, the company said the temporary idles are needed to “rebalance working capital needs and consume excess pellet inventory produced in 2024.”
The Iron Range is as productive as it’s ever been, though jobs are highly sensitive to swings in demand for steel, and automation has steadily reduced the number of workers needed to harvest tens of millions of tons of ore from the narrow band of iron-rich rock running from Grand Rapids to Babbitt.
Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves is bullish on Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel, and the higher price domestic producers are able to charge may ultimately help the American steel giant.
But it also means their customers in manufacturing will have to pay more for steel, which could dampen demand and hurt the broader economy.
“This is difficult news for our Steelworkers, their families, and our entire Iron Range community … I will do everything in my power to support these workers and will work with Cleveland-Cliffs during these tough economic times,” Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, said in a statement announcing the layoffs.
The layoffs, which the company says will be temporary, will start in May, after which workers will be able to collect unemployment benefits. It’s unclear how long the mines will be idled. Chris Johnson, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2705 representing HibTac, said employees have been given the option to transfer within Cliffs, though it’s unlikely local mines will be able to absorb everyone, Iron Range Today reported.
120 nursing home workers threaten strike
Some 120 workers at two nursing homes in the Twin Cities metro say they plan to strike for two days beginning Tuesday as they seek higher pay and staffing levels.
The workers at Providence Place in Minneapolis and The Villas at St. Louis Park, who are unionized with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa, include cooks, culinary aides, housekeepers and nursing assistants.
The union announced on Friday that it had reached tentative agreements at two other nursing homes — Regina Senior Living in Hastings and Cerenity Senior Care-Humboldt in St. Paul — averting strikes at those facilities planned for next week.
The agreement on a two-year contract includes a 5% wage increase and longevity bonuses up to $700 a year. The companies also agreed to recognize the holiday standards set by the state’s new Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board.
Nursing home industry groups have sued to block the board’s new rule entitling workers to time-and-a-half on 11 state holidays next year. The board, created by the DFL-controlled Legislature in 2023, voted earlier this year to raise the minimum pay for nursing home workers to an average of $22 per hour in 2026 and $23.49 per hour in 2027.