CHICAGO, Jan. 25 (UPI) -- AFL-CI0 President John Sweeney is praising a Human Rights Watch report that accuses U.S. meatpacking and poultry industries of abusing workers' rights.
The 175-page report says meat and poultry plant workers endure unnecessarily hazardous work conditions, making up to 30,000 hard-cutting motions with sharp knives on each shift.
"By exposing the wholesale denial of meatpacking workers' basic rights, the new Human Rights Watch report -- "Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers' Rights in the U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants" -- provides a window into the abuses visited on far too many workers all over the United States every day," Sweeney said in a statement.
The New York-based human rights group said 100 years after Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle," an expose' of turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry, increasing volume and speed of production, close quarters in the workplace, poor training and insufficient safeguards contribute to massive repetitive motion injuries and frequent lacerations for which workers often do not receive any compensation.
The president of the American Meat Institute said the report is riddled with falsehoods and baseless claims.
