NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Jim McCauley, Perdue, Inc.
My name is Jim McCauley. I am the Director of Safety for Perdue Farms out of Salisbury, Maryland. For you people up here in the mid-west, that's P-E-R-D-U-E. You know, we're criticized quite a bit, because we're not astute as P-U-R-D-U-E, but we define that as them being the boiler makers and we're the broiler makers.
In 1989, North Carolina OSHA came into two of our five plants in North Carolina. We were located in five different states at that particular time, and they conducted an ergonomic audit. They cited us, and we have been into ergonomics for a couple of years and were trying some things out. As typical, since we didn't have a written program, they cited us, and we ended up paying about $46,000 in penalties. We finally entered into an agreement, a voluntary agreement, as the lawyers call it, in 1991.
Now, bear in mind, we were cited in '89. We entered into an agreement in 1991. The agreement that we worked out with North Carolina, I think, is the secret to our whole success. North Carolina did not come in there and mandate that we do this, we do that and give us a time that we had to do it in. What we did, we sat down and tried to look at the problems and take an approach to solve those problems. It is kind of like Rab said, make sure we had an on-going process and not just do something and put it down on a piece of paper and then kind of forget about it next month.
So we put in a process. When we got through putting in what we thought would make a good ergonomic program, we said, well, look, if it's going to work for two plants, which we thought it would, why don't we put the other three plants in North Carolina in the same agreement, which they allowed us to do. We were doing business in four other states. So we said, hey, if it's good for North Carolina, why isn't it good for Indiana, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland? And so, we drew in the whole company. At that time, we had nine different plants. So we put them all under the same type of an agreement that we had with the five plants in North Carolina.
Today, what I'd like to do is just present an overview, if you might, what this agreement was with North Carolina, how we went about it, and the results that we have achieved with this program. As of January '95, this agreement expired with North Carolina. We tried to go back into a new and voluntary agreement with them, but they have other programs now which supersede that. Our new program is basically the same, we just fine tuned the old one, because you're going to learn that what you think is going to work, may or may not work.
Another feature about North Carolina, if it didn't work, they allowed us to sit down and tell them what we thought might work a little bit differently, and they allowed us to do it. One of the things that we do was on the Ergo Committee, to get the employee involvement. They asked that the committee serve only six months and then get another committee.
We were finding out that we were doing so much training to get people oriented into ergonomics to be on the committee, but no sooner did we feel secure and they feel secure about ergonomics, they were being moved off the committee. We had 10, 12 new people coming on board for the Ergonomic Committee. So we went to North Carolina, and we changed it to where we had the people serving on the committee for 12 months, and it really worked out well, because they were able to really get involved.
We also staggered the time members served on the committee so we did not have to change the whole committee at one time.
The first thing we did was to education all of our associates about ergonomics. Education is an absolute, not only just the hourly associates but for the management team. We first had to educate the very top level. Frank Perdue was heading up our company at that time. He has since gone into semi-retirement, and his son, Jim, is now running the company. But Frank really bought into it. Jim has also bought into it, and it's now endorsed from the very top, down into the management levels at the particular plants.
I think some of the other people this morning made mention that you have to have management involvement. And in my opinion, that's an absolute. If you can't get management to believe in it, you're going to have a hard job trying to sell it to the rank and file out there on the floor.
Education, we spent a lot of time bringing people off the floor initially to educate them into ergonomics, because we had not done that at the time they were hired. Now that we've gone through that, every time a person is hired at any of our plants, they go through an orientation program.
Part of that orientation is to school them into ergonomics. Normally, that's handled by the safety supervisor and the medical staff, normally, a licensed nurse in each of the plants. Once we get them into the classroom situation, and it is a classroom situation, we really dwell on the idea that it has to be their program. They have to be personally responsible for themselves. We try to tell them what they can expect as far as soreness is concerned. But it's up to them to make sure that their supervisor knows when they start getting sore so they can go to the nurse's office and to get into a pre-treatment type of thing, a medical intervention, if you might. We've also schooled our supervisors that they can't allow a person that they know is having pain to continue working. They have to take them off the floor. And if they have to, escort them to the medical office so that the nurse can take a look at them. We found that by early intervention, we prevent a lot of full blown CTS cases. We have prevented a lot of surgeries. We're a company now of about 18,000 people, and at one time, we were having somewhere between three to five surgeries a month throughout the company for CTS.
Now, we have three or four surgeries a year throughout the whole company. It' been drastically reduced, because we're intervening early , and we're not necessarily removing them from the work force when we do that. Because we work with the medical providers, our nurses inside the plants, as well as the doctors on the outside that are treating our people.
I don't know about you, but we found that in our plants -- most of our plants are located in the rural areas, Carpal Tunnel was something most of the doctors had read about in their medical journals and really didn't know that much more about it. And we would have our associates go to them and right away, it was surgery. There was no kind of nerve conduction test or anything else performed. They were doing a full blown release of a hand, like Rab was showing you. And some cases, they were doing it on both wrists at the same time. So you know what that did for that person at that point.
The next thing we started is what we call "ramp-in." Ramp-in is, for lack of another word, job conditioning. This is to prepare our people to go out there on the floor and do their job. As we described this morning, we're not assembling cars, we're disassembling chickens. And when you disassemble chickens, it's a lot of manual work that has to go into it. So we try and condition our people.
We use a lot of scissors. We use a lot of knives, and this has to be fine trimming, because we do turn out some of the best chicken in the world. I know Tyson's out there, and I'm sure they would agree with that. No, they're -- they have pretty good chicken. But we do a ramp-in so we can get them hardened for their job. The secret there is that we say we harden them, condition them, ramp them, in on their jobs.
That's plural. That's not singular. Because the people, as they are learning, they're learning two or more jobs initially. Because once we get into the ramp-in, then they're going to rotate on a particular schedule into other selected jobs.
You have to go through your plant and actually look at and score your jobs. This job being illustrated is a breast machine operator. We're doing a risk factor scoring here so we can find out how we're going to classify this particular job. And if you'll notice, we've taken everything there, the fingers, the wrist, the elbows, the shoulders, the back, the neck, and we're scoring it. Then we come down, and we get a total score for the job which is 135 or a high risk job. We do that because we want to be able to put the associate into the rotation schedule for other jobs so they will not be using the same group of muscles that they were using on the previous job. So changing jobs is not the thing to do. Illustration: We had a line that associates were working and the chickens were coming from the left of the people. They were rehanging, as we call it. And so, we told the supervisor they would have to be rotated.
Well, the supervisor thought he was an ergonomist, so he had it figured out that he would take his people from this side of the line, and then during rotation put them on the other side of the line. That way, the chickens were coming from the right instead of from the left. Well, that didn't cut it. So what we've done is that the "X's," and there's another part to this, but I'm not going to go through the whole thing. The "X's" say they are jobs that cannot be rotated into.
So if you go to the top, the stack off in the cooler, it'll go across. And then it'll say all those "X's" at the top, they're jobs that they cannot rotate into. But it identifies the jobs that can be used for rotation such as the "Box Icer," the "Breast Pack," and "Wing Pack." So that we now give the plants the freedom to look at where they want to rotate their people, and they can do it knowing that they can do it safely, because the jobs have been identified. We do the rotation based upon the type of severity that the people are exposed to.
So you could take a person that is a very high risk, i.e., a person using a knife to trim, particularly breast meat, that they may be rotated on an hourly basis every hour and a half. Somebody else in the "Tray Pack" may be rotated every two and half hours. The actual job dictates how often the associate will be rotated. Some are rotated every hour, some every hour and a half, some every two or two and a half hours. There are some jobs that are classified as low risk that may not require rotation.
What's been said this morning is still true. You still have to worry about productivity. And since we can't engineer out every problem that we have in the plant, we're doing what OSHA describes as administrative controls, and we're doing it through job rotation. There's a lot of controversy I'm sure as some say that rotation's not the best way to lessen the exposure. I beg to differ with that, and I'm going to show you some statistics later on as to what we have experienced through rotation.
We have also implemented a "ramp-in" program, and we use the same definition as we did on the score sheet there as to what's very high risk, high risk, moderate risk, low risk, et cetera. Because there's going to be a difference in the actual ramped-in time. So that when a person comes on board and they're being ramped in, you'll see that for a low risk, moderate risk job that the first week, it's no more than one consecutive hour, et cetera. And then the second week they go into no more than two, two and half hours before they're rotated into their second job. Then if you would look at the high risk and the very high risk jobs, you'll notice that they don't go into regular speed until the fourth week.
Now, you know, this is getting into the pockets of the plant people, because of production supposedly. But again, we can prove that even though we have decreased productivity with new hires, we keep the new hires longer. They're able to really produce for us and give us some money back for the training that we've done.
The other thing is medical intervention, and I can't stress this enough. We've hired a full-time medical director who is something similar to Rab. He was an internist practicing medicine there in Salisbury. He has defined an algorithm for the nurses so that basically all our nurses treat our associates who have expressed some concern about soreness, swelling, etc. in the same manner. They must follow that protocol without exception. So there's nobody out there trying new sciences or new arts that we're not aware of. These are time tested and proven.
This is a busy graph, if you might, and I'm not going to stand here and try to explain it to you. But what I'm trying to show you is that there is a very definite process that our nurses must follow in treating people when they first come to the nurses office. There's a very defined policy that we have. Then there's a defined policy as to when they actually have to be sent to the outside people, medical people, to be addressed also.
If you don't have medical intervention, you don't have good follow up. Then you have a problem. Let me tell you one thing. We've had doctors that work with our people on workers' comp, and we've brought them into our plants nearest to them so they could actually see the work process that was taking place inside the plant. They had heard a lot of horror stories before. They thought they knew what the chicken industry was all about. When they came into our plants and saw what we were doing and how we were working with the associates, they really changed their minds. They saw all the things we have talked about actually taking place. To say the least, they were impressed. The doctors became willing to work with us to treat our associates conservatively. There must be a second opinion before any surgery for CTS can be performed. We've had people go out and have surgery done on one day and actually had been directed to go back to work the following day.
Because the doctor knew what kind of restrictions to place on that person. The doctors will tell you that normally, the best therapy is to get the associates back to work, not leave them out there worrying about their job, worrying about getting 75 percent of their pay under workers' compensation. They come back, and they get their full pay. But the doctors know that we're going to adhere to any restrictions that they place on them. And that's saying quite a bit when the doctors trust you enough to have the people come back in there. Bear in mind, and Rab will probably vouch for this one. Those doctors are not paid by Perdue. They're paid through workers' compensation. And their first responsibility is to their patient, not to Perdue. So, they're not going to give us any special concessions just because we go out there and treat them to lunch or something like that.
The next thing was to make sure that proper reporting was being done. Like everybody else, we could give you horror stories about what was not being recorded that should have been recorded, et cetera. We've actually put the responsibility on the nurses, because they're the ones who see the patients. And we have lost one nurse, because she was fudging a little bit on what was recordable and what wasn't recordable, and we made it very clear at the outset that there was not going to be any playing of games with the recordability.
One thing that we haven't done -- we did do, because North Carolina asked us to, but it became an administrative nightmare. You were always dealing with problems that happened months before. Symptom surveys. We have plants with about 3,000 people in one plant. We did the symptom surveys, and then I would wait for them to tell me what they actually found out from the symptom survey. In 18 months, I'm still waiting to find out, because, these surveys are not yes, no, 1, 2, 3 or whatever. It's telling me what your symptoms are. And by the time you analyze 3,000 symptoms and try to get them into some kind of order, it was history. And we were losing a lot of people, because we were not able to react to their particular pain.
What we do now is on a weekly basis look at the OSHA 200, the nurse and the safety supervisor, to see if there are any trends. We also tell them not only look at the 200, but look at the nurse's register. Because the nurses have to record everybody that comes into the office even if they do nothing but dispense aspirins. It needs to be recorded so that we can look at trends and try and nip them before they actually cause a particular problem.
The other thing, employee participation. It's been said many times, so I'm not going to really get into it that deep. But if you don't get the people in the plants to buy into it and participate, and you're not going to get them to buy into it unless they are participating, then you're just blowing smoke, and you're really not going to get anything out of your programs. It's been said that people that are involved in their own destiny will do a better job for you quality wise and everything else. So let's let that go at that.
One of the things that was not mentioned too much and that was task forces this morning. And we do use a lot of task force. Rab said something about the people there at his places, but if we have a particular ergo problem, we'll go to the associates that are involved in that problem and set them up as a task force to offer us suggestions on how to resolve that problem. And they're only given one problem to resolve, because we don't want them looking at everything else. We have the ergo committee to do that, but the task force deals strictly with that particular task.
I'm not going to stand here and tell you that every suggestion that they turn back into the ergo committee is adopted, because sometimes they generate more of a problem, because they think it's a quick fix, and it really isn't over the long run. So task forces are something that we need to have there.
The graph is from an outside source, so this is not something that we have generated inside. We are self-insured, but we have somebody else actually administer the workers' comp payments and everything else for us. And this is a group of other companies, because we are self-insured, that have formed this co-insurance kind of thing, and we meet twice a year. And if you'll look up there, it will show you the solid yellow line is the industry average. That's the poultry processing industry average for lost work time cases. A little less than 12, but pretty close to it.
If you'll look, then, at the dotted line, this is the council that I'm talking about that we're members of. And if you'll look, then, at the red, that's Perdue itself. Now, this is strictly lost time worked cases. At first, we were measuring and trying to go on total recordable cases, and at first, we were measuring and trying to go on total recordable cases, and at the same time, I think it was mentioned this morning, were trying to get them into the nurse. So you're telling the supervisor, let's cut down on the recordable, but get them in there to see the nurse.
Well, what are you saying to them? So now, we do keep the other figures, by the way. But for our goals and everything, for our people, we're going strictly on the lost work day cases. I had a slide there I was going to put up, but I'm out of time. We had six different plants this year go with a million or more man hours without a lost time illness or accident. And so, I think that pretty much speaks for itself.
That's all for my presentation. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
(Whereupon the Manufacturing #2 session was concluded.)
