JUNE 1999 - Meatingplace Magazine Point Of View - ROTE THRIVES IN AN INDUSTRY THAT REFUSES TO DEAL WITH IT (Occupational Industrial Safety)

By Steve Sayer

Rote is defined in Webster's Dictionary as a "memorizing process using routine or repetition without full comprehension; unthinking repetition." Go ahead and look it up yourself - it's really there.

Rote is costing meat operations hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars or more a year. Keep addressing those fat monthly corporate checks to the order of "Mr. Rote."

Rote loves to gobble up your hard-earned, bottom-line dollars. In an industry where companies can either live or die on a few pennies per pound, it really makes one wonder where or how priorities are made.

But that's what Rote wants you to do - wonder. While you're wondering about your high workers' compensation bills, Rote continues to eat away at your company's profits.

The life signs of Rote are always there - costly workers' compensation payments, expensive lost-time injuries, and other cause-and-effect injuries and illnesses. Rote keeps raising your cost ratios, damaging employee morale, and even helping perpetuate fraudulent workers' compensation claims.

Rote opens the door for unscrupulous individuals to take advantage of the system. Soon, word gets around and other employees catch "lawsuit fever." You almost can't blame them because it's easy money. All the while, Rote continues to get stronger and fatter.

Rote is a living, thriving parasite leaching off your hard work and sweat. Rote is laughing at you because it is right in your face and you just can't seem to grasp it. Rote is elusive; it doesn't always remain focused long enough to really get clutched because of other priorities you set. Rote has had a successful past and has a bright future.

Why Rote persists

Rote thrives on an ill-trained workforce and prospers where job rotation is non-existent, which is why it loves many in the meat business.

What does Rote look like? Here's a snapshot: Rote has an insatiable appetite derived from company profits, which has made it grossly obese. If Rote's mug shot was in the local post office, it would closely resemble Jabba the Hut from "Star Wars" with a toothpick rolling around in its mouth and a wry, defiant smile on its worn face.

No company in its right mind would knowingly allow Rote to munch off of it - much less allow it to have its grubby hands in the corporate till. Yet, we have kept Rote alive through bad management priorities.

Rote will not discriminate. It loves any industry that is highly repetitive, and any industry that doesn't prioritize the training and educating of its workforce. Like any villain that has existed, Rote does have adversaries. So far, Rote has had four scares in the 1990s that have threatened its livelihood.

Rote's first scare came in 1990 when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration published a set of voluntary ergonomic standards for the meat industry. Statistics indicated overwhelmingly that the meat industry was rated the highest of any industry for repetitive motion injuries. Rote has blazoned such a wide trail of injuries and illnesses that the federal government could not help but eventually tap into it.

The second scare occurred in 1996 when the federal government again came calling - this time in the form of the HACCP regulation. If applied to Rote, the seven principles of HACCP would nearly eliminate it. At the very least, they would lower Rote to a more tolerable and acceptable level.

The third scare for Rote came in 1997 when California's OSHA passed the nation's first enforceable ergonomics standard. It raised a lot of eyebrows and unanswered questions that are still bouncing around [the state capital of] Sacramento. Fortunately for Rote, California's law on ergonomics remains undefined with several pending lawsuits from both industry and trade unions on the docket.

The latest scare came in February (1999) when federal OSHA debuted a web site version of its working draft of a new ergonomic standard proposal. In 1997, there were 276,000 cumulative trauma disorders in the United States. OSHA plans to release a proposed ergonomics standard in September, with a final rule coming perhaps next year.

Rote will never be completely defeated and it knows that. It's too smart for that. But it can be detained, cornered and scaled down through managing.

You see, Rote is allergic to job rotation, training, and education.

You've seen Rote rear its ugly head. Admit it. You just didn't really want to fully recognize or be bothered with that gnawing little chameleon devil...until maybe now.

Steve Sayer is vice president of operations at Alpha Meat Packing Company, Inc. The South Gate, Calif.-based processor has reduced the number of injuries and illnesses to its workforce by more than 88 percent between 1990 and 1998.