The majority of severe injuries that occur at meatpacking plants harm workers’ fingers and fingertips.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration data from 2015 to 2023 shows over half of severe incidents that happened at meatpacking plants in the last decade have injured workers' fingers and fingertips, including amputations.
Of the nearly 1,800 severe injuries that occurred at meatpacking plants, more than 900 injured a worker’s fingers.
Investigate Midwest compared injuries found in the agency’s Severe Injury Reports, which tallies injuries that require hospitalization, amputation, or the loss of an eye, in meat and poultry processing industries against all other industries, and then sorted injuries to fingers and fingertips, which were most common in meatpacking plants.
When looking at injuries across all other industries for the same time period, less than a third of them harmed workers’ fingers.
OSHA officials said that a lack of safety features to prevent body parts like fingers from coming into contact with rapidly moving machinery and blades are a top violation at plants.
