The Importance of Independent Media and Quality Reporting: a Case Study

Editor's note: With yet another proposed giant media acquisition (Comcast/Disney) in the news at the time of publication, this article provides an example of important investigative reporting that is increasingly rare among giant media conglomerates. It also is a case study in why media diversity and independence matters: thorough reporting on issues that matter can improve people's lives, or even save lives.

It's possible that a chain-owned paper could have produced the report highlighted here, rather than the employee-owned Omaha World-Herald. Such investigative reporting, however, is expensive and increasingly rare among media corporations whose focus is necessarily the bottom line. Our thanks to all the people who take pride in producing quality journalism.

The cattle pens in the south Omaha stockyards are empty. The Livestock Exchange Building is being converted into apartments. These days Omaha calls to mind Warren Buffet as often as it does meatpacking, but the industry remains as much a part of the local identity as it does of the local economy. The indoor football team is called The Beef; its mascot, Sir Loin. The Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce only recently retired the city slogan: Rare. Well Done. Nebraska is officially the Cornhusker State, but everyone here knows that corn is grown to feed the more than seven million head of cattle that are slaughtered in the state each year. The meatpacking houses have moved out to the countryside, to modern automated plants. It's a $1.2 billion business.

When an E. coli breakout at a meatpacking plant prompted the Omaha World-Herald to run a five-part investigative series in 1997, the Nebraska Cattlemen association persuaded cattle auctioneers to pull their advertising from the paper and led an effort to cancel subscriptions. The World-Herald -- an employee-owned, statewide newspaper with a 192,000 daily circulation -- doesn't have a near competitor in Nebraska, but the cattlemen had their effect. "We still are taking heat and feeling the repercussions from that," says executive editor Larry King. So when an ambitious new investigative team led by Mike Reilly, an assistant managing editor, suggested another inquiry into the meatpacking industry, there was an "implicit expectation that we were going to be very careful and very thorough," says Reilly.

Six nights a week, while Nebraska sleeps, Carlos and his co-workers sanitize an Excel plant that is caked every weekday with the blood and fat and guts of 4,400 butchered cattle. The workers spray burning chemicals and water. They scrub sprockets and belts. They remove meaty clogs from the floor drains. They work fast --- they have to -- because the plant can't whir back into production at 5:30 a.m. unless it is spotless.

Carlos isn't his real name. It's the name the World-Herald used for an illegal Mexican immigrant who works as a cleaner in one of the state's largest meat-processing plants. Reporter Steve Jordon met with Carlos twice before he learned his actual name, so great was Carlos's concern about jeopardizing his job, even if it was a job that few documented workers would want.

Jordon's conversations with Carlos launched a ten-month investigation that involved three reporters, thirty Freedom of Information Act requests, eighty sources, and more than six hundred phone calls. The front-page story, which ran last October 12, detailed what was known to many people working in the plants: that while meatpacking is recognized as one of the nation's most injury-prone occupations, the men who clean up at night after the meatpackers have gone home are at even greater risk, pushed to work so hard and so fast that safety goes by the wayside. But because these cleaners are lumped into an industry category with office janitors and hotel maids, the true danger of their work has escaped the scrutiny of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And because the majority of the cleaners, like Carlos, are working with false documents, they don't complain about conditions that routinely lead to acid burns, crushed bones, amputated limbs. Sometimes to death.

Jordon has been a business reporter for the World-Herald for more than twenty years. He has a calm, intelligent manner and a historian's knowledge of Omaha. His short white hair and dark suits lead colleagues to joke that undocumented workers must fear he is a Fed when they see him coming. He can list the flow of immigrant populations that have worked in the meatpacking plants over the years, from Czechs to Poles to Italians, and now, Hispanics. He knows the industry well, but what he learned in December 2002 when he met Carlos in a small aluminum-sided union hall, ninety miles from the newspaper's Omaha office and ninety miles from just about anywhere, was news to him.

Carlos works for a cleaning company that is subcontracted by the Excel plant, a common arrangement in the Nebraska meatpacking industry. He is paid to sanitize the plant, to clear out the meat left in the machinery, to hose the blood off the kill floor. If he cleans his area by the end of his seven-hour shift he receives a bonus. If he falls behind, even for a night, he can lose his bonus for the entire week. The pressure encourages Carlos and his co-workers to cut corners. They don't follow the time-consuming machinery-lock-out/tag-out procedure required by OSHA. As the World-Herald explained, "Locking out is the equivalent of turning off a light in your house by going to the basement, turning off the circuit breaker and inserting a padlock that prevents others from turning it back on." There isn't time for that.

"Move your ass," the supervisors have yelled at Carlos as he worked. They know that there are plenty of other immigrants who want these jobs, even at a starting wage of $6.50 an hour. And Carlos thinks it would be tough to find a new job with his forged identity documents and limited English.

Jordon met Carlos a second time in a small house that Carlos rents near the plant, in a town where the five & dime and the bakery have been replaced by a taqueria and a Mexican grocery store. Carlos showed Jordon scars from burns he received working with cleaning chemicals, but asked that he not describe them in his story for fear they would identify him to his supervisors. Carlos talked Jordon through his shift, slowly explaining the routine of scrubbing conveyer belts, grinders, blenders, and bone cutters. He showed Jordon his pay stubs, evidence of the long nights he has clocked at the plant. Carlos provided critical information the World-Herald needed to begin its investigation, but he chose not to meet with reporters from the paper again after that. It was the first of many frustrations in getting illegal immigrants to participate as sources in the story. They want work that is safer and better paid, but cleaning is one of the few jobs available to them in the area. A local labor union official estimates that 90 percent of the people employed as cleaners in the Excel plant are Mexicans or Guatemalans working in the U.S. illegally. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services estimates -- perhaps conservatively -- that 25 percent of the meat-processing employees in Nebraska and Iowa are working with false documents. The influx of Mexicans to the area prompted the Mexican government to open a consulate office in midtown Omaha in 2001.

When Mike Reilly sent an e-mail to the investigative team outlining the criteria for a great project, he wrote, "Remember we're looking for greed, waste, death or all three." In the story of the meatpacking cleaners he found all three.

Reilly had recently appointed Jeremy Olson, a young reporter who had distinguished himself in an exposé on Nebraska's child mental-health-care system, to the investigative team. Olson became the lead reporter and writer for the meatpacking cleaners story. Jordon gave Olson the notes he had taken in his conversations with Carlos. It was now Olson's job to quantify what they knew anecdotally. The hardships of the meatpacking cleaners had been mentioned in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. They were discussed in local union halls. But how many others did Carlos represent, what was the extent of the danger, and why was the situation being overlooked by regulators?

Olson sent out FOIA requests to twenty-five OSHA offices asking for the inspection reports of those cleaning companies that had received fines for lock-out/tag-out infractions and other violations. The reports he received back were chilling: contract cleaner loses legs when a worker activates the grinder in which he is standing; cleaner loses hand when he reaches under a boning table to hose meat from chain; cleaner killed when hog-splitting saw is activated; cleaner dies when he is pulled into a conveyer and crushed. Olson calculated that thirty people had died in packinghouse cleaning incidents in this country since 1987 and hundreds more had suffered severe injury.

Every year OSHA inspects industries with a high incidence of on-the-job injuries as calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics -- limited resources force the agency to play the percentages. But because the injury statistics for meatpacking cleaners are analyzed in a category separate from the meatpacking industry itself, their startling injury rate was diluted and failed to make its way onto anybody's radar.

It was ultimately Workers' Compensation Court files that provided Olson with the bulk of the information he needed to dig into the investigation. The files confirmed the scenes Carlos had described in the plant: hand crushed in rollers when worker tried to catch a scrubbing pad that he dropped; worker cleaning table loses fingers in pinch point of a table; hand crushed between rollers and belt while wiping grease off machine. Olson spent weeks creating spreadsheets that detailed the names of the cleaning contractors, their injured employees and the nature of the injuries. Stacked-up manila file folders crowded his small cubicle. In the end, he calculated that one in every ten cleaners working in the meatpacking industry will suffer a severe work-related illness or injury each year; that the meatpacking cleaners have an injury rate four times greater than those of the jobs they are grouped with; that meatpacking cleaners were more prone to severe injury than the meatpackers themselves.

What makes cleaning so dangerous is that it exposes workers to the "pinch points" of industrial plants. Bits of meat and grease stick to the teeth of grinders; they drip behind safety guards, and they dangle from gears and chains.

The safety barriers that protect daytime workers become impediments at night, because cleaners have to get around and behind them to thoroughly sanitize the plant.

The files also provided Olson with the telephone numbers and addresses of hundreds of injured cleaners. He called every one. Where no phone number was listed or the phone number was no longer valid, Olson, along with Cindy Gonzalez, an experienced immigration reporter, knocked on doors. Often they would find groups of men sleeping on living-room floors together. They became more conscious of the hours the cleaners kept. They came to expect and understand their hesitancy to talk. The reporters had conversations back at the office with Reilly about their desire to spark reform in the industry without provoking a workplace raid that might result in deportations. In the end, they decided it was important to just get the information out there. They assured the cleaners their anonymity would be maintained, but could not guarantee that their cooperation would benefit them in the short term, or even the long. More than thirty cleaners agreed to be sources in the World-Herald investigation.

The rest of the material Olson fleshed out through interviews with union officials, USDA officials, OSHA inspectors, meatpackers, meat-industry officials, attorneys, Hispanic advocates, civic leaders, and cleaning-company executives. Before the story ran, Olson took the unusual step of showing his copy to the primary sources he worked with to ensure he didn't unwittingly use a detail that would identify them. The cleaners were less concerned about the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services -- which has generally turned a blind eye to the situation of undocumented workers in the meatpacking industry -- than about supervisors who would want to get rid of troublemakers.

When the story finally ran in the Sunday World-Herald sunrise edition the cleaners were no doubt still asleep. Few of them would have been able to read the story in English anyway. It was read closely by the local OSHA office, which, as reported in the World-Herald the following Sunday, contacted several cleaning companies and requested that they work with OSHA to create a new safety training program. A similar program set up in 2000 has reduced the number of injuries among daytime meatpackers. Jose Santos, the worker rights coordinator for the meatpacking industry in the Nebraska Department of Labor, confessed that when he read the story on-line, it was the first time he was made aware of the hazards afflicting the cleaners. He said he is grateful for the important investigation the World-Herald did and is now working closely with OSHA on the issue. Nobody in the industry pulled any advertising.

© 2004 Columbia Journalism Review

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