If the majority of Americans may not give substantial thought tothe process by which certain animals become their food, fewer stillwould give any thought to the myriad workers' compconsiderations for those who facilitate the process from farm toplate.

Brian Rodgers is not one of them.

The senior director of corporate risk management for Butterball LLC,Rodgers knows well the various risks for the 7,200 workers at itsseven plant facilities, three hatcheries and four feed mills. Untilrecently, that included manually ushering live turkeys of up to 50pounds from a large crate and attempting to hang each birdupside-down on a conveyor line for processing. (But more on thatlater.)

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Rodgers describes Butterball as a "fully integrated producer ofturkey products." That involves a journey from insemination to theprocessing and hatching of turkey eggs, along with the transport ofpoults (baby turkeys) to contract farms, raising them to specificsizes, putting the birds in coops, and transporting them toproduction facilities where they're humanely euthanized. Then themeat is packaged and transported to cold-storage warehouses andshipped to stores worldwide.

Interdependent stage

The Butterball Safety Process, Rodgers explains, seeks to embody transformational safety culturechange from the Reactive model (which relies mostly on complianceas the goal) to the Dependent model (which begins the process ofmanagement commitment and adherence to rules and regulations) tothe Independent phase (which is heavily weighted around personalvalues, practice and habits), to the ultimate goal of theInterdependent model — "which aligns the individual to teams ofemployees where each feels a sense of ownership for safety, andtakes responsibility for themselves and others," he says.

The Interdependent stage, Rodgers notes, "is where we do notaccept low standards and risk-taking 'banana peels' — otherwiseknown as unsafe behaviors and/or conditions." These can include wetfloors, hoses stretched across trafficked areas, broken woodpallets — "basically, anything that's not supposed to be there thatcould cause a hazard," says Rodgers. One particular challenge foremployees was the aforementioned process by which live turkeysentered the processing facilities — and the claims they werecausing.

At Butterball's Mt. Olive, N.C., processing facility (thelargest turkey processing facility in the world, where some 2,800employees process approximately 60,000 turkeys a day), the birdshad once arrived at the processing facility in coops on tractortrailers. In what's referred to as a "Live Hang" area, a room keptdark in order to keep the birds more docile and calm, workers wouldremove the turkeys from the coops and hang each one from shackleson an overhead, moving conveyor.

Automated solution investment pays dividends

Employees assigned to the Live Hang area worked in what is bestdescribed as the most difficult and physically demanding job in theentire operation. This is a dimly lit area with multipleelevations, in a wet environment where employees physically handledand guided live birds out of the coops all day long. Musculoskeletal injuries to the shoulder and backwere most common, with a high frequency of injuries requiringshoulder rotator-cuff-tear surgery.

The Mount Olive facility alone, Rodgers says, was averaging adozen OSHA Recordable Injuries per year in the Live Hang process,with an average total incurred cost per injury of $39,560. Anautomated solution was needed, but it wouldn't be inexpensive.

"Based on product-flow efficiencies, we put forth capital tocompletely change how that live-hang process works," says Rodgers.Over $15 million was spent to automate the process: A crane nowlifts the coops off the trailer and maneuvers and places the coopson a conveyor belt with the birds still inside. They are thendropped into an enclosed area where they're euthanized with CO2(whereas before, they were electrically stunned); the crate is thenpulled out of the chamber and the turkeys are hung on the conveyor,on which they travel to be automatically de-headed.

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It was an investment that has paid dividends, eliminating anestimated 85 million opportunities for injury per year. "What was[once] one of the most physically demanding jobs in the building isone of the most if not the most sought-after jobs in thefacility," says Rodgers.

Butterball's Mt. Olive, N.C., factory is the largest turkeyprocessing facility in the world, where some 2,800 employees handleapproximately 60,000 turkeys a day. This batch of frozen turkeyswas distributed in 2011 to families in need by boxing promoter DonKing. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Cuts like a knife

The birds continue on a conveyor to be de-feathered with hotwater, and then need to be carved manually in order to yielddifferent sections of meat. That's when sharp knives and humanhands come into play.

Depending on the size of the facility and type of cuts that needto be made, anywhere from a dozen to 50 people can be working on a"disassembly" line of sorts with extremely sharp knives.Knife-sharpening is critically important, Rodgers says, in order toreduce fatigue in workers by reducing thedegree of pressure a worker needs to apply to make a certain typeof cut.

Employees are staggered far enough from each other to prevent"buddy cuts," which occur when one worker's instrument hits theperson next to them. "We rarely see those types of injuries anylonger," says Rodgers.

Still, management is aware that even with the sharpestinstrument, after a certain period of time any employee will startto develop fatigue. After two hours have lapsed, employees areshifted to different duty for the next two hours (for example,putting stickers on packages, or working on a line where they usean electric cutting instrument that requires less force) and backagain, on and away until the end of the shift. This also helpsprevent repetitive-motion injuries.

This practice of varying tasks was implemented around 2014,Rodgers says, and Butterball has been more aggressive in the lastthree years about making sure it is followed in all of itsprocessing facilities.

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Get on your boots

Because many of the processing plants' surfaces can becomeslick, steps must be taken to limit the number of slips and falls.With the assistance of Lockton (Butterball's broker) and its TPA,Sedgwick, the company thoroughly examined workers' comp loss dataand took an exhaustive look at existing flooring conditions toinclude co-efficiency testing of floor surfaces; employee andcontractor housekeeping behaviors; testing of various footweartypes; and the selection of a single-source boot manufacturer thatprovided footwear "with the highest coefficient shoe sole availablein the marketplace," says Rodgers.

Also, analysis of 2014 incident and workers' comp loss datafound that slip & fall incidents were the second-highestinjury frequency type (12% of all work-related injury claimsand 18% of total incurred cost, with an average cost per claim of$16,326). The company instituted a targeted enterprise-wide slip& fall initiative, which by 2016′s end had yielded a 69%improvement in workers' compensation claims frequency caused byslips & falls and an 88% reduction in incurred expense.

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Every employee's boots are regularly checked for wear; anythingfound that's beyond the manufacturers' specs results in a new pair.All boots are provided free to employees. "I'd rather give[employees] a $30 pair of boots than have them suffer a $90K-plusback injury due to a slip or fall," says Rodgers.

Rogers worked to establish more automated tasks atButterball production plants, which subsequently saw a significantreduction in employee injuries. (Photo: National UnderwriterProperty & Casualty)

'Swimming with sharks'

With stiff headwinds of OSHA regulatory compliance targeting theU.S. poultry industry, Butterball for the past 10 years has workedto earn entry and maintain certification in the OSHA VoluntaryProtection Program (VPP). Today, Butterball LLC and CargillTurkey are the only two poultry companies in America flying theesteemed OSHA VPP flag.

Unlike many of its industry peers, openly collaborating withregulatory agencies such as OSHA in order to ensure compliance isviewed by some as swimming with the sharks. Such is not the casefor Butterball, Rodgers says: "The foundation of our safetymanagement process is built upon the core principals of the VPPprogram, which are management commitment and employee involvement;worksite analysis; hazard prevention and control; and safety andhealth training."

Over the past two years, its Mt. Olive, Huntsville, Ark., andCarthage, Mo., facilities individually achieved 3 million hoursworked without an OSHA lost-time recordable injury.

In order to be OSHA compliant, Butterball's injury rate has tobe the stated injury rate for the poultry industry, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics(which is 4.30%), or 2.15%. Its OSHA Injury and Illness rates areconsistently 50%-65% better than the Bureau of Labor Statistics'industry average.

With a keen focus on continuous improvement of the safetymanagement process, Butterball has reduced its OSHA RecordableInjury Rate by 87% and improved its Days Away, Restrictions &Transfers (DART) rate by 76%.

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The payoff

One area of particular focus for Butterball has beenyear-over-year incurred workers' compensation claim development asmeasured quarterly. Over the past 36 months, claim cost developmenthas flattened and remained steady at 29%, which made possible a 23%workers' comp financial-reserve reduction.

The company's 2016 enterprise average incurred expense for paidclosed indemnity claims improved -21% versus 2014, and medical onlyclaims -17.4%. "As compared to our industry peer group, which isexperiencing double-digit workers' compensation expense increases,Butterball's average cost per indemnity claim is -54% or $9,524 perclaim better and for medical-only claims -41.3% or $584 per claimbetter than industry peer group," Rodgers says.

The company's focus and challenge around driving workers'compensation managed-care improvement with Sedgwick resulted in2016 savings of more than $1 million and a -19.7% improvementversus 2014. Additionally, utilization of onsite physical therapyand translation services at the Mt. Olive facility is deliveringannual savings of $135,000.

All of these steps also add to better loss history — and loweredinsurance rates.

"Lockton has helped us better understand what our variable costsare in relation to our overall [rate] spend," says Rodgers. Mostrecently, its improved loss rate (21% per $100 of payroll)translated into a real-dollar savings of $377,272.

That's roughly the equivalent of $25 million in sales in thefood-manufacturing space, where profit margins are generallylow.

"When you think about it those terms," he adds, "it really openssome eyes."

See also:

Nations Roof: Workers' comp reaches a newlevel

Sit up straight: Millennials, safety andergonomics