On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new safety food regulations for the poultry industry. Because of the high number of Latinos working in the business, the report has garnered praise from the National Council of La Raza.

The USDA's new regulations include heightened safety precautions via the New Poultry Inspection System, which will result in up to 5,000 less food-borne illnesses every year, according to a release by the department.

Catherine Singly Harvey, manager of the economic policy project at NCLR, the United States' largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group, said that Latinos represent over a third of poultry industry employees and around 16 percent of the country's total workforce, NBC News reports.

"In order to truly modernize the poultry industry, there must be standards in place to keep workers safe and healthy on the job," Janet Murguía, NCLR president and CEO, said in a release by the group. "NCLR looks forward to collaborating with the USDA, the U.S. Department of Labor and other federal agencies to vigorously improve working conditions in the poultry industry."

The USDA opted not approve a proposal to increase poultry production by 25 percent, from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute, the release said. According to Singly Harvey, NCLR was concerned about the increased rate because it would require employees to make the same movements with their arm 20,000 times per shift in order to debone and cut the meat.

"Responding to a key concern raised by the courageous poultry workers who exposed the human cost of bringing chicken to our dinner plates, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez today took an important step to prioritize worker safety," Murguía said. "Although life-altering injuries are already far too widespread among this workforce, I am proud to say that the collective efforts of tireless advocates helped the administration prevent a bad situation from becoming worse."

Singly Harvey said there are limited details on injuries in the poultry industry, but academic research has found some problems in certain plants. Employers and employees are known not to report injuries.

"The status quo in the industry is troubling," Singly Harvey told NBC News. "Injury rates at one of the plants the federal government studied was 40 percent at current speed."
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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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