Employee Risk Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation

Employee Risk

Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation is a leading Private Label food manufacturer that is headquartered in Chester, Illinois, which is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River (Gilster pp). This company produces over 8,000 products in over 500 different private label brands, as well as its own Hospitality label (Gilster pp). Gilster-Mary Lee employees approximately 3,000 workers in fourteen different manufacturing facilities across four states, and delivers products daily throughout the United States and Canada, as well as shipments destined for markets throughout the world (Gilster pp).

A few of the items Gilster-Mary Lee manufactures are Regular Cake, Pudding Cake and Moist Deluxe Cake Mix Flavors, Dessert-At-Home Mixes,

Cheesecake Mixes, Bread and Muffin Mixes, Frostings, Brownie and Cookie Mixes, Biscuit and Pancake Mixes, Whipped Toppings, Pudding and Gelatin, Drink Mixes, Macaroni and Cheese Mixes, Rice and Pasta, Stuffing, Soups and Gravy Mixes, Hamburger and Tuna Dinner Mixes, Cereals and Popcorn (Gilster pp).

Of all the items that Gilster-Mary Lee makes, it is the microwave popcorn that has gained the most attention recently due to employee health risk (Armour pp). Some of the former workers of the Gilster-Mary Lee microwave popcorn factory in Jasper, Montana are afflicted with a rare lung disease believed to be caused by inhaling the butter flavoring in the microwave popcorn, a substance that had never been suspected as an on-the-job hazard (Armour pp).

In November 2000, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health launched a study of the health of workers at the Gislter-Mary Lee popcorn plant, based on 117 workers (Armour pp). The study found that younger employees who had never smoked had roughly five times the rates of chronic cough and shortness of breath compared with a national sample, and current plant employees had 3.3 times the rate of airway obstruction when compared with the national sample (Armour pp). About 72% of microwave-popcorn production workers reported work-related irritation to their eyes, nose or throat, and twice as many employees in the microwave popcorn production area reported skin problems as those who worked in areas with lower exposures (Armour pp). Moreover, workers in the microwave popcorn production reported chronic coughs, attacks of wheezing, chest tightness and shortness of breath more frequently than workers in other areas (Armour pp). At least thirty former employees at the plant have severe breathing problems and nearly all may eventually need new lungs, according to a lawsuit filed by workers (Armour pp). Four of the former workers have been accepted on lung transplant lists, and doctors say that some are functioning on less than a third of a working lung (Armour pp).

The eight workers with severe lung disease had worked in the microwave-popcorn packaging or mixing areas, which are connected by doors, where salt, soybean oil and flavorings are blended into a heated tank (Armour pp). According to NIOSH employees who worked in the microwave popcorn production inhaled higher concentrations of butter flavoring, and seem to have more breathing problems than employees who worked in offices or packaging (Armour pp).

During 1992 through 2000, NIOSH investigated another microwave popcorn factory in Missouri and found similar findings (Fixed pp). This report indicated that an estimated 133% of the 425 former workers had been mixers, 276 or 65% had worked in microwave packaging, and 32% or 136 had worked in other areas of the factory (Fixed pp). On the basis of this estimated distribution, the crude incidence of illness was highest in mixers and microwave-packaging workers, with no cases reported in the estimated 136 workers in other areas of the factory (Fixed pp).