Amanda Hitt: The Champion of Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers Key to Cases

Whistleblowers have been piv­otal in expos­ing the more egre­gious vio­la­tions in the food indus­try. Kit Foshee was a qual­ity assur­ance man­ager at Beef Products, Inc. (BPI), who came to the Government Accountability Project for help in bring­ing atten­tion to con­cerns he had about his com­pany and their ammo­ni­ated beef prod­uct (col­lo­qui­ally known as “pink slime”). GAP authored a widely pub­lished op-ed on the sub­ject, which ulti­mately led to front-page arti­cles in major media. Foshee had already been ter­mi­nated by BPI for refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in its know­ing mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the prod­uct to the USDA.

Another famous GAP case was that of Food Lion, a super­mar­ket chain that was exposed when two ABC under­cover reporters, pos­ing as Food Lion employ­ees, video­taped with hid­den cam­eras unsan­i­tary prac­tices in the company’s han­dling of meat. The case began when Food Lion staff, seek­ing a way to expose the prac­tices, started work­ing with GAP. The resul­tant wide pub­lic­ity informed con­sumers and brought fur­ther pub­lic atten­tion to the issue of how our food is processed.

This is the type of whistle­blow­ing that the Food Integrity Campaign is work­ing to pro­tect. A series of state bills that have come to be known as “ag gag,” which impose crim­i­nal penal­ties for video­tap­ing or audio record­ing within farms or food pro­cess­ing oper­a­tions, are cur­rently being fought by FIC and GAP. In some states laws have been passed and are being chal­lenged, while in oth­ers they have not yet been passed and are being opposed. “These are anti-whistleblower statutes,” Hitt told Organic Connections. “The rea­son we view it that way—and many oth­ers in coali­tion with us agree—is that if you have a whistle­blower who needs his or her dis­clo­sure to be val­i­dated, we very often see the use of record­ing devices to do that. Many times we can’t vin­di­cate these peo­ple or val­i­date their claims with­out this sort of mechan­i­cal third party—the use of a cam­era or record­ing device.”

USDA Inspectors Blow Whistle

Whistleblowing isn’t con­fined to pri­vate indus­try. Recently gov­ern­ment meat inspec­tors were deeply con­cerned but unable to speak out about the results of new leg­is­la­tion that both cut down the num­ber of inspec­tors and sped up the lines to be inspected. “There’s a new ‘mod­ern­iza­tion of poul­try inspec­tion’ pro­posal that’s in the works by the USDA,” Hitt explained. “The inspec­tors that are affected by this are cur­rently expe­ri­enc­ing this speed-up. They very much want to pre­serve the safety and integrity of poul­try in the United States but now can’t stop this stuff from fly­ing down the line. At the same time, there is a reduc­tion in the inspec­tors; 800 posi­tions are in jeop­ardy. Inspectors can’t do what they’re there to do. They’re upset about this and they want con­sumers to know about it.

“These inspec­tors were unable to speak out, but we offered them the oppor­tu­nity to do so through anony­mous affi­davits. We gave that infor­ma­tion to the USDA, and also to the New York Times and many oth­ers. Ultimately ABC picked it up as well.”

Creating Protective Laws

Much of the work FIC is engaged in involves cre­at­ing leg­is­la­tion that will pro­tect future whistleblowers—some of whom now aren’t pro­tected at all. “I’ll give you an exam­ple of one of the most dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions for a whistle­blower,” Hitt said. “Let’s say you were an undoc­u­mented worker in a pork slaugh­ter­house. To start with you’re paid ridicu­lously low wages, but the real­ity is you have to sup­port your fam­ily on this. So, you’re work­ing in a slaugh­ter facil­ity; you’re doing these repet­i­tive motions and get­ting carpal tun­nel syn­drome; your back is being strained; you can barely keep up with this high-speed line (and these are espe­cially preva­lent in poul­try plants right now). Then you see some­thing com­ing toward you on the belt—let’s say it’s a large abscess on an animal.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“That type of thing should not hap­pen, but if you start speak­ing out about these kinds of sit­u­a­tions, you are going to draw atten­tion to your­self. You have no power what­so­ever, and in that sce­nario I don’t think there’d even be retal­i­a­tion; it would be ter­mi­na­tion. People like that want to voice their concerns—they want to tell us things; but if push comes to shove, they just can’t come for­ward. And it’s the same with farm­work­ers. There’s a lot on the line.”

Hitt and the Food Integrity Campaign are work­ing hard, through cre­at­ing new reg­u­la­tions, to make sure such peo­ple can come for­ward. There have been instances, how­ever, when jobs have been able to be pro­tected. “If it is a white-collar job, there’s the pos­si­bil­ity, espe­cially in gov­ern­ment, to get your job back or have some sort of lat­eral move within the orga­ni­za­tion,” Hitt pointed out.

There is another cru­cial aspect to Hitt’s work. “You have to let the pub­lic know the prob­lems that insid­ers know about but the gen­eral pub­lic doesn’t have access to,” she said. “We need to con­tinue that, because we do it very effec­tively. If we have a whistle­blower who knows some­thing from the inside, we get that per­son out and into the media—out there and talk­ing, their infor­ma­tion widely available.”

Food Integrity

It was Hitt, already work­ing for the Government Accountability Project, who came up with and imple­mented the Food Integrity Campaign. “When I started here at GAP in the eight­ies, there was already a robust food safety pro­gram,” she related. “I began real­iz­ing, how­ever, this is not just food safety—it’s more: it is integrity. This would mean, Is it con­sis­tent with com­monly held com­mu­nity val­ues and beliefs? Does it stand up to scrutiny or fur­ther obser­va­tion? I was find­ing that our food clients were reveal­ing aspects of the food indus­try, and even in the reg­u­la­tion of the food indus­try, that were just not con­sis­tent. They might be safe or unsafe—although usu­ally unsafe—but there was always a vio­la­tion of integrity. That’s what led to the cre­ation of the Food Integrity Campaign—to address all of those issues, and to also include envi­ron­men­tal issues, such as runoff from a hog farm. The runoff itself is not a food safety issue, but it’s destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment, which is very much a food integrity issue.”

Hitt has specif­i­cally directed her career in the direc­tion of being proac­tive in pub­lic health issues. “I went through law school want­ing to do some­thing in pub­lic inter­est, some­thing good for the world and some­thing great,” she con­cluded. “When I got out it was kind of dif­fi­cult to enter into that world; but more­over, the type of work that I was asked to do in those jobs was to clean up a mess that had already hap­pened. Maybe it was civil lib­er­ties or envi­ron­men­tal, but some­thing had already hap­pened for a lawyer to be involved. So I started think­ing about it and arrived at the con­clu­sion that I’d rather use the law to stop the bad things from hap­pen­ing than fix bad things by using the law.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.foodwhistleblower.org.