Health and Safety

Actions to Support Health and Safety

Training and Education

We provide frequent health and safety training to reduce the number of work-related injuries and illnesses throughout our facilities. Our in-depth safety training consists of new team member orientation, job- and task-specific training, departmental safety meetings, and regular refresher training. All newly hired team members must complete classroom and department-specific training, which are made available in multiple languages. In addition, we have implemented a virtual reality technology to train team members on food and team member safety protocol.

Audits

Each year, JBS locations undergo a comprehensive safety management system audit, fleet safety audit, and occupational health audit based on applicable legislation and company procedures. Many facilities also conduct comprehensive safety analysis audits to identify and reduce potential hazards. These audits focus on early detection of risks and in-depth reviews of policies and programs related to preventing electrical safety issues, ergonomics weaknesses, falls and slips, and machine guarding issues.

Corrective Actions

Despite our focus on health and safety training and accident prevention, some incidents do occur, and we must acknowledge, report, and learn from these safety-related incidents. Our facilities have formal incident investigation procedures and/or committees to investigate and reduce, mitigate, and eliminate injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. The incident investigation process assists operations in preventing the recurrence of similar incidents and in identifying injury and illness trends, potential weaknesses or failures in our safety management, and proximate root causes of incidents. This process allows us to develop effective corrective action plans. In addition, within each business unit, locations regularly share incident investigation information to facilitate learning and prevention.

Data-Driven Insights

We have integrated safety data across digital platforms to identify enterprise-wide trends and best practices related to health and safety. Data-driven insights support us to perform root-cause analysis and take corrective actions such as audits and safety inspections. Insights also help us to define best practices that we can share across the organization.

Innovation

We continue to find new ways to leverage cutting-edge technology to enhance team member safety.

Right to Speak Policy

If a team member notices an unsafe act or condition, we empower them to speak up so that we can stop unwanted behavior and restore optimal conditions immediately. We encourage every team member to report without fear of retribution. Our company policy prohibits retaliation, and we emphasize the importance of reporting to the success of our organization. Any incidence of retaliation against an employee for such actions will result in the immediate termination of the person engaging in the retaliation. As a final precaution, we advise team members that they are entitled to remove themselves from any situation they deem to be unsafe.

Safety Goals, Indexing, and Measurement

Annual companywide and facility-specific safety goals help our organization prioritize health and safety, with leading safety indicators reported weekly to all heads of HR, safety, operations, and business unit presidents. Safety issues can encompass a wide range of situations, including drivecam coaching effectiveness, electrical safety, machine guarding, preventable vehicle accidents, safety gaps, and working surfaces. All operational supervisors must conduct multiple safety observations each week and intervene with helpful coaching to prevent an unsafe act, condition, or injury.

Finally, we maintain a Safety Index at each facility to measure the frequency of severe injuries per hour of operation. We define a severe injury as any injury resulting in amputation, fatality, in-patient hospitalization, vision loss, second- or third-degree burns, or fractures that results in greater than fifteen days lost time, and any other injury that results in greater than fifteen days lost time. We have set a goal to collectively improve our Global Safety Index by thirty percent by 2030, compared to a 2019 baseline. In 2023, we achieved a 59% reduction from our baseline.

Despite our robust efforts to provide a safe working environment for all JBS team members, we unfortunately experienced one employee fatality in 2023. In the event a fatal accident such as this occurs, we take immediate action to fully investigate the incident in cooperation with authorities and in accordance with the appropriate regulations and laws for each region. During our evaluation, we seek to understand the circumstances, identify the root cause, and prevent any potential re-occurrence. We also review our safety protocols to determine any gaps and make any necessary improvements such as enhanced procedures or additional training. The safety and well-being of our team members remains our top priority, and we are dedicated to providing safe working conditions for everyone.