In late March 2020, the Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS reported a single case of coronavirus at its plant in Grand Island, Nebraska. Within days, a local emergency room doctor sent an email, alerting the regional health department that he had been treating “numerous patients” from the plant for Covid-like symptoms. The next day, a doctor at one of the town’s medical clinics recorded more cases.
JBS contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to express concern—not that the health of its workers was at risk but rather that its employees might walk out and file for unemployment benefits. A USDA official called Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts to alert him. Ricketts arranged a conference call with the director of the regional health department to inform her that the JBS plant would not be closed and then held a press conference where he announced: “If you quit your job, you will be ineligible for unemployment benefits.” The USDA official sent an internal email to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue’s top advisers, heralding Ricketts’s intervention: “Hopefully this is a ‘crisis averted’ situation.”
But JBS was just the beginning. In late March, Ricketts also received an angry letter from Kenneth Sullivan, the CEO of Smithfield Foods, a subsidiary of the Chinese-owned WH Group, after Nebraska’s capital city of Lincoln had closed its schools and issued other Covid restrictions, causing what Sullivan described as “hysteria” among Smithfield workers at the plant on the edge of Lincoln and in the nearby small town of Crete. “We are increasingly at a very high risk that food production employees and others in critical supply chain roles stop showing up for work,” Sullivan wrote. “Social distancing is a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops.” He warned Ricketts that temporary shutdown orders would cause food shortages and “could lead to social unrest.” Over the next three weeks, the Smithfield pork plant in Crete went from its first reported infection to nearly four dozen confirmed cases, but Ricketts refused to take action.
Within days, Smithfield announced that absenteeism in Crete was becoming such a problem that it would be forced to begin idling the plant, in order to perform a deep cleaning and to quarantine its workers. But then, the very next day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring meatpacking plants essential operations, giving Smithfield—and every other meatpacker—a pretext to stay open. (It was subsequently revealed that the executive order was drafted by the North American Meat Institute, a lobbying group whose executive board is composed of the CEOs and senior vice presidents of the country’s largest meatpackers.) Employees walked out of the Crete plant. “I got a phone call that there were people that were refusing to go back to work,” Eric Reeder, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 293, told me. “They were scared.”
The following Saturday, more than a hundred protesters, many of them employees of Smithfield or their children, formed a line of cars on Main Avenue in Crete, moving south toward the Smithfield plant. People honked their horns and waved American flags. They held up signs that read “Essential, Not Disposable,” and “My Parents Are More Important Than Meat.” They called for basic personal protective equipment (PPE), such as surgical masks and face shields, and they demanded slower line speeds to allow for social distancing. “If you have people working shoulder to shoulder, the only way you get six-foot distance is to remove workers,” Reeder explained, “but the lines aren’t slowing down.” In fact, in the following weeks, the USDA approved nearly 20 waivers for the largest meatpacking plants to increase their line speeds, despite the fact that Covid-19 continued to spread in those plants at alarming rates.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, FERN made a valiant effort to document the deadly impact of the virus on the nation’s meatpacking and food-processing workers—but it was far worse than anyone knew. At the end of October 2021, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis revealed that meatpacking plants experienced case and death rates that were up to three times higher than FERN’s estimates. In the first year of the pandemic alone, at least 59,000 meatpacking workers were infected and at least 269 workers died. Worse still, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the virus spread from meatpacking plants to surrounding communities at an alarming rate, accounting for as much as 8 percent of the national total of cases in the early stages of the pandemic. “That figure is roughly 50 times the 0.15 percent of the U.S. population that works in meatpacking plants,” reported the New York Times, “suggesting that the industry played an outsized role in spreading the illness.”
After winning in November, President-elect Joe Biden pledged to make the American workplace safe for at-risk workers. On his first full day in office, Biden signed an executive order aimed at increasing Covid-19 workplace safety measures, including a requirement to implement new emergency temporary standards by mid-March 2021. However, when the requirements were finally unveiled, three months past the deadline, OSHA had carved out exemptions that made implementation of safety protocols optional in meatpacking plants, food-processing facilities and retail outlets.
“This is a slap in the face,” said Marc Perrone, president of the UFCW international union, in a statement in June. “Today’s new COVID workplace safety standard from OSHA represents a broken promise to the millions of American workers in grocery stores and meatpacking plants who have gotten sick and died on the frontlines of this pandemic.”
Soon after, the USDA announced a new “ergonomic study.” But rather than addressing the key factors that were shown to promote the spread of the virus in meatpacking plants—tight working conditions and high line speeds—the “limited trial,” once again, will allow nine of the country’s largest pork processing plants to implement faster line speeds, in a supposed effort to study how speed affects worker safety. Not mentioned in the press release was the fact that five of the nine plants have been operating at these increased speeds for nearly two decades, under what was previously portrayed as a study of how line speed affected food safety inspection. The fact that the very same plants have been brought into the “new” pilot program is a clear indication: Regardless of who occupies the White House, USDA and OSHA remain only too happy to open back doors for big meat processors to increase output, no matter the impact on the health and safety of meatpacking workers.
It’s especially outrageous that workers face ever-worsening conditions even as all six of the country’s largest meatpackers posted soaring profits during the pandemic—first on the strength of exports to China and other Covid-affected markets, and then here at home, where their control of more than two-thirds of the market allowed them to increase food prices without facing meaningful competition. Smithfield warned Gov. Ricketts of potential disaster, but the company reported $11 billion in revenue in 2020. Trump’s Department of Justice investigated the big meatpackers for violations of anti-trust laws but then reached agreements that required the companies to pay a fraction of what they had made in profits. Smithfield, for instance, settled for $83 million for its part in artificially raising consumer prices. OSHA found multiple meatpackers liable for “failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus,” but then JBS was fined less than $16,000 for conditions at its plant in Greeley, Colorado, where hundreds of workers were sickened and at least eight died. Smithfield was fined less than $13,500 for failures at its plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which led to the infection of nearly 1,300 workers and at least four deaths. Both companies appealed even those meager penalties. In October of this year, the local union leader in Sioux Falls issued a press release, declaring that workers at the plant were “fed up” with Smithfield continuing to speed up lines, ignore social distancing recommendations, eliminate sanitation standards, and verbally abuse employees.
The recently passed infrastructure bill will make some modest improvements, but for the most part, the food system is being built back as bad as it was before. If we’re serious about honoring the sacrifices of essential workers, then we should start by protecting the lives—and acknowledging the deaths—of the men and women (and children) who plow, plant, pick, process and package our food. We should make an honest accounting of the impact of Covid-19 on the tens of thousands who were sickened and hundreds who died, and then compensate them and their families fairly. More than that, we should demand that OSHA make Covid safety protocols mandatory in all meatpacking and food-processing facilities and that the USDA not allow unbridled line speed increases. We should urge the Department of Justice to break up the collusive meat monopoly that rakes in huge profits for foreign corporations while disregarding the safety of food industry employees and their communities in America. Anything less will leave our health system vulnerable to the next pandemic and our food supply vulnerable to further exploitation and price-gouging. It’s time to safeguard the essential workers who make our every meal possible.
Ted Genoways is a regular FERN contributor. He is the author of five books, including This Blessed Earth, winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.
Caption: Maira Mendez and Romulo Vega join the protest of working conditions at the Smithfield plant in Crete, Nebraska. Photo by Mary Anne Andrei.