Update: Almost 90 percent of U.S. meatpacking workers who tested positive for Covid-19 are minorities, said the CDC in a new report issued on July 7, 2020, demonstrating more evidence of the virus’ disproportionate impact on communities of color. Among the workers who tested positive at meat processing facilities, over half were Hispanic, and about one-fifth were Black.

Despite still-rising national numbers of infection at meatpacking facilities over the past months, the CDC shows that only 37 percent of affected facilities have offered virus testing to employees, and 22 percent underwent temporary closures.

Citing worker safety concerns, labor advocates have called for reduced animal processing speeds, yet the CDC report shows that only 21 percent of plants affected by Covid-19 reduced speeds during the pandemic. Meanwhile, other meat facilities have increased speed, as outlined below.

“The effects of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minority groups are not yet fully understood,” said the report. “However, current data indicate a disproportionate burden of illness and death among these populations.”

The CDC’s report was based on state-reported numbers, provided by less than half of states. Conspicuously absent was Arkansas, where advocacy groups are putting pressure on Tyson Foods and Governor Asa Hutchinson to take action to protect workers. Tyson, one of the “big four” meat processing companies that together supply more than 80 percent of the country’s beef, has been criticized for its neglect of worker safety during the pandemic. At the time of this update, at least 8,888 Tyson employees have contracted the virus, according to Investigate Midwest. That’s higher than the number of all cases at the rest of the “big four” plants, combined.

After President Trump declared meat and poultry processing plants “critical infrastructure,” and urged plants to reopen, Domingo Garcia feared the worst. The reaction among front line workers was “one of horror and tremendous anxiety,” says Garcia, President of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “President Trump invoked the Defense Protection Act mandating that these plants stay open even though people were dying.”

Several weeks later, meat workers continue to risk their lives simply by going to work. The rate of viral outbreaks in meatpacking plants continues to soar, in part because the adoption of safety protocols by meat companies has been spotty at best. The introduction of protective equipment has also exacerbated pre-existing safety issues. Underlying it all is a culture that treats plant workers as “disposable.” Meat workers benefit from very few of the protections allotted to employees in other industries.

“The Black, brown, immigrant, and refugee workers who are disproportionately represented in the meatpacking industry will bear the brunt of this dangerous decision,” says Debbie Berkowitz, program director for worker safety and health with the National Employment Law Project. “Even during a global health crisis, the Trump administration has chosen once again to prioritize corporate interests over the health and safety of working people and their communities.”

Interactive map from the Food and Environmental Reporting Network, which is keeping a running tab on outbreaks due to the coronavirus.

After Trump pushed meat plants to reopen, the US Department of Labor (DOL) asked meat and poultry processing employers to follow a set of pandemic safety guidelines issued by OSHA and the CDC—unless “not feasible in the context of specific plants and circumstances.”

As long as companies demonstrate good faith attempts to follow the guidelines, the DOL will consider siding with employers sued by workers for coronavirus exposure. And, because the Defense Protection Act is in play, states and local authorities were advised not to order closures of individual plants. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also made its new set of safety guidelines optional.

Not surprisingly, many plants have chosen not to follow these guidelines. Even when they do, PPE presents its own set of challenges. Masks make breathing difficult and aren’t practical for the wet, messy work of chopping up meat. PPE goggles fog up, and plastic shrouds inhibit movement. With sharp knives, hooks, scissors, and saws precariously close at all times—workers have as little as three feet of space in which to work—any fumbling can be disastrous.

workers who feel ‘expendable’

Work at the bottom of the cheap meat food chain has always been punishing, with workplace injury rates—slicing, crushing, amputating, burning—twice the national average of any industry.  The pre-pandemic rate of illness was 15 times the national average, according to the National Employment Law Project, thanks in part to the damp and cold conditions in plants.

Making the situation more dangerous is that frontline meatpacking workers are much more likely to lack health insurance, underreport injuries and illnesses for fear of employer reprisals, and receive poor workplace injury care. There is no national database where all packing houses report injuries and accidents.

The meat industry is well-known for its longstanding ‘work while sick’ attitude, illustrated most recently by Tyson’s June 4 return to its pre-COVID absentee policy that penalizes employees for absences due to illness. A 2016 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that meat and poultry industry employees feel expendable—like their bosses care more about worker output than worker safety.

The agency tasked with looking out for workers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is far less likely under the Trump administration to step in to help. OSHA is currently operating with the fewest number of safety and health inspectors in its five-decades-long history, according to the Human Rights Watch.

It has certainly done nothing to spare workers from another new threat to safety: the push by meat companies to make the rate of killing animals, already fast, even speedier.

Killing 3 chickens each second

Under normal circumstances, about two-thirds of a processing facility’s laborers work shoulder-to-shoulder to break down chunks of meat as it’s moved down the line. Current regulations allow for a maximum of 140 chickens and about 18 pigs killed per minute. Wearing cumbersome protective gear makes meeting this grueling pace even harder, and LULAC is one of several organizations advocating to slow the speed of the processing line.

Instead, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) recently started granting waivers to individual poultry companies who want to speed up the processing line even faster—up to 175 birds per minute. The waivers are conditional upon a murky set of criteria, including the adoption of a new slaughter inspection system that privatizes some work previously performed by trained government officials. This means that in some plants, inspecting the animals and carcasses to prevent the spread of disease—like COVID-19—is now in the hands of untrained personnel who work for the meat company.

“They're prioritizing speed and efficiency over safety and welfare,” says Leah Garcés, president of Mercy for Animals, which filed two lawsuits against the USDA asserting the faster line speeds increase the rates of worker injury and animal suffering.

The USDA has also proposed a rule that would eliminate all caps on maximum slaughter speed regulations for pig processing, and is considering one for beef as well. The move by the agency to curtail its own safety effort is so dangerous it could lead to another zoonotic pandemic, concluded Food & Water Watch, after evaluating agency data.

“Rather than protect our food supply and workers, these waivers guarantee that workers are more crowded along a meatpacking line and more workers are put at risk of either catching or spreading the virus,” says Marc Perrone, International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents more than 250,000 meatpacking and food processing workers nationwide.

Even during the darkest days this spring, when viral outbreaks at meat plants had begun to soar, the FSIS pushed through 15 waivers allowing poultry plants to increase their maximum line speed. Previously, the highest number of waivers awarded in a month was five.

“This is not just about whether we will have enough beef, chicken, and pork to feed our families,” Perrone wrote. “It is—for these workers—a matter of life and death.”

no JUSTICE for meat workers

Over the past several decades, as companies sought to cut costs and evade union labor protections, they recruited a workforce of people of color, immigrants, and refugees willing to work for cheap, according to an investigative report by USA Today. Since the 1950s, when the average meatpacker earned today’s equivalent of about $34,400 per year and paid sick leave was standard, wages in the American meat industry have steadily dropped. Today’s worker earns $29,600 on average, usually without paid sick leave.

The workforce today is almost half Hispanic and a quarter Black, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Nearly half live in low-income families, while about one in eight earn below the poverty line—roughly double the percentage of low-income Hispanic and Black workers across all industries.

With low wages, scant labor protections, and the constant threat of experiencing a crippling medical disaster, breaking the cycle of poverty for these workers is nearly impossible.

time to Break up with meat

In early May, LULAC called for “Meatless May Mondays,” a once-weekly boycott of all meat products. “Until the meat industry, federal, and state governments protect the lives of essential workers at all meat processing facilities in a federally mandated and verifiable manner,” said Garcia, “LULAC will call for boycotts of meat products.”

Thanks to the billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies that keep burgers and bacon so cheap, it’s hard to get people to break their meat habit. Food justice activists, like Garcés, say that government funding should be used to support healthier and more humane meat alternatives, and make them more affordable. Instead, the government diverted money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to farmers so they could destroy animals and keep them out of crowded processing plants. Says Garcés, “We shouldn't have to pay to clean up Big Ag's mess.”

Meanwhile, according to the most recent figures collected by the Food Environmental Reporting Network, at least 27,888 meatpacking workers have tested positive for Covid-19, and at least 99 have died.

Want to help? Eating less meat is a powerful way to promote an equitable, safe, and sustainable protein system. Reject factory-farmed meat in favor of plant-based recipes. And contact your senator to push to reject faster processing speeds.

Cristin Nelson is a News Fellow based in Boston, MA.

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