But most public officials in meatpacking-plant communities have, to their credit, been looking on with horror as coronavirus cases multiply. Industrial plants that process cows, hogs, and chicken, they realize, have become more dangerous than any other high-density sites in America save prisons. By April's end, the United Food and Commercial Workers union reports, unsafe meatpacking worksites had left at least 20 workers dead and over 6,500 others infected.
The Trump administration doesn't seem to see that infection rate as particularly concerning. The two federal agencies most responsible for protecting workers during pandemics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have merely issued "guidance" on meatpacking and not required any specific serious steps to keep workers safe. The nation's meatpacking empires can legally ignore the recommendations in the guidance.
Thanks to President Trump's executive order, the meatpacking execs can essentially ignore lawsuits as well. Trump has now labeled their industry as "critical infrastructure" that must continue to operate. How can meatpackers be sued, their corporate attorneys can now argue, for endangering workers? The president made them do it.
Why this reckless rush to get all meatpacking operations up and running again? The rush has nothing to do with the "protein" that Smithfield Foods says the nation so desperately needs. The haste has everything to do with the rewards that meatpacking's decision makers the industry's top executives stand to lose if their plants close down or slow down for any appreciable amount of time.
And those rewards can be gargantuan. At Smithfield, for instance, the current CEO's immediate predecessor grabbed $62.9 million in compensation his last two years on the job and then walked off with an $11.25-million retirement package. The current CEO, Kenneth Sullivan, hasn't cleared windfall earnings that large yet. Sullivan only pulled down $14 million last year. But he knows full well that his millions won't start multiplying if his assembly lines don't run.
Reporters have done a solid job detailing how execs at Smithfield and the other meatpacking giants have consistently soft-pedaled the corona danger and failed repeatedly to put in place adequate protections for workers who labor in inherently high-risk workplaces.
"In many plants," as one news report points out, "workers cut and debone meat in tight conditions, share meals in crowded cafeterias and walk the same narrow hallways, making social distancing practically impossible."
Instead of addressing those dangers, the meatpacking industry has been blaming the spread of the coronavirus on their large immigrant workforce. Their "living circumstances" so different from "your traditional American family" are driving the pandemic problem, suggested one Smithfield spokesperson.
Smithfield executives might be crowding into tight apartments, too, if they were making as little money as many of their employees. Of the nation's 194,000 frontline meatpacking workers, the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, 45.1 percent live in households officially "low-income," a designation that covers families of four making less than $52,400 a year.
Meatpacking workers need every dollar of their limited incomes. But they want safety even more. At many plants across the country, they're responding to the industry's back-to-work edicts with strikes and mass sickouts. These workers don't have an easy road ahead. They face both the might of their giant employers and a hostile president of the United States.
"We only wish that this administration cared as much about the lives of working people as it does about meat, pork, and poultry products," as Stuart Applebaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, put it earlier this week.
Meatpacking workers over a century ago had things easier with their occupant of the White House. Theodore Roosevelt shared the public horror at Upton Sinclair's vivid revelations in The Jungle. He ordered the outrages investigated.
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