By Michael Brand
In the early months of the pandemic, former President Trump issued an executive order to keep meat packing facilities open, as business executives claimed that these facilities were “as essential as health care” and a shutdown would result in a meat shortage. Americans ate it up, literally, as they bought their meats from grocery stores without truly considering where it came from. Little did they know that the cost of their choices was not just the price of their meat, but also the suffering of thousands of meat packing employees who were forced to work through a pandemic in unsafe conditions.
On May 12, the House of Representatives select subcommittee on the coronavirus released a report issuing the grotesque cost of the meat packing industry. The cost: according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by July 21, 2020, “meatpacking plants had driven so much community spread that they were associated with 236,000 to 310,000 coronavirus cases—amounting to six to eight percent of all U.S. coronavirus cases—and 4,300 to 5,200 coronavirus deaths” (Taylor et al). What is scarier is that companies could have prevented this and the federal government allowed them to avoid doing so.
Workers who realized that working in tight spaces was probably a risk too large to take were forced to work in the name of a potential meat shortage. The risk of a meat shortage - unlike the risk of Covid spreading - was non-existent and just a rallying call for company executives to convince the USDA as well as state and local regulatory agencies to back off and not enforce essential standards. Their effective lobbying at all three levels of government armed them with, a powerful “Executive Order, a loyal USDA ready to do their bidding, and favorable CDC/OSHA guidance,” allowing “many meatpacking companies proceeded to operate plants without adopting critical coronavirus prevention and mitigation measures over the course of the following months, to the detriment of tens of thousands of vulnerable workers” (Subcommitee’s report, 32). With no social distancing, close to no testing, and no unemployment relief for those who quit, workers had a choice between risking their lives working in dangerous conditions or losing their livelihoods at a time where a wage was more important than ever.
That choice is not one American workers should have to face. The meatpacking industry, before even considering Covid, is extremely dangerous. The industry has “highest rates of occupational injury and illness in the country, and they labor in environments full of potentially life-threatening dangers. Moving machine parts can cause traumatic injuries by crushing, amputating, burning and slicing. The tools of the trade can cut, stab and infect. Even without accidents, the cumulative trauma of repeating the same forceful motions tens of thousands of times every day can cause severe and disabling harm” (McConnell). The reason it is so dangerous is the same reason so many employees suffer from Covid - powerful lobbyists are able to sidestep regulations, even the ones that are essential for keeping employees safe.
This report from Congress is shocking. When we think of meat packing companies, one would assume their costs of production are simply the cost of the wages of their employees, the cost of machines those employees use, and of course the cost of materials they use. In reality, as the report revealed, the most valuable purchase a meat packing company makes is the check they send to politicians and agencies to ensure their industry is not regulated. The choices to buy meat without a second thought, to ignore the lies this industry has told us to ensure it operates in a dangerous way, to ignore the obvious lobbying done to avoid regulation, come at a cost we do not see at the dining table. It comes at the cost of everyday American workers, who are forced to work in dangerous conditions, because companies care more about the cost of safer conditions, than the cost their workers face when having to suffer through dangerous ones.
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