Congressional Investigation: COVID-19 And Meatpacking
The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is a bipartisan House of Representatives subcommittee tasked with evaluating the Trump Administration’s oversight of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the subcommittee released a staff bulletin detailing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on meatpacking workers. It aimed to reveal some of the disparities between what meat company executives claimed versus what was actually happening to workers inside these facilities.
According to the report, the toll of the pandemic on meatpacking workers in terms of infections and deaths was nearly three times higher than previous estimates. Over 59,000 workers across the five biggest corporations were infected in the first year of COVID-19, with at least 269 deaths. This is a large difference from the prior assumption of 22,700 illnesses and 88 deaths. The report notes that gathering accurate data was difficult because meat conglomerates refused to share their internal data. What’s more, the facilities not only became focal points for worker illnesses and deaths, but in some cases, they also served as pathways to infecting the surrounding communities.
Even before the pandemic, the meatpacking industry was known for hazardous working conditions. Employees typically work long hours in close quarters, taking few breaks and sharing communal areas with hundreds or even thousands of co-workers. The job also requires a lot of physical work, meaning heavy breathing is common. Described by labor organizers as “stationary cruise ships,” meatpacking facilities have conditions that increase the risk of virus transmission.
The report explains how meatpacking companies prioritized profits over workers’ safety during the pandemic. In many cases, companies did not even adhere to basic health guidelines, resulting in crowded facilities where the virus could easily spread. As late as May 2020, workers at a Tyson Foods plant in Texas were wearing sweaty masks and facing inadequate social distancing measures. At this plant, nearly half of the workforce contracted COVID-19.
Despite the well-documented risk, an executive from Koch Foods stated the workplace was the safest place for employees, while Tyson Foods told its employees to come to work despite shelter-in-place recommendations. Furthermore, the virus spread may have impacted ethnic minority workers the most. One study of a meatpacking plant in Nebraska found that 89% of workers who came down with the virus in the summer of 2020 were racial or ethnic minorities, despite white workers making up 39% of the population.
The report goes on to argue that the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) did not do enough to protect meatpacking workers during the pandemic. The lack of a clear regulatory standard left executives largely unaccountable for worker safety. For example, the CEO of Smithfield Foods dismissed 14 recommendations from a CDC memo as “problematic,” and the final memo allowed Smithfield to ignore the recommendations. OSHA issued nine citations to three meatpacking companies despite 100 complaints related to the facilities, and it performed 35% fewer inspections in 2020 compared to previous years.
The report makes it clear that stronger regulations and better enforcement are needed to protect workers in public health situations. Data transparency is also needed — companies have an obligation to be forthright about infections and deaths within their workforce and must take actions to curb further spread. For animal advocates, this is further evidence of the human justice issues within the meat industry. When meat companies prioritize profit, it harms both animals and marginalized humans.