Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

The willow is too close to the house.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

People are weird.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

The lights are all blinking red.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Pandemic Pressure: The Meatpacking Industry Is Not Sufficiently Improved Since 1906

Pandemic Pressure: The Meatpacking Industry Is Not Sufficiently Improved Since 1906

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… when Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Efficiently chopping up carcasses is inherently messy & potentially dangerous; doing so at the greatest profit *to factory owners* is predictably dangerous, and not only for the workers. The DesMoines Register published this almost a week ago:

A rash of coronavirus outbreaks at dozens of meat packing plants across the nation is far more extensive than previously thought, according to an exclusive review of cases by USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

And it could get worse. More than 150 of America’s largest meat processing plants operate in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, based on the media outlets’ analysis of slaughterhouse locations and county-level COVID-19 infection rates.

These facilities represent more than 1 in 3 of the nation’s biggest beef, pork and poultry processing plants. Rates of infection around these plants are higher than those of 75% of other U.S. counties, the analysis found…

As companies scramble to contain the outbreaks by closing more than a dozen U.S. plants so far — including a Smithfield pork plant in South Dakota that handles 5% of U.S. pork production — the crisis has raised the specter of mass meat shortages.

But experts say there’s little risk of a dwindling protein supply because, given the choice between worker safety and keeping meat on grocery shelves, the nation’s slaughterhouses will choose to produce food.…

The meat packing industry was already notorious for poor working conditions even before the coronavirus pandemic. Meat and poultry employees have among the highest illness rates of all manufacturing employees and are less likely to report injuries and illness than any other type of worker, federal watchdog reports have found.

And the plants have been called out numerous times for refusing to let their employees use the bathroom, even to wash their hands — one of the biggest ways to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Amplifying the danger is that, in many places, meat processing companies are largely on their own to ensure an outbreak doesn’t spread across their factory floors.

Factory workers, unions, and even managers say the federal government — including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — has done little more than issue non-enforceable guidance. On its website, for example, the CDC has released safety guidelines for critical workers and businesses, which primarily promote common sense measures of sanitization and personal distancing…

But rather than increase safety and oversight, the U.S. Department of Agriculture relaxed it in the midst of the pandemic. Just this month, the agency allowed 15 poultry plants to exceed federal limits on how many birds workers can process in a minute.

That’s more than in any previous month in the waiver program’s history. Several worker protection agencies have found that increasing line speeds causes more injuries.

And it could lead to more infections, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union said in a statement: “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.”

Most of the plants that received waivers are owned by Tyson Foods and Wayne Farms, according to a department record. One of them — a Wayne Farms facility in Albertville, Alabama — disclosed this week that 75 of its workers tested positive and one died. The plant will slow production to improve safety, it told AL.com…

Seems like Tyson found a more cost-effective (for them) alternative — buy a full-page ad in the NYTimes:

Free (‘earned’) media ensues!

Counter argument:

When it comes to bailouts, Tyson Foods has the competitive advantage of being based in Arkansas. Smithfield is a wholly-owned subsidary of a Chinese multinational, and JBS is based in Brazil. Which is why, one presumes, Smithfield chose to keep a lower profile when COVID-19 infections exploded at their plants…


(Elsewhere, Smithfield spokespersons cited North Dakota’s governor to explain to Buzzfeed that it was all the fault of filthy immigrants living in crowded conditions with their teeming families — something else that hasn’t changed since 1906.)

“Former OSHA Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor”:

Further reading:

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  2. 2.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Help depopulating herds

    we’re gonna pay Chuck Grassley to kill his own pigs

  3. 3.

    khead

    The Jungle is one of my favorite books. A dreary death march for a poor immigrant who has all kinds of terrible things happen to him. Much like the many immigrants who once worked the coal mines in my native southern WV.

  4. 4.

    hells littlest angel

    Tyson: Nice plate of fried chicken you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

  5. 5.

    joel hanes

    If only there were an organization, somewhere, tasked with ensuring the safety of the work environment.
    Or a department of the government specifically chartered to defend the interests of workers in the necessarily-unequal power relationship with their employers.
    Or if — bear with me here — if workers could somehow join together in an organization that represented them collectively, so that they might, together, wield some bargaining power that offset the self-interest of capital.

  7. 7.

    Anne Laurie

    @rikyrah: Might not be that easy; I’m putting together another post about the much-abused mostly-immigrant workers who pick our produce, too.

    One pretty clear consequence of this pandemic is that all food is gonna get more expensive.  The silver lining, maybe, is that paying what it costs for ‘clean’ food is gonna reduce the incentives to manufacture addictive ‘junk’ from the off-results of factory production…

  9. 9.

    Kent

    Here in Washington State we were leading the nation in terms of bending the curve back down.  Washington started this crisis #1 in both infections and deaths, and then after the initial flood of cases, was doing the best job of tapering things down.  One by one 16 other states slowly passed WA by.

    Then fucking Tyson Foods out in Eastern Washington MAGA land (tri cities area) exploded with one of these meat plant hot spot outbreaks.  A couple of hundred new cases instantly for a plant that employs over 2000.  And they still haven’t come close to testing anyone.

    WA is still leading the nation in terms of bending the curve downwards, but not quite so much thanks to Tyson.  And this was the same exact part of the state where MAGA county commissioners were threatening to defy the governor and open things back up.

    My wife is vegan.  I think she may have a point.

  10. 10.

    dmsilev

    @joel hanes:

    Or a department of the government specifically chartered to defend the interests of workers in the necessarily-unequal power relationship with their employers.

    …with Antonin Scalia’s son at its head.
    Sigh.

  11. 11.

    MisterForkbeard

    @rikyrah: Nerp. I’m friends with two ranch owners out here. I’m never running out of great beefs, pork and chicken. Lamb, too. :)

  12. 12.

    NotMax

    Good rundown (emphasis added).

    The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million food and retail workers, said last week that 13 U.S. food-processing and meatpacking union workers in the U.S. have died and that an estimated 5,000 are sick or have been exposed to the virus while working near someone who tested positive.

    Marc Perrone, the union president, said 13 plants in Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin and Alberta, Canada, have been closed at least temporarily because of the pandemic. Those union plants represent about 10 percent of beef production and 25 percent of pork production, the union said.
    [snip]
    So far, the meat-processing industry has been able to shift production to open plants to keep a stream of meat moving through the supply chain, said Little, of the meat institute. Some plants that closed have reopened after deep cleanings.
    [snip]
    The situation would be more dire if not for record amounts of meat in cold storage, though much of the meat was intended for restaurants that now are largely closed.

    The USDA last week reported 921 million pounds of chicken in storage and 467 million pounds of boneless beef, including hamburger, roasts and steaks. Before much of that meat could be sold at markets, it would need to be repackaged because restaurants buy in greater bulk than individuals. Some of the meat would need to be cut by grocery store meat cutters and packaged for customers to take home.

    In late March, the USDA eased restrictions to allow for meat that had been intended for commercial food use to be diverted into the grocery store channels for consumers. The industry sought these changes in mid-March after brief meat shortages caused by the coronavirus panic sent people scurrying to grocery stores. Source

  13. 13.

    Miss Bianca

    @rikyrah: I;ve got this bookmarked to read later tonight, after I’m done wrestling the draft of an article about our local Board of Health meeting.

  15. 15.

    khead

    @rikyrah:

    It’s been a month since the first announcement and I am still looking for that $1 test kit.  Even the video in the tweet simply says “researchers are developing” the kit.

  16. 16.

    NotMax

    One consequence have not seen much mentioned is what the impact will be on pet foods and what changes, if any, in their formulations will occur.

  17. 17.

    Kent

    Here in the Portland metro, a vulnerable old steakhouse, the Ringside, decided to liquidate its freezers of dry aged steaks to the public at a discount.  I guess to keep some cash flow during the closure.  So they opened up curbside service to Portlanders wanting discount frozen steak.  The line through downtown Portland grew to over a mile long.

    People are crazy.  Costco sells similar stuff at similar prices:

    https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/04/portland-police-respond-to-mile-long-traffic-jam-of-cars-lining-up-to-buy-ringside-steakhouse-meats.html

  18. 18.

    Patricia Kayden

    Trumpers & useful idiots are elevating 1 Biden allegation despite Trump's unforgivable record: 56,521 COVID deaths, 25 rape accusers, impeachment for election cheating, 18K lies, obstruction of justice, kids in cages, totalitarianism etc.Shame on any liberal who's in on this.— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) April 28, 2020

  19. 19.

    Kent

    By the way, from what I understand of this business, which is a little but not a lot.  Beef and pork will basically keep in the field or feed lot.  You gotta keep feeding and watering the livestock and there are diminishing returns once they are full grown.  But you can keep inventory in the field if a plant is shut down for a few weeks.

    Chicken on the other hand, not so much.  Much of the industry is designed around processing chicken within a specific size range.  And if they get too old and big they can’t make the same fillet products or use the same processing machines.  The become “roasters” instead of “fryers” which is a smaller market I guess.  Anyway, chicken plants are going to be screwed if they have to keep their chickens for another month.

  20. 20.

    kindness

    Where can I go to start the meme that the Radical Vegans purposefully infected all those meat processing plant employees so we would be FORCED to go vegan.

    Those Bastards!

  21. 21.

    ant

    Here in Wisconsin by me, we are side eyeing Brown county right next door to us, wondering what’s going on with the case count numbers.

    Green Bay Packerland has more cases than Madison. Meat packing cluster of cases.

    Of course county officials wish they could do more testing to find out how much it has spread into the community. No such luck.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @rikyrah: It’s all about the bailout. They think they’ll get more from the bailout than if they put adequate and appropriate health and safety measures in place and keep production going.

  25. 25.

    p.a.

    The overall national reaction to The Jungle was outrage over the treatment of the meat.  The workers… not so much.

  27. 27.

    Cheryl Rofer

    I stocked up on beef, pork, chicken, and lamb at our local Farmers’ Market on Saturday. Probably have enough for six months or more. I don’t eat a lot of meat.

    I figured that when this gets out, the local producers will be overwhelmed. No indication of that on Saturday, though.

    Also: too many people at the Farmers’ Market as I was leaving. I will have to get there early when I go.

  28. 28.

    Jackie

    • @Kent: They did finally close and are testing employees. But, they waited at least a week too long. Also, disturbing; a fruit farm in Yakima Valley tested packers – 37 out of 72 tested positive for Covid-19. I live in the Tri-Cities, and I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We have several processing plants in the mid-columbia region.
  29. 29.

    Anne Laurie

    @Kent: Chicken on the other hand, not so much. Much of the industry is designed around processing chicken within a specific size range. And if they get too old and big they can’t make the same fillet products or use the same processing machines. The become “roasters” instead of “fryers” which is a smaller market I guess. Anyway, chicken plants are going to be screwed if they have to keep their chickens for another month.

    Yup.  And chicken is where Tyson makes most of its money.  Ergo, they laid low while the pork/cattle processors were getting dinged earlier this month, but NOW…

    Not up to date on how the ‘contract farms’ — essentially, tenant farmers, forced into factory-growing in order to fulfill the needs of corporate part uniformity — are going to be able to handle this problem.  But I have a strong suspicion it’s a lot easier for an individual farmer to sell hoofstock privately, one animal at a time, than for Tyson’s serfs to find buyers for the extremely bioengineered bird-units that feed America’s greed for pre-portioned breast cutlets and restaurant chicken products.

  30. 30.

    Anne Laurie

    @p.a.: The overall national reaction to The Jungle was outrage over the treatment of the meat.  The workers… not so much.

    Well, as it was explained to me in high-school English classes, those workers were immigrants, who lived crowded into filthy unsanitary conditions with all their kin, breeding like rabbits, endangering the health of True Americans.  Sub-humans, at best.  The people with political influence (like TRoosevelt) were *much* more concerned about the purity of their own precious bodily essences…

    As I pointed out, at least one of the major offenders today, Smithfield, has jumped on that very explanation, in only slightly less xenophobic language.  When times are tough, go with the classics!

  31. 31.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    The Washington State Office of Drinking Water is raising alarms about a shortage of C02, which is a key component used in producing drinking water and processing good.  A byproduct of ethanol, their suppliers have told them they can only meet 33% of demand.  This is ~7 weeks into the shutdown.

    Seriously concerned about the supply chain collapse on the horizon.

  33. 33.

    Kim Walker

    I would be very curious to know how much meat has been surplused in deep freeze. I found one figure that said 1.8 billion pounds in 2018. Why are they trying to produce so much? Aren’t lots of restaurants closed and aren’t lots of people laid off? Isn’t demand down right now? Last October WSJ had an article on surplus pork: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-22/u-s-bacon-pile-is-biggest-in-48-years-but-may-start-to-ebb (sorry if this doesn’t work)

  35. 35.

    Raoul

    We know our household is among the privileged. First, that we can afford to shop at a natural foods coop, and that it is literally within walking distance (though we tend to drive as I want to shop as infrequently as possible so we load up the back of the car with stuff).

    Except for the first more panic-driven week, our coop has had all the chicken, pork, turkey etc that I’ve always seen there. Small local producers seem to be coping OK. We were already, pre-covid, not eating beef or pork, and doing one day a week of fish and one day a week of plant based protein for dinner (breakfast is one egg, a little cheese, and fruits and grains. Lunch is PBJ on whole grain bread, or less often, more cheese).

    So our household was doing ~5 nights a week chicken/turkey. We’ve cut even that back. In the last 9 evenings, we’ve had two chicken meals, four plant-based dinners, fish twice, and vegetarian pizza dinner once.

    The mass market meatpacking industry is — and long has been — a nightmare. And driving across Nebraska as I do once or twice a year is enough to put me off beef forever (even without gout that I am treating w/o prescription drugs).

    I know a lot of people can’t adjust fast to changing food supplies. We’re just really glad that veggie burgers and veggie bratwurst has gotten much better in the past couple years!

  36. 36.

    Anne Laurie

    @Kim Walker: Why are they trying to produce so much? Aren’t lots of restaurants closed and aren’t lots of people laid off? Isn’t demand down right now?

    Keeping an animal alive costs more than keeping animal parts frozen for later use.

    Also, shutting down a meat-processing plant is expensive, especially in a situation where there’s no guarantee it will ever be profitable to restart it.

    Same problem as the current ‘oil glut’… shutting down a well is expensive, and dangerous, and it might never be possible to restart it.  So the oil companies are pumping out a surplus, in hopes of getting bailed out by various governments.

    Further, everyone hopes to be the ‘last man standing’; once those other plants shut down, there will be more pressure on the governments to bail out the whole industry, and the company that hasn’t yet shut down will have first-mover advantage once things ‘normalize’.

  37. 37.

    Anne Laurie

    @John Revolta: Seriously, they just call them ‘units’.

    This isn’t new; I took a Dairy Science 101 class some 40 years ago, which is where I was introduced to the ugly realities of modern farming.  The alternative required class, for us pre-veterinary hopefuls, was Poultry Science 101… which was reliably reported to be even nastier than having to stick one’s arm up a cow’s rectum.

  39. 39.

    oldgold

    Within the last few days farmers in my area have been euthanizing young pigs being delivered to their hog finishing units.

    Normally the young pigs are delivered in lots of 1500 to 1600 at a cost of approximately $10/ head.

    The thinking behind this drastic action is that taking a loss of $16,000 now is beats running the risk of fattening these hogs and having no place to sell them

  40. 40.

    NotMax

    @Anne Laurie

    That’s being somewhat unfair to Teddy, who faced and overcame entrenched opposition to being what could be described as the first publicly-oriented proactive president*, changing the balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches as well as elevating the tenet that the federal government’s power and authority necessitates obligations to the people. Faulting him for policies guided by principle which he knew were politically untenable and impossible to to push through Congress at the time is disingenuous.

    Roosevelt responded to public anger over the abuses in the food packing industry by pushing Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Though conservatives initially opposed the bill, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published in 1906, helped galvanize support for reform. The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 banned misleading labels and preservatives that contained harmful chemicals. The Pure Food and Drug Act banned food and drugs that were impure or falsely labeled from being made, sold, and shipped. Roosevelt also served as honorary president of the American School Hygiene Association from 1907 to 1908, and in 1909 he convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. Source

    Of course TR was no angel, his philosophical celebration of strenuous martial hawkishness being but one example of that.

    *Had he not been assassinated so shortly after assuming office, Garfield could well have gone down in history as being so a couple of decades before TR.

  43. 43.

    Anne Laurie

    @Raoul: I know a lot of people can’t adjust fast to changing food supplies.

    Counter-intuitively, I suspect restaurants are going to have a particular advantage as we gradually come out of this:  There are a lot of people who can’t, can’t always, or don’t want to go to the trouble of cooking ‘from scratch’.   From what I’ve read, prepared-food vendors are among the first businesses that show up historically when the transition from villages to cities happens, because packing lots of busy people into one place makes buying meals more cost-effective than making them for a lot of the new denizens.

    I’ve also read that one reason there are / were so many fried-chicken chains is that making fried chicken at home is messy & time-consuming.  Turning newly-expensive cuts of meat, or unfamiliar vegetable-based protein products, into tasty meals is gonna be a major growth industry, come the jubilee.

  45. 45.

    Anne Laurie

    @NotMax: Oh, I’m a Teddy stan, going back to visiting his childhood home (now a National Park site) when I was very young (and got a tiny Steiff teddy bear, as a souvenir).  But one thing former American high school students of our generation tend to remember about The Jungle is the story that Roosevelt read a chapter over breakfast, screamed & threw his sausage out the WH window…

  46. 46.

    ziggy

    @Kent: Meat chickens, or “meaties” have been bred to be very strange animals. They grow to size in only 7 to 8 weeks, which is really insane. If they aren’t butchered soon after that point, they can grow so big that their legs don’t support them, they literally cannot walk. It is rather gross. I actually prefer red meat over chicken because it is much easier to find pastured, well-raised beef, pork and lamb.

    Factory farming is going to have all kinds of weak points that are falling apart quickly under stress. I am so glad we have great local meat farmers and butchers in my area. But of course you pay more for it (as we should).

  47. 47.

    Recall

    Elsewhere, Smithfield spokespersons cited North Dakota’s governor

    South Dakota. Don’t put that evil on us.

  48. 48.

    debbie

    Seriously, we’re still living in Upton Sinclair’s world, and we’re supposed to believe in AI? Suckers!!!

  49. 49.

    NotMax

    @Anne Laurie
    Most probably an urban myth.

    President Teddy Roosevelt was pretty set in his ways when it came to breakfast. He’d have hard-boiled eggs and homemade rolls. He insisted that the eggs be cooked until solid throughout. Medium or soft-boiled eggs wouldn’t cut it. As for the rolls, they had to be fresh and there had to be a lot of them. In the rare times that he’d deviate from his routine, it was usually in favor of hominy with butter and salt. Source

    And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

    Also too, for respite, kind of a fun read: All the Presidents Ranked in Order of How Much They Loved Breakfast

  51. 51.

    Raoul

    @Anne Laurie: I have very rarely been a McD’s person in the past couple decades. A week ago I was joyriding after getting air for the car tires, and went past a fast food outlet of a clownish, red and yellow variety. Holy Drive-Thru batman! Indeed I think a lot of people aren’t scratch cooks.

    I have enjoyed the culinary arts most of my life. But I can pretty surely say that I have never, at age 54, had a previous streak of +/-38 days in a row of cooking* dinner at home.
    * Please allow me that one frozen pizza night. I did dress the pizza with home-cut tomatoes and pepitas before banging it in the oven, and had made spinach omelets that morning for breakfast as a weekend treat. And yes, I do buy veggie burgers, but those meals have home made sides :) .

    We finally got to-go food on Saturday, first time in nearly 6 weeks (‘Sichuan’ salmon with pistachios, side of farm fresh green beans. I actually make better salmon at home, but it was heaven to not cook).

  52. 52.

    phdesmond

    @rikyrah: i just watched and rewatched that.  very interesting.  an antimalarial drug called chloroquine, the researcher said.

  53. 53.

    John Revolta

    @Anne Laurie: Ha! Years ago, I read all the James Herriot books, and I loved them, but as I said to my wife, “If I have to read one more time about this guy having his arm up to the shoulder in a cow’s ass………”

  58. 58.

    Anne Laurie

    @John Revolta: Well, it was (probably still is) a significant portion of the routine in any large-animal practice, however unglamorous.

    I actually got off unscathed — only a ‘fortunate’ few actually had to palpate a Holstein’s ovaries from the inside.  Although we all had to do a rectal-temp check!

    The class was about 60% boys due to inherit their families’ dairy farms, and 40% squeamish pre-vet urbanites, mostly female.  Just imagine how fun was ‘filmstrip day’, on the proper insemination via glass straws…

  59. 59.

    frosty

    @rikyrah: Hi rikyrah – OT, I had some WWII book recommendations for a 12yo at the end of the DNA thread a day or two ago. If you can’t find them let me know. They date back to when I was 12 many years ago, but they still hold up.

  62. 62.

    JaneE

    The absolute horror of eating a standard portion size. It would really collapse somebody’s pockets if everyone went to meatless Monday and 3 oz. portions of meat for dinner.

  63. 63.

    cain

    @Kent:

    I guess more people are going to eat roasters – small market or not. I honestly though feel really bad for these animals. :( Death is part of the cycle, but mass slaughter seems horrible.

  64. 64.

    joel hanes

    @Kim Walker:
    Why are they trying to produce so much?

    The hogs that are ready to go to the packing plant today are probably six months old, so, maybe eight months ago was when the farmer was deciding how many to raise and laying in feed.
    It’s a pipeline.

    During that six-month lead time, coronavirus changed the market.

  66. 66.

    daryljfontaine

    I think we’ve found some good jobs for all of those economically anxious protesters we’ve seen lately.

    D

  67. 67.

    Sloane Ranger

    @Patricia Kayden: Ah, but having sexual assault allegations against you is a badge of honour if you’re a Republican, a badge of shame if you’re a Democrat.

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