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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Pandemic Horror Stories: ‘Coronavirus infections at U.S. meat plants far higher than previous estimates -House subcommittee’

Pandemic Horror Stories: ‘Coronavirus infections at U.S. meat plants far higher than previous estimates -House subcommittee’

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This is *not* actually new information — I kept starting posts with news stories about the terrible conditions in meatpacking plants beginning in mid-2020, well before vaccines were available. And then scrapping those unfinished posts, because there was just too much material for a well-meaning amateur to do justice!

WASHINGTON, Oct 27 (Reuters) – Workers at the leading U.S. meatpacking plants experienced cases and death from COVID-19 that were up to three times previous estimates, according to a report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis seen by Reuters.

The U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee surveyed major meatpackers Tyson Foods (TSN.N), JBS USA (JBS.UL), Cargill (CARG.UL), National Beef (NBEEF.UL) and Smithfield Foods (SFII.UL), which together control over 80% of the beef market and 60% of the pork market in the United States.

At those companies’ plants, worker cases of COVID-19 totaled 59,147 and deaths totaled 269, based on counts through January of this year, according to the report which was released on Wednesday ahead of the subcommittee hearing on the pandemic’s impact on meatpacking workers…

Cases were especially high at certain plants, including JBS’s Hyrum, Utah, beef plant and Tyson’s Amarillo, Texas, beef plant, where around 50% of workers contracted the virus, according to the report.

The subcommittee’s findings also included new details of lax safety protocols at some of the plants.

In May 2020 at Tyson’s Amarillo plant, for instance, workers wore masks “saturated” with fluids, were not socially distanced, and were separated by “plastic bags on frames” instead of CDC-compliant barriers, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) memo obtained by the subcommittee.

Both Tyson and JBS said in statements on Wednesday that they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on COVID-19 health and safety efforts…

I’m guessing, from my reading back in May 2020, that a substantial percentage of that ‘hundreds of millions’ was divided between sending professionals to intimidate workers who complained / lawyers to bullyrag covid victims & their families / lobbyists to convince local & national political leaders that, hey, it wasn’t that bad, you know how those people like to whine, always looking for a free ride… just incidentally, do you know how much Tyson / JBS donated to your last campaign local tax base?

Also, I don’t think those stats include the infections & deaths among the meatpackers’ families, or their neighbors, because a lot of the reports I remember from that period included horro stories about entire extended families sickened, with the oldest and most vulnerable members most likely to die.

The subcommittee report also suggested that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had not done enough to protect workers in the meat industry from the virus.

OSHA staff told the subcommittee that under former President Donald Trump, the agency’s leadership made a political decision not to issue an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that would have required meatpackers to take certain safety precautions, the report said.

“Without being held to any specific standard, meatpacking companies were left with largely unchecked discretion to determine how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, to the detriment of meatpacking workers,” the report said…

One key factor this particular article doesn’t stress: Many, if not most, of the affected workers were people of color and/or immigrants. Again, this was a common thread to the media reports at the time; ‘nobody’ (who had the power to do anything about it) cared that the Somali / Hispanic / African-American workers were getting sick, bringing infection home to their families & (‘ghetto’) neighborhoods, dying out of all proportion to their numbers. The few politicians who *did* raise their voices were met with indifference or threats — We never wanted Those People here in the first place, undercutting wages & stealing jobs from us Real Americans!

Yes, it’s a good thing that the statistics are being parsed for the permanent record. But none of this is *new* information — just facts that were inconvenient to acknowledge during a period of product scarcity, under a Republican kakistocracy administration.

Reader Interactions

38Comments

  2. 2.

    CarolPW

    The stuff you did include in the daily covid posts made it pretty clear meat packing plants were fucked. It helped explain why eastern Washington got hit so badly early on. I suspect the french fry plants are not a lot better.
    I’m glad I can afford to buy what meat I eat from people I know at the farmers market.

  3. 3.

    laura

    Waves wand and confers citizenship on every single immigrant worker and their families in every type of work in the US and its territories- that’s what this daughter/granddaughter/ niece of a butcher and meat cutter would do if I was in charge.

  4. 4.

    Dan B

    For more than a decade I’ve shopped at a small local butcher and at a big co-op grocery that offer locally owned and operated farms. We don’t get the “Portland” story about our chicken but we regularly hear about the owners and the conditions of the animals. For instance our chickens roost in teepees on a farm about 5 miles from our house. We can hear them clucking and quaking in the evenings – nevermind, that’s the neighbors who have ducks and chickens in a greenhouse in their front yard. My partner buys deep fried chicken from a local Chinese deli counter in a Japanese grocery so he’s bringing the agri-business food into the house. We’re lucky to have small local businesses that source their meats from small farms. In the back of my mind is the huge hatchery in the town we lived in in Arkansas. It was a nightmare right on the river, probably Tyson before they became a corporate behemoth.

    The local butcher has chicken in many sizes, no factory farmed identical birds,, and until I patronized them I thought I was losing my sense of taste. Chicken with flavor was a revelation. So we’re chicken thighs bug enough to feed two adults easily. And it feels good to spend a few pennies more to support a business that cares about its customers and suppliers.

  5. 5.

    Shana

    There’s been a movement within the kosher community to include safety standards for the workers at kosher meat processors, both beef et.al. and poultry in addition to the condition of the animals in order for it to be considered truly kosher. I don’t know how successful they’ve been.

  6. 6.

    West of the Rockies

    Seems meat packing is farrrr more dangerous than LE, but Blue Lives Matter.  USA, USA, USA.  ‘Merica, fuck yeah.

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    @West of the Rockies: Also, Blue Lives don’t sufficiently Matter for cops to get vaccinated. And God forbid the various local governments mandate that, because as we all well know, cops are paragons in the field of respecting people’s rights and freedoms and therefore deserve the same for themselves.

  8. 8.

    Dan B

    @West of the Rockies: I believe you are correct, also construction, garbage collectors, and a whole host of other vocations.  It’s likely that cooking is more dangerous, as well as being a dentist’s child.  (That’s the reason my dentist cut back.  He saw the data.

     

    One big difference is there are no TV dramas about any of these occupations.  The other is that people are anxious about the possibility of being a victim of random crime.  They’re not anxious about the random possibility of being an employee on the floor of a meatpacking plant.  But they do have feelings about dentist’s, although not about encountering one with murderous intent.

  9. 9.

    RaflW

    Undercutting wages & stealing jobs from us Real Americans!

    Hey, where did everybody go?

    …a trend some have dubbed the “Great Resignation.” But the phenomenon is making an outsized impact in some regions: In Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho, more than 4% of workers voluntarily left their jobs in August — the highest rates in the country.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, those three are among the states with the nation’s lowest minimum wage — the federally mandated rate of $7.25 an hour.

    eta: Regionally interesting to me ~ Quit rates: MN–2.6%, WI–3.4%, IA–3.6%. Seems like the socialist hellhole around these parts is the least unstable. Huh.

  10. 10.

    Dan B

    And:  Many thanks to Anne Laurie for making me much more knowledgeable about the pandemic than I ever thought I could be!  It’s great to have a beacon in this dark time.

  11. 11.

    planetjanet

    One of our first huge outbreaks in Virginia were poultry plants on the eastern shore.  That county now has one of the highest vaccination rates in the state, 87% of adults with at least one dose.

  13. 13.

    Fair Economist

    …a trend some have dubbed the “Great Resignation.” But the phenomenon is making an outsized impact in some regions: In Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho, more than 4% of workers voluntarily left their jobs in August — the highest rates in the country.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, those three are among the states with the nation’s lowest minimum wage — the federally mandated rate of $7.25 an hour.

    Walmart minimum wage $11. Costco $17. Gee, why would workers be quitting in those states?

  14. 14.

    cain

    @Dan B: 
    I’ve had really good luck going to a halal butcher – their meats are of excellent quality.
    Your description reminds me of I think the first or second episode of Portlandia.

  15. 15.

    Chetan Murthy

    @laura:

    Waves wand and confers citizenship on every single immigrant worker and their families in every type of work in the US and its territories

    IIUC, that is precisely what France did for essential workers in a wide range of occupations.

  16. 16.

    Dan B

    @cain: Interesting.  There is a halal store about four blocks from our house.  I keep thinking of stopping in to get injera.  Adding chicken or lamb to the list would be nice.  I don’t think my partner would go for goat, sigh.

  17. 17.

    VeniceRiley

    Maddow covered the story extensively at the beginning; so I expect an update.

     

    meanwhile, in the good news file. R/hermancainaward has met their 50k goal for WHO vaccines fundraiser for covax! I wish they had the savvy the Jackals have to get matching fund donors. Maybe one of you experts can on a mod over there with tips.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/qbftyw/donate_a_vaccine_with_hca_for_go_give_one/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

  18. 18.

    jonas

    We never wanted Those People here in the first place, undercutting wages & stealing jobs from us Real Americans!

    Your excitement at seeing that $.99/lb. special on hamburger down at the Food-N-Stuff in the weekend circular says otherwise…

  20. 20.

    NotMax

    Anyone mention this yet?

    Three of President Joe Biden’s major nominees were confirmed to ambassadorships by the Senate on Tuesday.

    Former Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who left office in 2019, was confirmed as ambassador to Turkey, while former Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico was confirmed to be ambassador to New Zealand.

    Cindy McCain, the wife of late GOP Sen. John McCain, was confirmed to the rank of ambassador during her tenure of service as U.S. Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture.

    All three nominees were confirmed unanimously. Source

  22. 22.

    Mary G

    The teen quit his dishwasher job because he didn’t get a bonus one week due to other members of his team and it was dishwashing.

    He’s now working construction in the time-honored entry level position of carrying heavy things here and there all day. His starting salary is $20/hour.

  24. 24.

    CarolPW

    @jonas: ​
     
    I used to clean house for a couple where the guy was a gunsmith and they went for a month or so to Alaska to fish and hunt, and brought the meat home. They would feed me lunch, and often send me home with salmon.
    One of the best things I have ever eaten was a sandwich they fed me of BBQ mountain goat.
    Hippie me said OH NO, mountain goat, but I gladly ate it any way. I have no idea if at that time (1970s) Alaska had too many or too few mountain goats.

  25. 25.

    Chacal Charles Caltrop

    @Dan B:  is there any kind of halal meat that is the equivalent of bacon? As in, could be used to fry a few strips to render the fat, cook veggies in the fat, crumble the bacon meat in top of the veggies?

  26. 26.

    dmsilev

    @Mary G: Hah. A few years ago, the building I work in underwent a yearlong complete renovation, and the site supervisor for the job said that when he first started in construction, his boss told him ‘you’re a mule’ and sure enough he spent his days carrying stuff around job sites. Fast-forward a few decades, he’s managing multi-tens-of-millions-dollar projects.

  27. 27.

    NotMax

    @CarolPW

    Planet-wide, goat is far and away the most consumed meat.

    Haven’t driven through those neighborhoods in quite some time but when ( did it was not uncommon to encounter an acrid smell while passing by some houses shortly before a weekend, where they had laid a whole goat carcass out on the driveway and were burning the hair off with a blowtorch in preparation for a party or family gathering.

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    @Chacal Charles Caltrop: ​
     

    is there any kind of halal meat that is the equivalent of bacon? As in, could be used to fry a few strips to render the fat, cook veggies in the fat, crumble the bacon meat in top of the veggies?

    I think the halal equivalent is tail fat from fat-tailed sheep. I don’t know how easy that is to get here in the USA. Of course you could find some other fatty cut of meat and cure it yourself to get something similar to bacon.

  32. 32.

    Ohio Mom

    @Chacal Charles Caltrop: The kosher version of bacon is beef fry. I don’t know what part of the cow it comes from.

    Not quite as good as bacon but much closer to the real thing than vegetarian options like Morningstar Farms.

  33. 33.

    VeniceRiley

    @NotMax: Maddow says senate is holding up all I her ambassadors without a senate service tie.

    Should make for a effin ineffective g20

  38. 38.

    Searcher

    I know big tech is a sexier target, but meat packing really needs to be broken up and unionized.

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