Meat plant workers were not protected

Back in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 began its deadly trail through communities, long-termcare facilities and workplaces.

One of the hardest hit workplaces in the pre-vaccine days were the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants where as many as half the employees at certain sites came down with the virus. Some died. That was certainly the case at Cargill’s meat processing facility in High River, southwest of Calgary.

Workers at JBS Foods in the southeast corner of the province also had high infection rates. Together these plants produce 70 per cent of what the companies refer to as Canada’s “protein” supply.

The employees are mostly temporary foreign workers or new immigrants.

The owners of these plants are global giants — Cargill is U.S.-based, JBS is based in Brazil.

Last week, a U.S congressional select sub-committee on the coronavirus crisis reported that during the first year of the pandemic, five of the largest meat packing companies in the U.S —Tyson Foods, Inc., JBS USA Holdings, Inc., Smithfield Foods, Cargill, Inc. and National Beef Packing Co. LLC — knew their workers were at risk but undertook a concerted effort to insulate themselves from oversight by health authorities to keep the plants open, employees working and profits secure.

They banded together to convince the U.S Department of Agriculture and then-president Donald Trump that their industry was too important to the country’s economy and food supply to be subjected to local public health authorities.

They wanted a presidential executive order that would free them from “those pesky health authorities,” as one industry lobbyist wrote in an email.

Trump issued an order on April 28, 2020.

In Alberta, the industry didn’t have to worry much about those “pesky health authorities” because both the UCP government and the chief medical officer of health (CMOH) — Deena Hinshaw — played down the dangers to employees even when infection numbers started to rise significantly.

During a virtual town hall meeting on April 18, 2020, several employees said they were anxious about working in the plant. But UCP cabinet ministers, the CMOH and Cargill’s top North American executive, Jon Nash, told them everything that could be done was being done to keep them safe.

Yet, at the same time, Cargill and other industry heavy weights in the U.S were hatching a plan to keep local health inspectors from doing their jobs.

Two days after the Alberta Cargill town hall meeting, a 67-year-old female employee died. By the first week in May three people linked to the plant had died and almost half of the 2,000 employees had been infected — the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

By then, Cargill had moved to shut down the plant for two weeks. The government or the CMOH never ordered them to close before that, despite having the authority to do so. They also didn’t implement strong infection controls. At the same stage of the pandemic, B.C. public health officials closed down a poultry plant in Vancouver after one worker tested positive and subsequent tests found that 27 workers were infected. A sister poultry plant in Coquitlam was shut down after two employees tested positive.

It seems the Alberta government was more concerned about the fate of cattle ranchers and the feedlot operators who supply the meat packers than they were about the workers.

Other slaughterhouses and meat packing plants across Canada also had high infection rates and in some cases deaths.

Will the federal or Alberta government investigate what was going on so we have a clearer idea about why so many workers were put at risk? Not likely, because that would reveal too many skeletons in the closet.