Ordering meatpacking plants to reopen endangers workers
WASHINGTON » If you work in a meatpacking plant, by order of President Trump you are officially considered less essential than the steak you’re cutting up. You have to risk being infected with the deadly coronavirus so that those of us who can stay home — and still get paid — may continue to enjoy our hamburgers and chicken wings.
Trump stubbornly refused to use his executive powers to compel the production of personal protective equipment, like masks and gowns, for front-line medical workers. He boasts about the chummy “partnerships” he supposedly brokered with corporate bigwigs to acquire ventilators and to launch a still-inadequate testing program. But when meat processing company executives began speaking out about the danger dire outbreaks of COVID-19 posed to their business, our meat-loving president almost immediately invoked the Defense Production Act to force the plants to stay open — but not to ensure employees are safe.
Whose lives are put at risk by the order Trump issued Tuesday? Low-income workers — many of them black or brown, many of them immigrants — who can’t afford to lose their jobs and who now must put their health at risk to stay employed.
On the White House website, Trump declared the meatpacking plants part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure” and said that “closure of any of these plants could disrupt our food supply and detrimentally impact our hardworking farmers and ranchers.” In essence, he designated plant workers not essential, but expendable.
Perversely, scores of such plants, some truly enormous, have reported virus outbreaks and had to close. The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday that up to one-third of U.S. meatpacking capacity may currently be offline. Just three of the shuttered plants — Tyson Fresh Meats in Waterloo, Iowa; Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and JBS Pork Processing in Worthington, Minnesota — together account for about 15% of U.S. pork production.
The Tyson plant offers an instructive case study. Waterloo, population 68,000, is in Black Hawk County. Of more than 1,300 cases in the county, which has seen more people diagnosed with COVID-19 than anywhere else in Iowa, 90% are connected somehow to the plant.
Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, allowed most of the state to begin a partial reopening on Friday. Like the other states prematurely trying to send citizens back to work, Iowa doesn’t come close to meeting the goals of declining infections set out in the Trump administration’s guidelines. Reynolds, however, is one of a smaller number of governors who have announced that furloughed workers who are told to resume their jobs and refuse to do so — even out of justified fear for their health and that of their families — will have their unemployment benefits cut off.
Maintaining an adequate flow of food to grocery stores and still-functioning restaurants is necessary. But the meat industry, for decades criticized for its working conditions, creates an ideal environment for spreading the highly contagious coronavirus. Because of the way workers are stationed, and the high speed at which processing lines run, it’s hard to implement social distancing.
If the fight against COVID-19 is a war, workers ordered to go back into these plants have every right to feel like cannon fodder.
It comes as no surprise that the Trump administration, with its reflexively plutocratic orientation, would think nothing of sending poor, powerless workers into danger. It’s fully in character. But it’s also really stupid.
The virus doesn’t respect property lines or wait to infect people until they’ve clocked out. A cluster of infections at a plant quickly spills out into the larger community. Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson said Wednesday that he’s seeing cases at long-term care facilities that health officials have traced back to the Tyson plant. He said that two of his employees who work at the county jail have tested positive — a kitchen worker whose roommate works at Tyson and a nurse.
Trump could have saved lives by issuing tough, specific, mandatory requirements for meat processors to slow down their lines, institute proper social distancing, frequently shut down plants for deep cleaning and repeatedly test all workers to isolate the infected. But no: That would have meant asking the nation to survive on fewer bacon cheeseburgers for a while. Bon appetit!
Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist.