More on coronavirus and meat processing

From the Trib:

To understand powerlessness in a pandemic, trace a northbound path from Amarillo up State Highway 87. Not too far shy of the border where Texas meets Oklahoma lies Moore County.

There are few easy ways to make a living in this country of feedlots and dryland cotton, but one of the hardest is at the JBS Beef meatpacking plant. Just about everything looks small on these vast flatlands until you get right up on it, but the 125-acre plant in the tiny town of Cactus is massive from any vantage point.

The steady billow of gray smoke from the plant’s stacks tells you it is still running full tilt. With the coronavirus pandemic gripping the world, it’s considered essential to keep thousands of cattle running through the kill floor each day, headed for dinner tables across America.

Meat and poultry plants nationwide have emerged as incubators for coronavirus spread. More than a dozen have been forced to shut down temporarily as the number of cases and deaths tied to those facilities rose; others have scrambled to ramp up health and safety precautions in facilities where meatpackers often must work shoulder to shoulder.

State health investigators are tracking 159 coronavirus infections tied to the Cactus plant, including one death associated with the outbreak, and Moore County now has the highest reported infection rate in Texas. Yet about 3,000 workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala and refugees from Asia and Africa, still report there each day.

Meatpacking has always been brutal and dangerous work, but it pays relatively well. JBS jobs have drawn generations of immigrants to this rural community, so many that Hispanics make up more than half of Moore County’s nearly 22,000 residents, and one quarter of the population is immigrants.

But the people who prop up life here, the ones now getting sick or working in fear wondering when they will, have little power over what the coronavirus is doing to their lives, because they have little power here at all.

From the Observer:

Officials at Tyson’s poultry processing plant in Shelby County may have waited weeks to tell workers that an employee had tested positive for COVID-19, preventing other workers from taking action to prevent the spread of the virus inside the facility, plant employees told the Observer last week. The company waited even longer to implement rudimentary safeguards (such as breathing masks and plastic screens to separate workstations) as more workers fell ill, were hospitalized, and died, they say.

[…]

The Observer has changed Bennett’s name, as well as the two other employees named in this story, after employees expressed concern that Tyson might retaliate against them for speaking to a reporter. The story also omits some details of employees’ positions within the plant and their medical histories to make them less identifiable. The extent to which the Tyson outbreak has contributed to COVID cases in this rural region is still unclear, partially because of a lack of reliable state data on infection rates and testing. It is clear, however, that some workers feel as if Tyson put profits over worker safety as the virus spread through the facility this month. If the company had distributed protective equipment earlier, “it probably wouldn’t be as bad as it is now,” Bennett says.

The employees say that approximately three weeks ago, a plant supervisor told workers that at least one employee had tested positive. But they shouldn’t worry, the supervisor reportedly said—the case had occurred two weeks earlier, so other workers likely wouldn’t be threatened. The announcement hit the workers like a bombshell. “I don’t think it was fair to us as employees the way they waited until 14 days later to tell us,” says Denise Richardson, who has not contracted the virus. “If you’ve got paperwork confirming that someone has it, you let everybody know and give us all an opportunity to take proper precautions.” At the time, the company had just recently begun to start screening workers by checking their temperature, and masks had not been widely distributed to employees, Richardson says.

By the time Tyson alerted employees to the danger, the virus already appeared to be spreading. Bennett, after days of “feeling sicker and sicker, weaker and weaker” at work, was hospitalized shortly after the announcement. Bobby Dawson, another Tyson employee, tested positive for COVID-19 about the same time as Bennett. He says he informed plant supervisors about the positive test result the same day he learned of it. Dawson criticized the company for not telling him about the situation sooner, which would have allowed him to take precautionary measures to keep from getting sick, such as taking days off work or wearing protective equipment. “They hid it from us. They didn’t give us a choice to do anything,” Dawson told the Observer. “Their main concern is to get them chickens out, regardless of what their employees are going through. That’s why we all come up sick.”

The conditions of the plant lend themselves to the spread of disease, the workers say. Employees work “elbow to elbow” as they defeather, eviscerate, and debone thousands of birds a day. Even the most innocuous task—such as clocking in for a shift and clocking out at the end of the day—appears to present considerable risk, as hundreds of employees crowd the few functional terminals. “You got so many people trying to clock in at one time you can’t do nothing but catch it,” Richardson says. “We’re packed in there like a bunch of sardines.”

Richardson also notes that many of the plant’s workers cross the border each day from Shelby County’s adjacent parishes in Louisiana, a state that’s been ravaged by the virus. Shelby County shares a border with DeSoto Parish, where at least 180 confirmed cases and 10 deaths have been counted among a population of only 27,000.

See here for the background. These and other meat processing plants will continue to stay open due to federal order. I don’t have anything to add here, just that you should go read both of these stories.

Related Posts:

• Coronavirus and meat processing
• More reopening
• Federal response to coronavirus spike in Panhandle