A major congressional panel launched an investigation this week on the wave of COVID-19 infections that killed hundreds of slaughterhouse workers across the country last year and highlighted the long-standing risks in the industry.
Since the start of the pandemic, the meat industry has struggled to contain the virus at its facilities, and factories in Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas have experienced some of the biggest workplace outbreaks in the country.
Meat company employees, many of them immigrants and refugees, slice pork bellies or cut chicken carcasses indoors. Many of them do not speak English and do not receive paid sick leave. To date, more than 50,000 slaughterhouse workers have been infected and at least 250 have died, according to a ProPublica count.
The congressional investigation, opened by the Chamber Selection Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, will examine the role of JBS, owner of the meatpacking plant in Greeley, Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods, three of the country’s largest meat companies, which, according to the subcommittee, “refused to take basic precautions to protect its workers” and “showed an implacable disregard for workers’ health”.
The subcommittee is chaired by Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s third Democrat.
In response to the subcommittee’s announcement, JBS and Tyson officials said the companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to implement coronavirus protections and temporarily increase salaries and benefits, and hoped to discuss their pandemic security efforts with the panel. Smithfield said in a statement that it also took “extraordinary measures” to protect employees from the virus, spending more than $ 700 million on modifications, testing and equipment in the workplace.
The Chamber’s subcommittee noted that reports from a variety of news organizations shed light on problems with the way refrigerators handled the pandemic and the oversight efforts of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The subcommittee cited ProPublica’s report on how meat companies overshadowed local public health departments and efforts by Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts to intervene when local health officials tried to temporarily close a JBS factory in the middle of an outbreak.
ProPublica also documented how meat companies ignored years of federal government warnings about how a pandemic could hit a food processing facility and reported on the role that slaughterhouses, such as a Tyson pork facility in Waterloo, Iowa, played in spread of the virus to the surrounding community.
The subcommittee’s investigation will also examine the federal government’s deficiencies in protecting slaughterhouse workers. “Public reports indicate that under the Trump Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has failed to properly fulfill its responsibility to enforce worker safety laws in slaughterhouses across the country, resulting in preventable infections and deaths ”, According to the letter subcommittee to OSHA.
The subcommittee also said that the agency had issued only “a few meager fines” and “failed to show urgency in addressing the security risks in the refrigerator facilities it inspected”. The letter said that OSHA had received complaints about the factories from JBS and Smithfield months before the agency carried out the inspections.
In a statement, a Labor Department spokesman said the subcommittee’s investigation is “focused on the Trump administration’s actions around protecting workers from COVID-19-related risks,” and the agency is committed to protecting of workers and with this new guidance on the coronavirus the application that was issued in late January will serve as a “first step”.
In its letters of February 1 to OSHA, JBS, Tyson and Smithfield, the subcommittee requested documents related to government inspections in refrigerators and COVID-19 complaints filed with the companies. OSHA was asked to report to the subcommittee by 15 February.