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 score.
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The Congressional investigation, opened by the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, will examine the role of JBS, Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods, three of the country’s largest meat companies, which, the subcommittee said, “refused to take basic precautions to protect their workers ”and“ showed a cruel 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 had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to implement coronavirus protections and temporarily increase wages and benefits, and hoped to discuss their pandemic security efforts with the panel. Smithfield said in a statement that he also took “extraordinary measures” to protect employees from the virus, spending more than $ 700 million on modifications to the workplace, testing and equipment.
The Chamber’s subcommittee noted that reports from a variety of news organizations shed light on problems with the way refrigerators dealt with the pandemic and with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s oversight efforts. The subcommittee cited ProPublicais reporting how meat companies surprised local public health departments and about efforts by Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts to intervene when local health officials tried to temporarily close a JBS factory in the midst of an outbreak.
ProPublica also documented how meat companies ignored years of federal government warnings about how a pandemic could devastate a food processing facility, and reported on the role that slaughterhouses, such as a Tyson pork facility in Waterloo, Iowa, played in the 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 stated that OSHA had received complaints about the factories from JBS and Smithfield months before the agency carried out the inspections.
David Seligman, a lawyer who helped refrigerator workers in Pennsylvania to file a lawsuit against OSHA during the pandemic, said he hopes the subcommittee’s efforts will be “just one of the initial steps” to hold companies accountable and ensure workers are safe. “The damage inflicted on meat processing workers during this pandemic, in the service of the profits of corporate slaughterhouses and under a government that seemed happy to close its eyes, is a serious scandal,” wrote Seligman by email.
In a statement, a Labor Department spokesman said the subcommittee’s investigation was “focused on the Trump administration’s actions around protecting workers from risks related to COVID-19”, 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.