New Report Says Meat, Poultry Plants Are Covid Hotbeds
ByFrom Investigate Midwest.org
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| Photo by the Government Accountability Office |
Working conditions in meatpacking plants likely led to the spread of Covid in rural areas of the United States in the early months of the pandemic, a new U.S. Department of Agriculture research shows.
The
space between workers, who stand close together on
production lines as they make the same cut over and over, was probably the main
factor that caused the Covid hotbeds and outbreaks, according to the USDA’s report published
last month. Overall, meatpacking plant workers were much more likely to be
exposed to the virus than workers in other manufacturing jobs.
“It
is a strong possibility that specifically the physical proximity of the workers
in meatpacking plants is directly linked to the outbreaks that we saw in the
spring and summer of 2020,” said Thomas Krumel, one
of the paper’s authors and now an assistant professor at North Dakota State
University.
The
paper, according to the researchers, could be the first effort to empirically
identify conditions that caused coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants at
an industry-wide level.
The
paper’s conclusions support what many meatpacking workers and advocates
suspected during the early months of the pandemic: Working close together and
high speeds of production, which lead to an even more
compact workplace, contributed to the virus’ spread.
“Workers at the beginning of the pandemic identified immediately they were at higher risk of getting Covid than other workers because of the closeness,” said Magaly Licolli, executive director of Venceremos, a worker-based organization in Arkansas that advocates for poultry workers. “You know, in some departments, they work shoulder-to-shoulder.”
Investigate
Midwest reached out to the North American Meat Institute to
get the industry’s take on the new study, but it did not immediately provide a
statement. In the past, the lobbying group has argued rates of
infection among meatpacking plant workers were below rates of infection for the
general population.
Since
the start of the pandemic, at least 50,000 meatpacking workers have contracted
coronavirus and 250 have died, according to Investigate Midwest tracking.
People of color make up 60% of the meatpacking workforce but accounted for 90% of coronavirus infections in
the industry in the pandemic’s first few months.
The
new USDA analysis compared rural counties with a large number of meatpacking
plants to areas that depended on another manufacturing industry between
mid-March to mid-September 2020.
Krumel
and his coauthor, Corey Goodrich, a University of Connecticut research analyst,
found that Covid cases in meatpacking-dependent rural counties in mid-April
2020 were nearly 10 times higher than in other areas that depended on other
manufacturing industries.
By
mid-July 2020, however, the number of cases in meatpacking plants had dropped
and the difference between meatpacking-dependent counties and the other areas
disappeared. The pattern remained the same throughout the rest of the time
studied.
The
September report ascribed the situation to meatpacking companies implementing
policies to protect workers, such as requiring face masks and erecting physical
barriers. However, the researchers couldn’t verify that safety precautions
single-handedly caused the change.
Licolli
said that workers and advocates had to fight to get companies to implement
safety measures, demanding workplaces provide personal protection equipment.
Even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised manufacturing
workers to be six feet apart, Licolli said, workers still found themselves
working in close proximity and in crowded hallways.
The
analysis found key differences between meatpacking and other manufacturing
industries, with the most significant being physical proximity of employees.
This was followed by exposure to disease and infections, which could be
attributed to workers coming into contact with foodborne illnesses.
Meatpacking
facilities were already “incredibly vulnerable” to Covid outbreaks, according
to the paper, because of consolidation within the industry resulting in large
processing plants with hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers.
“This
was further exacerbated by the close physical proximity of workers within these
plants, which helped to facilitate the disease’s spread—especially among
frontline workers,” the report said.
Meatpacking
companies including JBS and Smithfield have argued in court that they’re not
liable for employees getting sick, and court decisions favoring
workers are rare.
The
analysis’ authors theorized that, based on what’s happened during the pandemic,
meatpacking plants, in general, might be more susceptible to disease and other
viral outbreaks.
The
analysis, however, suggests that other factors such as low temperatures and a
loud work environment — in which people may have to shout — had less of an
impact on the overall spread of the coronavirus in meatpacking plants and did
not vary significantly between other manufacturing industries.
A study cited in the working paper found that
poultry processing plants that received waivers allowing them to raise line
speeds beyond federal limits saw more cases compared with facilities that
didn’t get waivers.
“Firms
that have higher line speeds necessarily needed to have workers in closer
physical proximity as a result of the increased line speeds,” Krumel said. “The
increased line speeds likely resulted in workers being closer to each other.”
Line
speeds played a role in a 2020 lawsuit against Smithfield when
workers at the company’s Milan, Missouri, pork-processing plant sued over a
lack of coronavirus safety measures.
In
addition to the lack of distance between workers, high line speeds prevented
employees from being able to change a soiled mask, step away to cough or sneeze
or wash their hands, said Axel Fuentes, executive director of Rural Community
Workers Alliance, which advocates for the rights and safety of Smithfield
employees in Milan.
“Having
a high line speed definitely impacted the workers during Covid because that
means more pieces of meat that they have to process per minute,” Fuentes said.
“That limited them taking prevention measures and if they don’t work fast
enough, they can get reprimanded by the supervisors.”
OSHA inspection documents obtained
by Investigate Midwest confirmed the company generally used
plastic barriers as a substitute for physical distancing, and as of May 2020 in
two areas of the plant employees worked side-by-side with no barriers.
And,
as more and more people got sick or quarantined, the remaining employees
struggled to keep up.
“The
people that were still working, had to work even faster and sometimes even do
multiple jobs, because they didn’t have enough people to do what they needed to
get the production back up,” a former Smithfield employee told
Investigate Midwest in April.
Amanda
Perez Pintado covers
Illinois’ agriculture businesses and workers for Investigate Midwest. Madison McVan was graduated from the University of Missouri
in 2020 with degrees in Journalism and Latin American Studies