Meatpacking plants were big COVID spreaders, USDA says. What it means for Fresno area
A recent report from the USDA confirms what many have been saying for months — meatpacking factories were a “major catalyst” to the spread of COVID-19 during the early months of the global pandemic.
The changes in safety policies and protocols in meatpacking plants during the pandemic likely led to decreased COVID-19 spread, the report concludes.
While it’s the first industry-wide analysis of its kind from the USDA, some labor voices said the report doesn’t go far enough to explore the role of health and safety policies in curbing the spread of COVID-19.
“Health and safety standards aren’t just adopted,” said Edward Flores of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. “They’re also enforced.”
Advocates say they hope the federal report leads to changes in working conditions and an overhaul of the meatpacking industry.
COVID outbreaks at meatpacking plants in California’s Central Valley
While the USDA’s report only analyzed this small subset of the meatpacking industry, researchers said that the report applies to the entire industry.
“Our results are generalizable beyond a single meatpacking plant or community to the entire industry,” the report said.
While none of the top 25 outbreaks in small, meatpacking-dependent counties listed in the report were based in California, the central San Joaquin Valley is home to a high concentration of beef and poultry slaughterhouse and processing plant facilities.
Flores says the report remains instructive for California researchers and policymakers that make decisions on worker safety.
There are 684 registered meat, poultry, and egg processing plants located in California, according to USDA data.
A number of the Central Valley’s meatpacking and poultry plants came under scrutiny in 2020 due to coronavirus outbreaks during the pandemic’s earliest months.
Despite testing positive, infected workers said they felt pressured to show up to work at the Central Valley Meat Company in Hanford. In December, the company was slammed with a Cal/OSHA citation and a $50,000 penalty for not protecting workers from COVID-19.
Selma also saw an outbreak in July 2020 at the Harris Ranch Beef Company meatpacking plant.
Another company that came under fire for its COVID-19 outbreaks was Foster Farms.
The company had outbreaks at its Fresno-based plant, Stanislaus County plant, and Livingston-based plant in Merced County, the latter resulted in nine COVID-19 related deaths. Foster Farms is currently appealing the $450,000 Cal/OSHA fines.
Labor advocates and California’s Democratic politicians have pushed for more coronavirus-related protections for workers throughout the pandemic, such as requiring companies to report and share outbreaks with local health officials and the public.
A recent effort to require California companies to publicly report outbreaks was shut down by the California legislature.
Flores said the preliminary report “gives us evidence” that during the early months of the pandemic, the spread of COVID-19 in many rural counties was tied to the lack of measures at the workplace to mitigate the spread of COVID among workers.
While Flores said the report does a good job of trying to test out different ideas, he said that the role of regulatory bodies that created and enforced health and safety rules is a crucial part of the discussion on coronavirus mitigation.
“I just think that the question of how these policies came to be enforced is really the big question.”
How COVID spread at meatpacking plants
The USDA’s 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.
“There is strong evidence the meatpacking industry was a major catalyst for COVID-19 outbreaks in rural America during the pandemic’s early months,” the report said.
The report found that working conditions in meatpacking plants led to the high viral spread, particularly the physical proximity to other workers and the fast pace of the work on the production line.
As a result, the researchers found that in mid-April 2020, “COVID-19 cases in meatpacking-dependent rural counties rose to nearly 10 times the number in comparison to rural counties dependent on other single manufacturing industries.”
While the industry compensated their workers with hazard pay, the report said that “created the incentive” for workers feeling sick to still show up for work.
The USDA report said that workers in the meatpacking industry are “often financially constrained” and thus “uniquely dependent upon working.”
The report comes months after a research team at UC Davis found that an estimated 334,000 COVID-19 cases were attributable to meatpacking plants. Their findings estimated that these cases caused economic damage of $11.2 billion, driven by deaths, health care costs, and lost wages.
Additionally, researchers at Johns Hopkins University said that nationwide, counties with meatpacking plants reported twice the national average rate of COVID-19 infections.
Another factor the USDA report attributes to increased coronavirus spread is the consolidation within the meatpacking industry over the past 40 years.
Industry consolidation has resulted in large processing plants with hundreds and even thousands of workers in one place, the report said. Recently, the Biden administration announced a plan to enforce the antitrust laws and boost competition in meat processing.
Finally, the USDA report said that the peak of the cases took place in late April through early May 2020, and then “decreased sharply,” suggesting that policy changes within these plants, such as installing physical barriers between workers and requiring workers to wear face masks, helped reduce the transmission of COVID-19 cases within these meatpacking plants.
Flores, of UC Merced, said that while the USDA’s report provides evidence of the role of meatpacking plants in viral spread, it doesn’t go far enough in “interrogating the meaning of compliance” with safety laws and regulations that were implemented to protect workers in response to the pandemic.
“A company may say that they’ve adopted something as a policy, but in practice, it’s not consistently implemented or enforced,” said Flores. “I think the real danger is ... in attributing the decline of COVID cases in the dependent counties on the assumption that there was compliance.”
Advocates calling for industry changes
Worker advocates said the report echoes what workers have been saying since the start of the pandemic and that a “key lesson for everybody” is to listen to working people.
“It’s so symptomatic of our (current food) system that it’s a year and a half later that this report is coming out to say what went wrong when folks who are on the frontlines then were saying what the problem was and what the solution was, but nobody listened to them,” said Navina Khanna, executive director of HEAL Food Alliance is a membership-based organization whose goal is to transform food and farm systems.
If OSHA and the USDA had listened to workers earlier on, Khanna said, many worker-related deaths in the meatpacking industry might have been avoided.
HEAL Food Alliance was part of a coalition that filed a Title VI complaint against Tyson foods, alleging racial discrimination and a “disastrous” COVID-19 response.
Khanna said that one of the major takeaways from the report is that working conditions in meatpacking plants aren’t sustainable.
“While COVID illuminated for a lot of folks what is so wrong with our food system...none of the conditions are a new thing.”
“One of the biggest things I hope that folks are taking away from this is that the conditions that folks are working under including the high speed on the lines in the meatpacking plant is one of the biggest contributors” to the spread of the virus, said Khanna, adding that these working conditions make meatpacking plants vulnerable for future crises and emergencies as well.
Khanna said she hopes this report can help further the case for more federal worker protections, such as a mandatory rule from OSHA that protects frontline workers in the food system, similar to what exists for healthcare workers.
She also said the USDA report demonstrates the need for “a complete overhaul” of the meatpacking industry that prioritizes the workers and communities.
Melissa Montalvo is a reporter with The Fresno Bee and a Report for America corps member. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.
This story was originally published October 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
