Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Protecting Meatpackers and Public Health

The last week in March 2021, President Joe Biden took a step to protect the health and welfare of workers in America’s meatpacking plants. He withdrew a Trump administration order that raised the maximum speed at which chicken plants can send chicken carcasses along a conveyor line. The old speed was 140 birds per minute. The Trump speed was 175 birds per minute.

Now just imagine. You work in a processing plant.

You’re standing in a line of workers, shoulder to shoulder, each with a super sharp knife in your hand. And there’s a conveyor line of chicken carcasses going past you at 140 birds per minute. Let me just play my metronome at 140 beats per minute to see how fast that is … Yikes! It’s more than two beats per second, and each of those beats is a chicken carcass going past?

OK, now let’s hear my metronome at 175 beats per minute. Wow. Even though it didn’t read like much of a difference, the clicks are remarkably faster. Almost three beats per second.

So, OK, your job is to take your very sharp knife and cut the right leg off every 10th bird. That gives you a second for each knife swipe. What are your chances of, say repetitive stress injuries? Like a shoulder being thrown our of commission? Or what are the chances of getting cut by your neighbor? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in animal slaughter and production suffer from more injuries than other occupations … more than coal miners or construction workers. Poultry processing is the leading occupation when it comes to finger amputations.

So, thank you, President Biden, for keeping severed fingers off the conveyor belt of America’s food processors. But, of course, there’s more to the story. Like, why did Trump speed up the lines in the first place?

The answer is that slaughterhouses had become hotspots for the COVID-19 virus. In May of 2020, the CDC reported that almost half the current COVID-19 hotspots in the US were linked to meat processing plants where poultry, pigs and cattle are slaughtered and packaged. That spike, in turn, led to the virus spiking in the small towns where the plants are located.

In Nebraska, five counties had outbreaks linked to meat plants. In one county, about one of every 14 residents has tested positive – the second-highest infection rate in the US at that time. In Kansas, outbreaks in four of the hardest-hit counties were linked to large meatpacking plants. In Waterloo, Iowa, a plant manager organized a winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19. Yeah, you read that right. A betting pool on how many of his employees would get sick.

Tyson President Dean Banks issued a statement: “We are extremely upset about the accusations involving some of the leadership at our Waterloo plant … Tyson Foods is a family company with 139,000 team members and these allegations do not represent who we are, or our core values and Team Behaviors.” Nice words, right?

Six months later, more than 57,454 meat- and poultry-processing workers had tested positive for COVID-19 and 284 had died. A report by USA Today said OSHA was not investigating the deaths. “During its last data release in July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 87% of coronavirus cases in meatpacking plants occurred among racial or ethnic minorities,” said the newspaper.

And, while plant workers suffer the most, there is enough misery to go around. Ordinary citizens are paying the cost for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) as the feedlots export their pollution. One study in Iowa reported that livestock in factory farms produce as much waste as 134 million people. That’s as much waste as produced by humans in the entire nation of Russia. All that waste is applied to growing fields, where, if there’s a rain, it washes from the fields into the creeks and rivers. The City of Des Moines has one of the most expensive nitrate-removal systems in the world. And, like I said, ordinary consumers are paying for the clean-up.

In 2020, legislators in four states — Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon — proposed moratoriums on new or expanding mega-farms. “We have to ask if we can reconcile our water quality goals with the idea that we can continue to expand the livestock industry,” says one university researcher, “And we can’t.”

How to fix this national disgrace? Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has proposed legislation to phase out factory farms within 20 years. In the meantime, consumers need to find better sources if we are going to eat meat. This month, farmers’ markets from coast-to-coast will re-open, bringing fresh produce, baked goods, grains and responsibly-raised meats to the public. Find your conscientious farmers, become their customer, and help them stay in business.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History” Email: margotmcmillen@ gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2021

Populist.com