Profits vs. health: how to balance the cost of meat packers continuing to operate?

President Trump's decision to sign an executive order Tuesday to keep meat-processing plants open, declaring them critical infrastructure under the Defense Production Law, is coming under fire from labor rights advocates, and some public health experts.

The decree seeks to guarantee the supply of food throughout the country, despite mounting reports of plant worker deaths due to covid-19.

The order also includes guidelines to minimize risks for the most vulnerable workers, in addition to giving companies more legal protection if an employee contracts the coronavirus from the need to go to work.

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meat plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open. Under the order, the government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance, according to media sources.

Companies will be able to recommend the highest-risk workers to stay at home, in addition to ensuring that all employees have protection such as face masks and access to evidence.

" It’s shocking. I have never seen an administration so abandon their responsibility to protect workers," said Debbie Berkowitz, director of Worker Health and Safety Programs at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which advocates for workers rights, based in Washington DC.

“This is extremely shortsighted and of course extremely harmful from a public health point of view,” according to Ashish Jha, professor of global health at Harvard University.

“An executive order will not override biological reality. If you force people into situations that are unsafe people will get sick, they will die, and those plants will run out of workers and they’ll have to shut down,” he told the television network, MSNBC.

Many of those who work in these plants are immigrants. 35% of workers are Latino, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About another 30% are refugees, mainly from Asia and Africa, according to estimates by labor experts.

The Defense Production Law

Meat processing plants around the U.S. have shut down because of the coronavirus, but Trump said in the order that “such closures threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency.”

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meat plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open. Under the order, the government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance, according to media sources.

Legal liability

As companies begin to plan their reopens, business groups push Congress to limit liability for potential lawsuits filed by coronavirus-infected workers and customers.

The move came just days after Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. meat processor, ran paid ads in national newspapers stating that the food supply chain was "broken."

“The food supply chain is breaking,” John H. Tyson, chairman of Tyson’s board, wrote in a full-page newspaper ad published Sunday in The Post, the New York Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"We have a responsibility to feed our country," the ad said. “It is as essential as health care. This is a challenge that should not be ignored. Our plants must remain operational so that we can supply food to our families in America. ”

Profit v. health

Some workers have told Univision that the federal government and companies have not done enough to protect them from the virus outbreaks and have chosen to put production over their safety while failing, at least initially, to provide adequate protective gear and promote social distancing.

Some employees say they were told to continue working in crowded plants even while sick as the coronavirus spread around the country.

Because of outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, over the past several weeks Tyson, JBS and Smithfield have closed 15 plants, threatening the nation’s supply of beef and pork.

Coronavirus outbreaks in more than 30 plants have left at least 3,300 workers sik and 17 dead, according to news reports.

The actions by three major meat producers - Tyson Foods, JBS USA and Smithfield Foods - continued even after federal guidelines on social distancing and personal protective equipment were published March 9, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.

"It was not inevitable that this would have happened in the meat packing plants had they reconfigured their lines so instead of people being two feet apart they were six feet apart," said Berkowitz, who worked as a senior policy advisor in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) office of the Department of Labor during the Obama administration.

"Yes, production would have slowed down. They would killed less hogs per minute or per hour, less birds per minute. But you wouldn’t have seen the spread of the disease like you do now in the plants and they wouldn’t be shut down."

Recommendations

Critics point out that Department of Labor has chosen not to enforce any requirements in the meat industry to protect workers, instead leaving them only as recommended guidelines for the industry to follow.

The meat packing industry says it has implemented changes to protect workers on the production line, adding plexiglass between work stations, as well as equipping workers with protective gear, including face masks.

But industry experts say the meat packing industry was caught unprepared by the rapid spread of the virus.

“I don’t think they had any idea it was going to get this bad so quickly,” said Steve Meyer, an economist with Kerns and Associates, an Iowa-based agricultural risk management firm.

Rearranging the plant production lines to so workers are six feet apart in order to abide by strict social distancing would involve shutting down plants for longer periods to completely redesign them. In order to keep operating adjustments can be made but there were physical and economic limitations, he said.

“They only have so much space in those plants. They can do some of that (social distancing), but less people on the production line means that line will have to run slower,” said Meyer. " I don't think these people are cold, hard bastards who just want to wring everything of out their workers. I think they really are concerned about their people, no matter what language they speak," he added.

Although the meat industry was looking at heavy financial costs, he said it would probably overcome the crisis. "These plants are going to get through it. Heaven forbid we have one close permanently. I don't see that at all," he said.

Price to pay

But worker advocates said there could be big price to pay if major steps are not taken to protect workers.

"The industry will have to alter its current method of production. They still have to do that if they want to continue operating, otherwise the disease will continue to spread in the community," said Berkowitz.

The Trump administration and the meat industry say it is essential that the plants stay up and running to secure the nation's food supply and secure thousands of jobs, at a time when the pandemic has left some 26 million out of work in just five weeks.

Critics of the industry note that much of the production is for export, at least 30 percent in the case of pork.

"The president did this on behalf of Tyson to send a message to the workers to shut up and put up, and if you get sick and die, so what?" Berkowitz said.