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Meatpackers hyped ‘baseless’ shortage to keep plants open despite covid risks: report

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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The biggest players in the U.S. meat industry pressed “baseless” claims of beef and pork shortages early in the pandemic to persuade the Trump White House to keep processing plants running, disregarding the coronavirus risks that eventually killed at least 269 workers, according to a special House committee investigating the nation’s pandemic response.

In a report released Thursday, the committee alleges that Tyson Foods’s legal team prepared a draft with input from other companies that became the basis for an executive order to keep the plants open the Trump administration issued in April 2020, making it difficult for workers to stay home.
“Meatpacking companies knew the risk posed by the coronavirus to their workers and knew it wasn’t a risk that the country needed them to take,” according to the report by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. “They nonetheless lobbied aggressively — successfully enlisting USDA as a close collaborator in their efforts — to keep workers on the job in unsafe conditions, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless to mandate otherwise, and to be protected against legal liability for the harms that would result.”


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The report alleges the nation’s largest meatpackers and industry trade groups repeatedly misled the public when they warned that a slowdown in their operations posed an imminent threat to the nation’s meat supplies. But “these fears were baseless,” the investigation found.
The report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is based on review of 151,000 pages of documents, more than a dozen survey calls with meatpacking workers union representatives, former U.S. Department of Agriculture and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials, and state and local health authorities. The subcommittee also held a staff briefing with OSHA and USDA.
Internal industry documents showed that “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants, meatpacking companies engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight, to force workers to continue working in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from legal liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the report states.



In the run-up to the publication of the executive order, executives from Smithfield and Tyson held calls with members of the Trump White House, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short.
Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, said that the company has worked with government officials at many levels in both the Trump and Biden administrations as it navigated the pandemic.
“This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” Mickelson said in a statement. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the U.S. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”



Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs, said that the company has invested more than $900 million to support worker safety, including paying workers to stay home, and have exceeded CDC and OSHA guidelines.
“The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch,” Monroe said in a statement. “That is the challenge we faced as restaurants closed, consumption patterns changed and hogs backed-up on farms with nowhere to go. The concerns we expressed were very real and we are thankful that a true food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal.”
An estimated 334,000 coronavirus cases nationwide have been tied to meatpacking plants, resulting in more than $11 billion in economic damage, according to research from the University of California at Davis. Researchers found that per capita infection rates in counties that were home to beef- and pork-processing facilities were twice as high. Chicken-processing facilities raised transmissions by 20 percent.



Publicly, meat industry lobbyists and executives raised alarms about the threat closing plants would present to the nation’s food supply chain.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” John H. Tyson, chairman of Tyson’s board, wrote in a full-page newspaper ad that ran in The Post, the New York Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April 2020.
“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.”
But that same month, U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high, the report found. In the first three quarters of 2020, JBS exported 370 percent more pork to China than it had in the same period of 2017; Smithfield exported 90 percent more pork during the same window.







“These employers must be held accountable for the consequences of their blatant disregard of the safety and lives of their employees,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said Thursday in a statement. “Today’s report is just one step towards accountability, but much more must be done to prevent corporations from putting profits over people’s lives in the industry.”
At least 59,000 workers at Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef — companies that control the lion’s share of the U.S. meat market — were infected with the coronavirus in the pandemic’s first year, the subcommittee previously found. At least 269 workers across these companies died of covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021.
“In 2020, as the world faced the challenge of navigating COVID-19, many lessons were learned and the health and safety of our team members guided all our actions and decisions,” Nikki Richardson, head of communications for JBS USA, told The Post. “During that critical time, we did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running.”







To keep production humming while business activity around the world ground to a halt, meatpacking companies and the USDA “jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting,” the report found.
The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
In April 2020, chief executives from Tyson, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods other meatpacking companies had a call with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, where they asked him to “elevate the need for messaging about the importance of our workforce staying at work to the [president] or [vice president] level” and separately stressed the need to make clear that “being afraid of COVID-19 is not a reason to quit your job and you are not eligible for unemployment compensation if you do.”

Soon after, in a news conference, Vice President Pence issued a “direct message to meatpacking workers” that “we need you to continue … to show up and do your job,” admonishing recent “incidents of worker absenteeism,” the report states.






Tyson’s legal team drafted the proposal for the executive order that companies used as justification for keeping plants open, the investigation found, and the final version “adopted the themes and statutory directive laid out in Tyson’s draft, invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants “continue operations.”
“In the days leading up to President Trump’s issuance of the Executive Order, meatpacking industry representatives and companies — Smithfield and Tyson in particular — engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House,” the report notes, including “calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White; a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump.”

Short and Perdue declined to comment on the report. Meadows and Pence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The following day, after the order was issued, the Trump White House allegedly “requested” that the companies “issue positive statements and social media about the President’s action on behalf of the industry, about the Order itself and about how it will help ensure the food supply chain remains strong,” according to the report.

 
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Did keeping any of those plants open have an adverse effect on the health of the country? We know the answer.
 
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We do have an idea, it's in the first paragraph. They say it killed at least 269 workers.
Those workers made a choice for themselves. Lots of other people died, too. It's a virus. There's no evidence the quality of the food was affected. Had there been shutdowns 2 years ago, we'd be in even worse shape today.
 
We do have an idea, it's in the first paragraph. They say it killed at least 269 workers.

Did those workers contract COVID from work? What is the population of meat plant workers in this country? That is over a one year timeframe. Should the plants have all been shutdown for a year?

That number by itself doesn’t tell me much.
 
Those workers made a choice for themselves. Lots of other people died, too. It's a virus. There's no evidence the quality of the food was affected. Had there been shutdowns 2 years ago, we'd be in even worse shape today.

That's a different matter. My post was intended to help you with your question: "Did keeping any of those plants open have an adverse effect on the health of the country?"

It was answered in the first paragraph that you either didn't read or didn't understand.
 
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There is nothing about the meat packing industry that makes it's workers inherently more susceptible to covid...
 
Did those workers contract COVID from work? What is the population of meat plant workers in this country? That is over a one year timeframe. Should the plants have all been shutdown for a year?

That number by itself doesn’t tell me much.

This is the footnote for that claim if you are interested:

Memorandum from Majority Staff to Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Coronavirus Infections and Deaths Among Meatpacking Workers at Top Five Companies Were Nearly Three Times Higher than Previous Estimates (Oct. 27, 2021) (online at https://coronavirus.house.gov/sites...iles/2021.10.27 Meatpacking Report.Final_.pdf
 
Anyone capable of reading The Cold Storage Report knew that there was no shortage of meat in this country. The Trump administration knew exactly what they were doing.
 
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Did those workers contract COVID from work? What is the population of meat plant workers in this country? That is over a one year timeframe. Should the plants have all been shutdown for a year?

That number by itself doesn’t tell me much.
There are 59,000 folks that work at the effected plants



Need some data that says 269 deaths due to covid is a higher death rate than folks in the same age demographic nation wide. Seems like that's a high rate...

Another thing...wouldn't folks in food processing be classified as "essential workers"? We kept Grocery store, gas stations ect open throughout the pandemic for obvious reasons.

Wouldn't closing the plants eventually create a food shortage? What happens to the beef/poultry/pork due to be processed if they're closed?
 
Last edited:
The biggest players in the U.S. meat industry pressed “baseless” claims of beef and pork shortages early in the pandemic to persuade the Trump White House to keep processing plants running, disregarding the coronavirus risks that eventually killed at least 269 workers, according to a special House committee investigating the nation’s pandemic response.

In a report released Thursday, the committee alleges that Tyson Foods’s legal team prepared a draft with input from other companies that became the basis for an executive order to keep the plants open the Trump administration issued in April 2020, making it difficult for workers to stay home.
“Meatpacking companies knew the risk posed by the coronavirus to their workers and knew it wasn’t a risk that the country needed them to take,” according to the report by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. “They nonetheless lobbied aggressively — successfully enlisting USDA as a close collaborator in their efforts — to keep workers on the job in unsafe conditions, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless to mandate otherwise, and to be protected against legal liability for the harms that would result.”


ADVERTISING


The report alleges the nation’s largest meatpackers and industry trade groups repeatedly misled the public when they warned that a slowdown in their operations posed an imminent threat to the nation’s meat supplies. But “these fears were baseless,” the investigation found.
The report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is based on review of 151,000 pages of documents, more than a dozen survey calls with meatpacking workers union representatives, former U.S. Department of Agriculture and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials, and state and local health authorities. The subcommittee also held a staff briefing with OSHA and USDA.
Internal industry documents showed that “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants, meatpacking companies engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight, to force workers to continue working in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from legal liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the report states.



In the run-up to the publication of the executive order, executives from Smithfield and Tyson held calls with members of the Trump White House, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short.
Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, said that the company has worked with government officials at many levels in both the Trump and Biden administrations as it navigated the pandemic.
“This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” Mickelson said in a statement. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the U.S. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”



Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs, said that the company has invested more than $900 million to support worker safety, including paying workers to stay home, and have exceeded CDC and OSHA guidelines.
“The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch,” Monroe said in a statement. “That is the challenge we faced as restaurants closed, consumption patterns changed and hogs backed-up on farms with nowhere to go. The concerns we expressed were very real and we are thankful that a true food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal.”
An estimated 334,000 coronavirus cases nationwide have been tied to meatpacking plants, resulting in more than $11 billion in economic damage, according to research from the University of California at Davis. Researchers found that per capita infection rates in counties that were home to beef- and pork-processing facilities were twice as high. Chicken-processing facilities raised transmissions by 20 percent.



Publicly, meat industry lobbyists and executives raised alarms about the threat closing plants would present to the nation’s food supply chain.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” John H. Tyson, chairman of Tyson’s board, wrote in a full-page newspaper ad that ran in The Post, the New York Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April 2020.
“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.”
But that same month, U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high, the report found. In the first three quarters of 2020, JBS exported 370 percent more pork to China than it had in the same period of 2017; Smithfield exported 90 percent more pork during the same window.







“These employers must be held accountable for the consequences of their blatant disregard of the safety and lives of their employees,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said Thursday in a statement. “Today’s report is just one step towards accountability, but much more must be done to prevent corporations from putting profits over people’s lives in the industry.”
At least 59,000 workers at Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef — companies that control the lion’s share of the U.S. meat market — were infected with the coronavirus in the pandemic’s first year, the subcommittee previously found. At least 269 workers across these companies died of covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021.
“In 2020, as the world faced the challenge of navigating COVID-19, many lessons were learned and the health and safety of our team members guided all our actions and decisions,” Nikki Richardson, head of communications for JBS USA, told The Post. “During that critical time, we did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running.”







To keep production humming while business activity around the world ground to a halt, meatpacking companies and the USDA “jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting,” the report found.
The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
In April 2020, chief executives from Tyson, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods other meatpacking companies had a call with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, where they asked him to “elevate the need for messaging about the importance of our workforce staying at work to the [president] or [vice president] level” and separately stressed the need to make clear that “being afraid of COVID-19 is not a reason to quit your job and you are not eligible for unemployment compensation if you do.”

Soon after, in a news conference, Vice President Pence issued a “direct message to meatpacking workers” that “we need you to continue … to show up and do your job,” admonishing recent “incidents of worker absenteeism,” the report states.






Tyson’s legal team drafted the proposal for the executive order that companies used as justification for keeping plants open, the investigation found, and the final version “adopted the themes and statutory directive laid out in Tyson’s draft, invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants “continue operations.”
“In the days leading up to President Trump’s issuance of the Executive Order, meatpacking industry representatives and companies — Smithfield and Tyson in particular — engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House,” the report notes, including “calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White; a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump.”

Short and Perdue declined to comment on the report. Meadows and Pence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The following day, after the order was issued, the Trump White House allegedly “requested” that the companies “issue positive statements and social media about the President’s action on behalf of the industry, about the Order itself and about how it will help ensure the food supply chain remains strong,” according to the report.

My company makes industrial equipment and we stayed open for the same reason. I thought it was a bit of a reach to make us “essential“ but I never missed a day. We had zero issues, kept on making our products and the Iowa economy did just fine.

In hindsight, I can’t believe this is even a story.

In hindsight I find it remarkable that this is even a story anyone would
 
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Many stores were empty of almost everything during the first 3-4 months, do they forget that? This period of time also had smallest numbers of cases relative to 6 months later and the next year, meaning it was the least "dangerous" period of time while maintaining supplies of food.
 
There are 59,000 folks that work at the effected plants



Need some data that says 269 deaths due to covid is a higher death rate than folks in the same age demographic nation wide. Seems like that's a high rate...

Another thing...wouldn't folks in food processing be classified as "essential workers"? We kept Grocery store, gas stations ect open throughout the pandemic for obvious reasons.

Wouldn't closing the plants eventually create a food shortage? What happens to the beef/poultry/pork due to be processed if they're closed?
Farmers were basically giving hogs away for free. We bought one for only 100$ and butchered it ourself. Many stories of farmers killing their hogs and burying them in pits because they had nowhere to take the hogs to get processed.
 
Farmers were basically giving hogs away for free. We bought one for only 100$ and butchered it ourself. Many stories of farmers killing their hogs and burying them in pits because they had nowhere to take the hogs to get processed.
It has more to do with animal weight and how the companies want to run the production lines. They would have had to adjust some machinery and slow some lines.
 
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A lot of you don’t know much about how “protein”, factories are run. They are optimal for the spread of a virus. Lots of splatter. Parts of them are at a warm, humid temperature. Workers packed in tightly. Workers with few employment options. These plants really, really love foreign born workers on visas, or recent immigrants with limited skills.
Even before Covid this industry was known for the disposable nature of the work force. But, it produces a lot of cheap, processed meat for Americans, and that is what matters to most posters. I am glad there seems to be a small push to look at unfair pricing practices by Midwest legislators. However, this may be an election year ploy.
 
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