Judge dismisses Missouri lawsuit over meat worker safety

JIM SALTER,Associated Press•May 6, 2020




O'FALLON, Mo. (AP) — A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of employees at a rural Missouri meatpacking facility, ruling that oversight of how the plant adheres to guidance aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus falls to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, not the courts.

U.S. District Judge Greg Kays issued his 24-page ruling Tuesday in favor of Smithfield Foods. A lawsuit on behalf of workers at Smithfield's pork processing plant in Milan, Missouri, sought an injunction requiring the plant to abide by federal guidelines. The lawsuit accused Virginia-based Smithfield of not doing enough to protect workers from the coronavirus.

“Plaintiffs are naturally concerned for their health and the health of their community in these unprecedented times,” Kays wrote. “The Court takes their concern seriously. Nevertheless, the Court cannot ignore the USDA’s and OSHA’s authority over compliance ... or the significant steps Smithfield has taken to reduce the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak at the Plant.”

The Milan plant has not seen an outbreak of COVID-19. Just one case has been reported in Sullivan County, where the plant is located. But outbreaks have become common at other meat plants across the U.S., infecting thousands of workers, leading to the closure of some plants and prompting meat shortages. Several big grocery chains this week were restricting customer purchases of meat, and Wendy’s was unable to serve hamburgers at some locations.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week requiring meatpacking plants to stay open. The order was widely seen as giving processors protection from liability for workers who become sick on the job, and it came after the Missouri lawsuit against Smithfield Foods.

In Washington, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence met Wednesday in the Oval Office with Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in a session that was upbeat about reopening meat plants quickly and safely.

“We think the story will be we’ll see more variety, and more meat cases fully supplied,” Perdue said. “I’d say probably a week to 10 days we’ll be fully back up.”

“We’re going to hopefully prevent what could have been a really sorry situation where we were euthanizing some of our protein supply and really impacting the food supply, not only across the country but throughout the world,” Reynolds said.

On the matter of safety, she said companies “know how important it is to take care of their workforce.”

Perdue said that since Trump’s order, the USDA has worked with OSHA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ensure that meat plants are abiding by federal guidelines.

The attorney for the workers in Milan, David Muraskin, didn't rule out an appeal but said the lawsuit had demonstrated workers' power by prompting several changes at the plant, including better spacing of employees, additional cleaning and sanitizing, and an improved sick leave policy that means workers don’t feel obligated to come to work if they have symptoms of the coronavirus.

Smithfield said it was pleased the court dismissed what it called a “frivolous” lawsuit.

“Importantly, the Court recognized the ‘significant measures’ Smithfield is taking to protect the health and safety of its employees,” the company said in a statement.

Also Wednesday, Trump said he has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of potential market manipulation and possible price fixing by meatpackers during the pandemic. Attorneys general for 11 Midwestern states this week asked for a federal investigation, and some members of Congress had also asked about the issue.

Separately, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Wednesday that more than 300 federal meatpacking inspectors are either sick from the coronavirus or in self-quarantine after exposure. Citing a USDA spokesman, the newspaper said through Tuesday, 197 inspectors had tested positive; the Food Safety and Inspection Service has about 8,000 employees. The agency said it continues to meet its responsibilities.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.

USA

Coronavirus committee: Meat companies lied about impending shortage and put workers at risk

Parija Kavilanz -
CNN

At the height of the pandemic, as the coronavirus infected tens of thousands of meat industry workers and caused hundreds to die, executives at the nation’s largest meat producers were aware of the transmission risk in their plants and successfully lobbied the Trump White House and the USDA to circumvent coronavirus prevention measures and regulations, according to the latest findings of a congressional investigation.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which launched its probe in February 2021 into meatpackers’ Covid response, also found that meat processors’ warnings about the nation being on the brink of a meat shortage were not based in fact, and that industry experts at the time believed them to be intentionally misleading.

“The Select Subcommittee’s investigation has revealed that former President Trump’s political appointees at USDA collaborated with large meatpacking companies to lead an Administration-wide effort to force workers to remain on the job during the coronavirus crisis despite dangerous conditions, and even to prevent the imposition of commonsense mitigation measures,” committee chairman, US Rep. James Clyburn, said in a statement Thursday.

The North American Meat Institute, an industry trade group, criticized the committee’s report as “partisan” and said it “distorts the truth about the meat and poultry industry’s work to protect employees during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice. The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of Covid among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency,” Julie Anna Potts, president and CEO of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement.
Ignoring the risk

The investigation centered on meat producers Tyson (TSN), Smithfield, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its response to worker illnesses. Meat plants became a hotbed for Covid outbreaks in the first year of the pandemic as workers grappled with long hours in crowded work spaces.

The initial results of the probe, released last October, showed infections and deaths among workers in plants owned by those five companies in the first year of the pandemic were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers infected and at least 269 deaths.

The report cited examples, based on Internal meatpacking industry documents, of at least one company ignoring warnings by a doctor of the risk of rapid transmission of the virus in their facilities.

For example, the report found that a JBS executive received an April 2020 email from a doctor in a hospital near JBS’ Cactus, Texas, facility saying, “100% of all Covid-19 patients we have in the hospital are either direct employees or family member[s] of your employees.” The doctor warned: “Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory continues to be open.”

The emails prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s chief of staff to reach out to JBS, but it remains unclear whether JBS ever responded to the email, the report said.

“This coordinated campaign prioritized industry production over the health of workers and communities and contributed to tens of thousands of workers becoming ill, hundreds of workers dying, and the virus spreading throughout surrounding areas,” said Rep. Clyburn.

“The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated,” he said.

In a response to CNN’s request for comment, JBS, in an email, did not address the doctors warning, highlighted by the committee.

“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. During that critical time, we did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running,” said Nikki Richardson, a spokeswoman for JBS USA & Pilgrim’s.

The investigation surfaced examples of some meatpacking industry executives acknowledging that being transparent about the lax mitigation measures and high infections rates in plants would cause alarm.

The report, citing a company email, said on April 7, 2020, managers at National Beef discussed avoiding explicitly notifying workers when an infected plant worker returned to work with physician clearance, saying they should instead “announce line meeting style,” likely referring to announcements made during informal in-person huddles of production line workers, “hoping it doesn’t incite additional panic.”

Meatpacking companies and the United States Department of Agriculture “jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting,” according to the report.

Further, meatpacking companies successfully lobbied USDA officials to advocate for Department of Labor policies that deprived their employees of benefits if they chose to stay home or quit, while also seeking insulation from legal liability if their workers fell ill or died on the job, according to the report.

The probe found that in April 2020, the CEOs of JBS, Smithfield, Tyson and other meatpacking companies asked Trump cabinet member and then Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to “elevate the need for messaging about the importance of our workforce staying at work to the POTUS or VP level,” and 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.”

On April 28th, 2020, President Trump signed an executive order directing meat packing plants to follow guidance being issued by the CDC and OSHA on how to keep workers safe, so processing plants could stay open

Sec. Perdue would later send a letter to governors and to the leaders of meat processing companies.

“Meat processing facilities are critical infrastructure and are essential to the national security of our nation. Keeping these facilities operational is critical to the food supply chain and we expect our partners across the country to work with us on this issue.”

The Committee report said meatpacking companies and lobbyists worked with USDA and the White House in an attempt to prevent state and local health departments from regulating coronavirus precautions in plants.

Calling the contents of the report deeply disturbling, a spokesperson for the USDA said “many of the decisions made by the previous administration are not in line with our values. This administration is committed to food safety, the viability of the meat and poultry sector and working with our partners across the government to protect workers and ensure their health and safety is given the priority it deserves.”

A spokesman for Perdue, who is currently Chancellor of the University of Georgia, said Perdue “is focused on his new position serving the students of Georgia” and did not provide a comment on the committee report.

Former President Trump has not responded to CNN Business’ request for comment.
False claims of impending meat shortage

As their workers fell ill with the virus, several meat suppliers were forced to temporarily shut plants in 2020 and their companies’ executives warned the situation would put the US meat supply at risk.

The report slammed those warnings as “flimsy if not outright false.”

“Just three days after Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan publicly warned that the closure of a Smithfield plant was ‘pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our nation’s meat supply,” he asked industry representatives to issue a statement that ‘there was plenty of meat, enough … to export,” while Smithfield told meat importers the same, the report said.

The investigation found industry representatives thought Smithfield’s statements about a meat supply crunch were “intentionally scaring people.”

At the time, food experts told CNN Business that while there were meat shortages, at times, various cuts of meat might not be available.

Tyson said via an email response that it was reviewing the report.

Smithfield said it took “every appropriate measure to keep our workers safe” when it encountered a “first-of-its-kind challenge” two years ago.

“To date, we have invested more than $900 million to support worker safety, including paying workers to stay home, and have exceeded CDC and OSHA guidelines,” Smithfield spokesman Jim Monroe, said in an email to CNN Business.

“The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch. 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…. Did we make every effort to share with government officials our perspective on the pandemic and how it was impacting the food production system? Absolutely,” he said.

Cargill and National Beef could not immediately be reached for comment.

The committee said its report was based on more than 151,000 pages of documents collected from meatpacking companies and interest groups, calls with meatpacking workers, union representatives, and former USDA and OSHA officials, among others.

– CNN Business’ Jennifer Korn contributed to this report

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SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/05/report-trump-officials-meat-companies.html

THESE COMPANIES OPERATE IN ALBERTA
Major meat companies lied about impending shortages to keep workers on site at the height of the pandemic, a House committee says

gdean@insider.com (Grace Dean) - 



© Provided by Business Insider

A JBS meat packing plant in Colorado. Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

A report by a bipartisan House committee details meat-processing giants' response to the pandemic.

One hospital doctor told JBS that all its COVID-19 patients were linked to a JBS plant in Texas.

The companies exaggerated meat shortages to keep workers on site, according to the report.

Major US meat companies were aware that their sites were hotbeds for coronavirus transmission but exaggerated impending product shortages so they could keep workers on site at the height of the pandemic, according to an investigation by a House committee.

They also lobbied the White House and the US Department of Agriculture to minimize coronavirus safety measures on the industry, according to the report, which was released on Thursday by the bipartisan House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Meat processing sites were a major source of coronavirus outbreaks, triggering a wave of lawsuits. This was largely down to their lack of safety procedures like social distancing and staff's inability to work from home.

The report focused on five of the US' largest meatpacking companies — Tyson Foods, JBS, Smithfield Foods, Cargill, and the National Beef Packing Company. During the first year of the pandemic, more than 59,000 workers at these companies were infected with the coronavirus and at least 269 died, the committee said.

The report details how meatpacking executives were allegedly aware of the high risks of coronavirus transmission inside their plants.

For example, a doctor at a hospital close to JBS' processing plant in Cactus, Texas, sent an email to a JBS executive on April 18, 2020, saying that "100% of all COVID-19 patients we have in the hospital are either direct employees or family member[s] of your employees."

"I am not sure this situation is being treated with the urgency it deserves," the doctor continued. "Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory continues to be open."
Claims of meat shortages were 'intentionally scaring people'

Despite awareness of outbreaks at some sites, meatpacking companies continued to push for their workers to stay on site. In the report, the committee dismissed claims that there would be meat shortages if sites closed as "flimsy if not outright false. It also said they were "an attempt to justify operating meatpacking plants under dangerous conditions."

Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan said in April 2020 that the closure of meatpacking facilities "is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply. It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running."

But an executive at trade body North American Meat Institute said in an email published in the committee's report that Sullivan was "intentionally scaring people." The email also said that three days after his statement, Smithfield had asked the Meat Institute to "issue a statement that there was plenty of meat," including enough for export.

"Smithfield has whipped everyone into a frenzy," the executive added.

Meatpacking companies' reports of impending shortages appeared to come as the companies bulked up their exports. The US exported around 640 million pounds of pork in April 2020 – a 22% increase on April 2019, per data from the Department of Agriculture. Pork exports to China more than quadrupled over that time period, the data shows.

"The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch," a Smithfield spokesperson told Insider. "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 food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal."

The report also outlined how the meatpacking industry "worked actively to cultivate its very close relationship with USDA" at the start of the pandemic in an attempt to minimize coronavirus safety measures on the industry. This included the USDA under secretary for food safety being in regular communication with industry representatives and lobbyists, using both her personal and government phone and email, per the report.

The USDA and meatpacking companies also jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting during the pandemic.

"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 committee wrote.

The Smithfield spokesperson told Insider that the company had "exceeded CDC and OSHA guidelines" and had paid workers to stay at home during the pandemic.

"The content of the report was deeply disturbing and many of the decisions made by the previous administration are not in line with our values," a USDA spokesperson told Insider. "This administration is committed to food safety, the viability of the meat and poultry sector, and working with our partners across the government to protect workers and ensure their health and safety is given the priority it deserves."

Workers cheered as they enter South Dakota pork plant

The Associated Press

May 20, 2020

The Smithfield plant has instructed many workers to return to work this week as it looks to scale up operations by the end of the month

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Employees at a Smithfield pork processing plant in South Dakota where a coronavirus outbreak infected over 800 people were greeted at work Wednesday with thank-you signs, cheers and waves from about a dozen area residents. 

"They're putting their health at risk just like the hospital workers are to continue on with this work, so I hope they feel appreciated," said Becky Olson, a Sioux Falls resident who held a sign outside Smithfield's entrance.

The plant has instructed many workers to return to work this week as it looks to scale up operations by the end of the month. Masked employees streamed into the factory entrance as trucks carrying pigs rumbled past.

The Smithfield plant, which produces roughly 5 percent of the nation's pork supply, gave an early warning of how quickly the virus can spread in meatpacking plants that are key to the nation's food supply. Two employees at the plant have died from COVID-19, along with more than 20 meat and poultry workers nationwide.

Dave Tesphay, an employee who was reporting to work on Wednesday, said that with the pandemic "it was really scary at first."

Smithfield shut the plant down for three weeks and has installed plexiglass barriers between work stations to prevent infections from spreading. The company is also spreading employees at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart when possible.

Tesphay said the plant's closure and safety measures gave him confidence to return. The people who showed up to cheer him on made him feel the community cared, he said.

The event was organized by a group of friends who wanted to give meatpacking workers, many who are immigrants, a show of support similar to what health care workers have received during the pandemic. Sioux Falls mayor Paul TenHaken also got behind the idea, saying he would show up to cheer during the day.

Food Workers Are Dying at Meat Processing Plants Where Social Distancing Is ‘Almost Impossible’
"Every day we worry about this virus.”

NOT JUST IN THE USA BUT IN ALBERTA TOO

By Paul Blest Apr 24 2020


AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGSA Tyson Fresh Meats plant employee leaves the plant, Thursday, April 23, 2020, in Logansport, Ind. The plant will temporarily close its meatpacking plant in north-central Indiana after several employees tested positive for COVID-19. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
More than 5,000 American food workers have been infected or exposed to coronavirus, and at least 13 have died, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International union.

Members of the union, which represents 250,000 workers in the meat and food processing industries, said on a Thursday press call that conditions at meatpacking plants made it nearly impossible to practice social distancing, even as companies have taken short-term measures to try to keep workers safe.Margarita Heredia, a worker at a JBS pork plant in Iowa, described social distancing inside the plant as “almost impossible. There’s no room.”

Even at plants that have adopted “aggressive” social distancing and safety measures, such as a Cargill beef plant in Dallas, Texas, workers are anxious to come into work, worker and UFCW member Rhonda Trevino said.

“On a normal day we don’t have room for errors, it’s very hard work, and safety is our top priority,” Trevino, who has worked at the plant for more than 25 years, said. “These are not normal days. Every day we worry about this virus.”

The news of infected workers comes as at least eight major meat plants owned by Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, National Beef, and Hormel have shut down in recent weeks, according to a count from Bloomberg. This week, JBS shut down its Worthington, Minnesota facility after seven workers there tested positive for coronavirus.

The closures have taken at least a quarter of U.S. pork production offline indefinitely, although most shutdowns are lasting about two weeks, according to Bloomberg. If coronavirus forces more closures in key parts of the supply chain in the coming weeks and months, economists say that shortages of some meat products could begin as soon as May.

The CDC released a 15-page report on Thursday offering more than 100 recommendations for how Smithfield can improve conditions at its production plant in Sioux Falls, SD, which has nearly 800 workers who’ve tested positive for coronavirus. The plant closed on April 12, and a spokesperson said recently that “living circumstances in certain cultures” helped exacerbate the spread of the disease.

On Thursday, however, the Rural Community Workers’ Alliance and an anonymous worker at Smithfield plant in Missouri filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the company wasn’t even allowing workers to pause their work to cough or sneeze. The suit said Smithfield was enacting “punitive measures to ensure its preferred line speed is maintained, including that missing even one piece of meat to clean one’s face could result in punitive employment action.”

The worker and the RCWA also allege that the company hasn’t given employees “any additional break time to wash their hands or to use hand sanitizer,” and even “encourages them to come into work sick.”

A Smithfield executive reportedly told Law.com that the allegations “are without factual or legal merit and include claims previously made against the company that have been investigated and determined to be unfounded.”

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Testing uneven, or nonexistent, at meatpacking plants with COVID-19 outbreaks
2020/5/9 18:31 (EDT)

©Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Workers trim beef at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Dakota City, Neb. in 2012. 

- Keith Myers/Kansas City Star/TNS

MINNEAPOLIS — Nearly two weeks after President Donald Trump proclaimed that meat processors should remain open, thousands of U.S. meatpacking workers are still not being tested for the coronavirus.

Pork, beef and poultry laborers have been asked to return to fast-moving, shoulder-to-shoulder meat-cutting lines with no clear idea of who does or does not carry the virus. Across the country, meat factories have been the scenes of the largest outbreaks in the country.

“It really is a death march going into those facilities until workers can be tested,” said Joe Enriquez Henry of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a group that’s communicating with meatpacking workers in Iowa and fighting for their protection.

“We can’t solve this until everyone is tested,” he said. “That’s the clear thing that needs to happen, and it’s not happening.”

The only guidance from the federal government has been that meat processors should “consider” tests. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue wrote a letter to governors last week urging that meat plants remain open, but he didn’t mention testing workers.

That’s left meat processors with no obligation to test for COVID-19, even as many thousands of workers have been infected and the death toll among and around them is rising. In Minnesota, the spouse of a worker at a Jennie-O turkey plant in Melrose died last week.

Meat processors, who were quick to applaud the president’s order that they stay open, continue to shutter plants because of outbreaks. Last week, at least 10,000 hogs a day were being euthanized in Minnesota because of a lack of slaughterhouse capacity.

Some of the plants that remain open are running at reduced capacity because of absenteeism. Workers are afraid to go to work.

On her own

Jomari de Jesus is a Honduran asylum-seeker and mother of two who works for a contractor that cleans a Jennie-O turkey processing plant in Willmar.

For $14 an hour, seven hours a day, five days a week, de Jesus is one of 105 cleaning workers in her department. Her responsibility is to sanitize an area the size of a small apartment, including machines that process turkeys into ground meat.

She started feeling ill on April 11. “I felt like I was smelling cigarette smoke and I don’t smoke,” she said.

A stomachache, diarrhea, headaches, fever and cough followed. She thought maybe it was all caused by the cleaning chemicals. Then on April 21, one of her co-workers fainted and was taken away in an ambulance.

“I told my supervisor after the woman fainted that I wanted to go home because we were scared we might be sick too. He approved that we could go home but if we didn’t show any signs of illness to come back to work,” de Jesus said. “He did not encourage us to go to the doctor. He said we were just scared.”

She hasn’t worked since, and on her own initiative, de Jesus called the hospital, explained her symptoms and was tested for COVID-19 on April 24. Three days later, she learned she was positive and went into quarantine.

De Jesus said she has not been paid by her employer while she was isolated at home and caring for her two children. She does not have health insurance, she said, and paid $115 from her own pocket for the coronavirus test.

Austin-based Hormel Foods, which owns the Jennie-O plant in Willmar, has been testing employees, but de Jesus isn’t sure what the policy is for her employer, the cleaning company.

“I think it should be obligatory to be tested,” she said.

Hormel “encourages” returning employees to get tested for COVID-19, and as testing availability has increased, “we have been able to move more swiftly to encourage team members to get tested,” the company said in a statement to the Star Tribune.

The food company decided about a week ago to conduct mass testing at its turkey plants in Willmar and Melrose for all employees and third-party contractors who regularly work at the factories.

“Our company covered the cost,” a Hormel spokesman said.

JBS ‘reluctant to test’

Two-thirds of the workers at the JBS plant in Worthington were tested when the facility was idled two weeks ago, but that was at Gov. Tim Walz’s insistence.

“The governor wanted everyone in the plant to be tested,” said Kris Ehresmann, infectious disease director for the Minnesota Department of Health. “JBS was reluctant to test everyone. They had reservations.”

The Health Department ended up testing about 1,400 of the plant’s 2,200 workers, coordinating with local public health authorities and Sanford Health. Minnesota taxpayers will foot the bill.

Systematic testing of employees has not occurred at a similarly sized JBS pork plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, where at least dozens of workers have fallen ill from the virus. Ken Lyons, chairman of the Marshall County Board of Health, said last week he has not known the case count at the plant for three weeks.

JBS, which has put in place a long list of new safety measures in Worthington, did not respond to the Star Tribune’s questions about coronavirus testing.

Testing is “a point in time,” said Ehresmann, of the state Health Department. “All a negative test means is that today — at this point — you don’t have evidence of COVID-19.”

Employers must conduct continuous, rigorous screening of their workers in addition to giving them continued access to testing, she said.

Patchwork policies

The other companies with dominant meatpacking presence in the Upper Midwest are Smithfield and Tyson, and their testing of employees varies by location.

“I am not sure who has been testing and who has not, nor how they have been doing the testing,” said Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for the North American Meat Institute, a trade group for meatpackers.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union has called for daily testing of meatpacking workers, but that is some way off. Many plants are not testing workers at all.

Smithfield is trying to reopen its Sioux Falls, S.D., pork plant where more than 800 workers have tested positive, but any new testing is “on a voluntary basis,” the company said in a statement. The state of South Dakota is paying for the tests.

A Smithfield plant in Denison, Iowa, has been the scene of an outbreak and is running at reduced capacity because of absenteeism.

The mayor of Denison, Pamela Soseman, said last week that Smithfield “did not respond” when she asked the company to request rapid test kits from the state.

But on Friday afternoon she spoke with representatives from the company, and Smithfield workers are now being encouraged to sign up for testing at a drive-through site in town. Testing is not mandatory.

Smithfield said Friday in a statement to the Star Tribune that it has worked with the state of Iowa and local public health authorities “to make testing available for free to all Denison employees” of the company.

Tyson Foods, which has suffered outbreaks at several plants in Iowa, Nebraska and elsewhere, did not respond to a request for comment.

Silent USDA

Local news reports indicate workers are being tested in Dakota City, Neb., where a Tyson beef plant has been shut down, but not in Independence, Iowa, where Tyson has a dog-treats factory with an outbreak.

A spokeswoman for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents thousands of poultry-processing workers in the southeastern United States, said testing is not occurring “to our knowledge” at any of the plants where it represents workers. A least three workers have died from COVID-19 at a Tyson plant in Camilla, Ga., where the union represents 2,000 workers.

The USDA has given processors little instruction for reopening a plant that has been idled, including testing guidelines.

“The information we have gotten from the USDA has been very limited,” said Thom Petersen, Minnesota’s agriculture commissioner. “It has been very general — things we are already doing in Minnesota.”

Perdue, the U.S. secretary of agriculture, has told meat and poultry processors to use an interim guidance for the industry published last month by the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

That document’s only reference to testing says, “Facilities should consider the appropriate role for testing and workplace contact tracing of COVID-19-positive workers in a worksite risk assessment.”

The USDA did not respond to the Star Tribune’s questions about testing at meatpacking plants.

———

©2020 Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

The federal government isn't prepared to relocate America's climate change victims

Alex Lubben, Julia Shipley, Zak Cassel and Olga Loginova
·Columbia Journalism Investigations
Wed, August 3, 2022 

LONG READ

This article was produced in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations.

SMITHFIELD, Va. — When flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 destroyed Betty Ricks’s home, she rebuilt it. Several years later, she posed proudly for a Christmas photograph beside her daughter and granddaughter in her new living room.

Then another flood — brought by Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006 — claimed her house a second time, leaving soggy furniture and appliances jumbled sideways.

“Everything gone again,” Ricks said. The only thing she salvaged was the photograph, now water-streaked.

After that storm, she rebuilt her home from scratch once more. Yet more flooding followed.

Now she and some of her neighbors on Great Spring Road, who live adjacent to a creek that overflows during bad storms, see no way out of this dangerous loop but to move. With an increasing number of communities at high risk from worse and more frequent disasters fueled by the changing climate, experts warn that many Americans will find themselves in a similar situation.

Betty Ricks in her home in Smithfield, Va. The family photograph in the background is all she could save after a devastating tropical storm. 

(Julia Shipley/Columbia Journalism Investigations)

But the only way to leave without putting new buyers in the same position — or abandoning their homes altogether — is to seek relocation funds from the federal government.

Twice now, Ricks and her neighbors have asked for that help. Both times, their applications were denied.

Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations spent a year digging into the growing need for climate relocation across the United States. Little organized government assistance exists for preventing the loss of homes and lives before a disaster, the investigation revealed — and there is no comprehensive focus on helping people escape untenable situations like Ricks’s.

That leaves people in harm’s way to fend for themselves. Many can’t.

Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners analyzed federal disaster declaration data over the past three decades to identify communities repeatedly hit by major hurricanes, floods or wildfires, events that climate change is worsening.

The analysis revealed dozens of communities across the country in recent years — and hundreds over the last generation — bearing the brunt of successive disasters, from California to North Carolina, Washington state to Texas. Many are located near the Atlantic, Pacific or Gulf coasts, but the impacts are also felt far from the shoreline, in Missouri, North Dakota, Kentucky and elsewhere. No region of the country has been spared.

Cassandra Wilson of Ironton, La., gestures at her community's cemetery, flooded by Hurricane Ida in 2021. The storm surge pushed caskets out of the crypts.

 (Olga Loginova/Columbia Journalism Investigations)

What unites these pummeled communities is that they are often more socially and economically vulnerable than other places, the analysis revealed.

People of color make up more than half the residents in counties that experienced at least three climate disasters in the past five years. These counties also have a higher proportion of residents who speak limited English and people in poverty than the rest of the country.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster preparedness spending — which includes money to help people relocate — already falls short of the need, experts say. And it’s not flowing out equitably, according to the analysis by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners.

Among hard-hit counties, places with a higher share of residents of color than the national average received about 40% less funding per person. A similar trend held over the last three decades.

Taken together, the findings highlight how, in the face of climate-driven disasters, communities across the country in the greatest need of government assistance receive less of it — if they get anything at all.

These challenges affect a large and growing number of people. In 2018, the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment warned that more than 13 million people across the country may need to move by the end of the century due to sea level rise. Add the effects of hurricanes, flooding rivers and wildfires, and millions more will need to seek out safer parts of the country — or remain trapped in damaged, dangerous conditions.

Take Smithfield.

Sea levels in this Hampton Roads region in Virginia, by the Chesapeake Bay, are rising faster than anywhere else along the Eastern Seaboard. Additionally, the land along the Virginia coast is slowly sinking, causing high tides to push water farther and farther inland. Along Ricks’s Great Spring Road, amid the region’s coastal floodplain, sudden heavy rains can cause water to rise up to 7 feet in just an hour, turning the streets into rivers.

Ricks has been rescued by boat from her home twice.

Ricks’s home in Smithfield, Va. (Julia Shipley/Columbia Journalism Investigations)

In 2010, she and her neighbors applied for a federal buyout through Isle of Wight County, where Smithfield is located. For decades, FEMA has facilitated the purchase of flood-prone homes. Following the buyouts, the government demolishes the structures, returning the land to open space to stop the cycle of damage and loss.

On Ricks’s application, a hazard mitigation consultant attested that the grant “would eliminate the possibility that another homeowner will suffer the same misfortune as Mrs. Ricks.”

The state agency denied Ricks’s application for unknown reasons; according to one official, no documentation that could explain the decision could be located.

In 2020, Smithfield officials tried again, applying for $920,240 in funding from FEMA to acquire and demolish Ricks’s home and four neighboring properties. The project would be “100% effective in preventing loss of property and life due to future flooding,” the town’s funding paperwork stated.

FEMA denied the request.

The money would have come from FEMA’s newly launched Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which allocated $500 million for disaster and climate change preparedness projects across the country. But Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s acting deputy administrator for resilience, said there wasn’t enough funding to help Smithfield in 2020. Across the country, requests for assistance exceeded $3 billion.

A Coast Guard helicopter conducts a flyover of the Charleston, S.C., area that was affected by Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

 (Petty Officer 3rd Class Alexandria Preston/USCG)

“We were oversubscribed,” Salinas said. “There are so many good projects that need to be funded, and communities want to invest in their resilience. They want to be making sure they’re safe today and tomorrow. There’s just not enough money on the streets to [fund them all].”

Ricks sees no way out without that help. She leaves the TV on in her bedroom, checking news broadcasts for warnings about incoming storms. She keeps important papers wrapped in plastic bags in a trunk at the foot of her bed, hoping that will be enough to save them when her home floods again.

Faced with intensifying hazards and a federal government failing to act, she asks a question with no clear answers:

“What am I going to do?”

No 1-stop shop for climate relocation

On a hotter planet, rising sea levels, largely driven by melting polar ice, and harsher hurricanes are threatening coastal areas. In the West, wildfires are more frequent and devastating. Every region of the U.S. is likely to experience more intense rainfall, according to the National Climate Assessment.

The federal government knows that climate change will displace millions, but it has been slow to respond to the growing threat. No single agency or program is responsible for helping Americans move to safer parts of the country.

“There’s not a one-stop-shop program for this,” Salinas said. “I think right now, what we do offer is pieces of it.”

The tundra near Kivalina, Alaska, in 2019. Permafrost, which is found to some extent beneath nearly 85% of Alaska, has been melting due to the Earth's rising temperatures. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Vulnerable Americans must navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth, seeking funding from grant programs spread across multiple agencies. Taken together, Salinas said, the existing “patchwork quilt” of programs can help communities relocate. But tapping into them is difficult at best for small, under-resourced communities on the frontlines of climate change. Often they don’t have the resources to apply at all.

“What’s really frustrating is that every different program has different eligibility requirements and determinations,” said Kelly Main, the executive director of Buy-In Community Planning, a nonprofit that helps communities apply for buyouts. “Just being able to go through all of the different eligibility determinations for each of those programs, if you’re a one-person staff in a small town somewhere on the Gulf Coast, is extremely challenging.”

Smithfield is not alone in its struggles.

In Washington state, where rising seas cause repeated flooding, at least four tribal nations are seeking federal help to support relocation efforts and still need millions of dollars in order to move.

In Colquitt, a small community in Georgia, Hurricane Michael leveled a mobile home park in 2018. Records show that officials applied to FEMA for buyouts twice and received no assistance.

In Horry County, S.C., a working-class community just up the coast from Myrtle Beach, residents applied for a HUD-funded buyout program, but the process has dragged on for years, leaving homeowners stranded.

Because government assistance programs are so difficult to access, communities often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of disasters on their own. In De Soto, Mo., residents said they sit in their cars when it rains, ready to evacuate quickly if the Joachim Creek floods. The Army Corps of Engineers recommended buyouts for about 70 flood-prone properties in 2019. Since then, the city has applied for FEMA buyouts twice, but state and federal officials approved funding for just one property. The homeowner chose to remain in their home, according to De Soto’s city manager. No one in De Soto has been moved out of the flood zone.

Vehicles under water in Philadelphia on Sept. 2, 2021, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. (Matt Rourke/AP)

With no aid on the horizon, some residents have sold their flood-prone houses at a loss. “Right now they’re selling on this block, but they’re selling for 25 cents on the dollar,” said Ken Slinger, a De Soto resident who lives across the street from the Joachim Creek.

A federal buyout would allow him and his wife, Cindy, to move to a safer area, he said. Without one, they can’t afford a comparable home nearby.

For the government, the cost of doing nothing can escalate quickly.

In flood-prone areas, for example, the government might need to provide repeated rounds of aid to help residents recover and rebuild, said Jeffrey Peterson, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama administration. The “smarter investment,” he said, is for the government to buy out residents — avoiding the need for additional help.

“We could end up spending $500,000 on your house,” Peterson said. “So let’s buy it now for $250,000” and prevent escalating costs.

Mitigation efforts like seawalls may delay encroaching waters, but they also require large upfront investments. And even then they are only an interim solution, Peterson and other experts warn.

“Protection for most of our coastline doesn’t make any sense,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “For a lot of the U.S. coastline, relocation is probably cost-effective.”
Unmanaged retreat

Politicians’ unwillingness to fully acknowledge the problem is a key obstacle to funding relocation efforts, according to interviews with a dozen former federal officials.

“People’s climate risk is not something that politicians, that elected officials, that even appointed officials, or people running different agencies of governments in towns and cities across the country, are eager to know and make public — largely because they believe that they do not have the money to address the climate risks that might be revealed,” said Harriet Tregoning, a former senior HUD official who is now director of the New Urban Mobility Alliance, a coalition focused on urban transportation. “And highlighting climate risk without a plan for addressing those risks, they see as a recipe for undermining everyone’s confidence in the future of that community.”

Debris piles up on a curb as residents gut their flooded homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in LaPlace, La., Sept. 7, 2021. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

The most recent effort to develop a plan for climate relocation came in 2016, when President Barack Obama established an interagency working group to craft a framework for “managed retreat,” a term that describes voluntary, community-led relocation projects. The Trump administration abandoned the project after just two months, and the Biden administration has not relaunched it.

Asked for comment, the White House did not address this directly. Its Council on Environmental Quality provided a list of efforts to defend people from climate-fueled disasters, only a few of which were about relocation, and offered a statement from Chair Brenda Mallory.

“The truth is: we need a wide range of strategies and solutions — across the entire Federal government — to help communities protect themselves from disaster, respond when disaster strikes, and, in some cases, move out of harm’s way,” she wrote. “Through a series of hazard-focused interagency working groups, we are working to get critical investments to the communities that are most vulnerable, support community-led efforts to protect against climate-fueled disasters, improve climate and risk information for communities, improve building standards and codes across the country, and share best practices and policies.”

Without any federal relocation policy in place, scientists say Americans are already in “unmanaged retreat” — families and individuals are taking matters into their own hands and, without government help, fleeing areas vulnerable to climate-driven disasters.

In Paradise, Calif., the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the worst wildfires in California history, burned down more than 13,000 structures — 95% of the town. At least 85 people died. Sarah Bates, a longtime resident, lost her home and everything in it: photo albums, all her furniture, the record collection she’d compiled during her 40-year stint as a radio DJ, the electric wheelchair she needed to get around.

U.S. Army Sgt. Rodrigo Estrada leads a team conducting search and debris-clearing operations in Paradise, Calif., after the Camp Fire in 2018.

 (Senior Airman Crystal Housman/U.S. Air National Guard)

In the wake of wildfires, government assistance is almost entirely directed toward rebuilding, not relocating.

“There’s no precedent for wildfire buyouts,” said Robert Barker, a spokesperson for FEMA Region 9, which includes California.

Bates decided she could no longer stay in Paradise, however. She initially moved to North Carolina before eventually settling in central Virginia, funding the move on her own. Once she got to the East Coast, she struggled to find affordable housing.

“There’s still people not in housing even now,” Bates said. “And it’s inexplicable to me that the government has not worked out what to do about helping them get rehomed after three years.”

More than 14,000 people moved out of Paradise after the Camp Fire, according to Peter Hansen and Jacquelyn Chase, researchers at Chico State University who analyzed change-of-address data to map the migration across the country. More than 4,000 left Butte County and more than 2,600 left California entirely, moving to Oregon, Indiana, Tennessee and other states, the analysis showed.

“The absence of managed retreat is going to be unmanaged retreat,” said Anna Weber, a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not going to be no retreat at all.”

Aerial view of a mobile home park that was destroyed during the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

In April, Valerie Butler, a member of the Smithfield Town Council and one of Betty Ricks’s neighbors, sent an email to the town manager and her fellow council members. In it, she urged her colleagues not to give up on efforts to obtain federal aid for relocation.

“I know the bureaucratic process can be daunting,” Butler wrote. But Smithfield was facing another hurricane season, and residents were frightened. “Can you imagine,” she wrote, “being in your home, a place of protection and safety, when it rains each time and your kids ask you, ‘is the boat going to have to come [and] get us.’

“This is heartbreaking. Resolving this situation should be a priority.”


CJI research assistants Gabriela Alcalde and Samantha McCabe contributed to this story. Carolynne Hultquist, a disaster researcher at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, contributed to the data analysis.

Julia Shipley, Alex Lubben, Zak Cassel and Olga Loginova are reporting fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. The Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations, two nonprofit investigative newsrooms, provided reporting, editing, fact-checking and other support. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

USA
At least 59,000 meat workers caught COVID, 269 died

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

PUBLISHED: 27 October 2021 |

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - At least 59,000 meatpacking workers caught COVID-19 and 269 workers died when the virus tore through the industry last year, which is significantly more than previously thought, according to a new U.S. House report released Wednesday.

The meatpacking industry was one of the early epicenters of the coronavirus pandemic, with workers standing shoulder-to-shoulder along production lines. The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which examined internal documents from five of the biggest meatpacking companies, said companies could have done more to protect their workers.

The new estimate of infections in the industry is nearly three times higher than the 22,400 that the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has said were infected or exposed. And the true number could be even higher because the companies' data didn't generally include coronavirus cases confirmed by outside testing or self reported by employees.

At the height of the outbreaks in the spring of 2020, U.S. meatpacking production fell to about 60% of normal as several major plants were forced to temporarily close for deep cleaning and safety upgrades or operated at slower speeds because of worker shortages. The report said companies were slow to take protective steps such as distributing protective equipment and installing barriers between work stations.

"Instead of addressing the clear indications that workers were contracting the coronavirus at alarming rates due to conditions in meatpacking facilities, meatpacking companies prioritized profits and production over worker safety, continuing to employ practices that led to crowded facilities in which the virus spread easily," the report said.

Martin Rosas, who represents a UFCW chapter based in Kansas with over 17,000 members in three states, said the union pressed companies for better protections.

FILE - In this May 7, 2020, file photo workers wait in line to enter the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Ind. At least 59,000 meatpacking workers became ill with COVID-19 and 269 workers died when the virus tore through the industry last year, which is significantly more than previously thought, according to a new U.S. House report released Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

"The harsh reality is that many of the companies were slow to act in the early days of the outbreak, and whatever progress that was achieved was due to the union demanding action," Rosas said.

The report is based on documents from JBS, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, Cargill and National Beef. Together they control over 80% of the beef market and over 60% of the pork market nationwide.

The North American Meat Institute trade group defended the industry´s response to the pandemic. And Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield and JBS released statements Wednesday saying they worked aggressively to meet federal health and safety standards and took additional measures to protect their employees, such as conducting widespread testing and urging employees to get vaccinated.

"The health and safety of our team members always comes first and our response since the onset of the pandemic has demonstrated that commitment, with an investment of more than $760 million to date. We have taken aggressive action to keep the virus out of our facilities and adopted hundreds of safety measures that often outpaced federal guidance and industry standards," JBS spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said.

The companies expressed regret at the toll the virus has taken.

"Even one illness or loss of life to COVID-19 is one too many, which is why we´ve taken progressive action from the start of the pandemic to protect the health and safety of our workers," Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said.

The report said infection rates were especially high at some meatpacking plants between the spring of 2020 and early 2021. At a JBS plant in Hyrum, Utah, 54% of the workforce contracted the virus. Nearly 50% of workers at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, were infected. And 44% of employees at National Beef´s plant in Tama, Iowa, caught COVID-19.

The report said internal documents show Smithfield aggressively pushed back against government safety recommendations after experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspected its pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after a major outbreak. A few days earlier, Smithfield's CEO told the CEO of National Beef in an email that "Employees are afraid to come to work."

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration needs to do more to protect meatpacking workers.

"Some of these companies are treating the workers in the plants not much better than the animals that go through them," Raskin said.

Debbie Berkowitz, with Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, said the industry was slow to respond and federal regulators didn't force companies to act.

"When the pandemic hit, of course it was going to hit meatpacking plants really hard and really fast," said Berkowitz, a former OSHA official who testified Wednesday. "What was the industry´s response - not to protect workers and mitigate the spread of COVID-19, not to separate workers 6 feet apart, which was the earlier guidance that came out in late February - but to just keep on going."

 In this April 9, 2020 file photo employees and family members protest outside a Smithfield Foods processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. At least 59,000 meatpacking workers became ill with COVID-19 and 269 workers died when the virus tore through the industry last year, which is significantly more than previously thought, according to a new U.S. House report released Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021. 

(AP Photo/Stephen Groves File)

US COVID-19 cases unreported in largest meatpacking companies, probe finds

By Mary Yang, Medill News Service

Activists demonstrate to call attention to slaughterhouse workers who have contracted COVID-19 while on the job in Vernon, Calif., on December 11. On Wednesday, a House select subcommittee investigation revealed many U.S. meatpacking plants weren't required to adhere to COVID-19 safety standards.
File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

WASHINGTON -- High coronavirus infection and death rates among workers in the U.S. meatpacking industry went unreported because of a "political decision" to not track cases, according to the report released Wednesday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration did not require meatpacking companies to install safety standards to protect workers during the pandemic, the Select Subcommittee found. OSHA is the agency responsible for ensuring worker safety, but scaled back investigations in 2020, according to the subcommittee report.

OSHA "totally abandoned" workers, Debbie Berkowitz, former OSHA chief of staff, said at a subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended businesses enforce social distancing guidelines, but OSHA did not press meatpacking companies to comply so COVID-19 "spread like wildfire," she said.

The subcommittee did not call OSHA officials to testify.

COVID-19 cases among meatpackers were three times higher than earlier estimates, according to the report, and the virus disproportionately hit workers of color. Last spring, 87% of infected meatpackers were racial or ethnic minorities, the CDC found.

The meatpacking industry is made up largely of immigrant and refugee workers, said Berkowitz, and workers are often afraid to speak out against poor working conditions, fearing punishment from their supervisors.

Workers during the pandemic continued to work in close proximity to each other, said American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska Interim Director Rose Godinez. Godinez is the daughter of two meatpackers, both of whom retired before the pandemic.

More than half of Nebraska's meatpackers are immigrant workers, she said, putting immigrant families and minority communities at higher risk. Last summer, Hispanics accounted for 60% of Nebraska's coronavirus cases, she said, but the Hispanic community is only 11% of the state's population.

Godinez asked subcommittee members to demand OSHA respond to workers' complaints. She also urged members to support comprehensive immigration reform to protect meatpackers who are not U.S. citizens and fear employer retaliation.

Meatpacking companies and the Trump administration "caused enormous pain" to meatpackers and their families, said Select Subcommittee Chairman Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.

In an interview before the hearing, Berkowitz said she expects the Biden administration to issue the first protections for meatpacking workers next week by requiring vaccines.

Meatpackers deny workers benefits for COVID-19 deaths, illnesses

© Reuters/Jim Urquhart FILE PHOTO: Outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Greeley, Colorado

By Tom Hals and Tom Polansek

(Reuters) - Saul Sanchez died in April, one of six workers with fatal COVID-19 infections at meatpacker JBS USA's slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, the site of one of the earliest and deadliest coronavirus outbreaks at a U.S. meatpacking plant.

Before getting sick, the 78-year-old Sanchez only left home to work on the fabrication line, where cattle carcasses are sliced into cuts of beef, and to go to his church, with its five-person congregation, said his daughter, Betty Rangel. She said no one else got infected in the family or at Bible Missionary Church, which could not be reached for comment.

JBS, the world's largest meatpacker, denied the family's application for workers' compensation benefits, along with those filed by the families of two other Greeley workers who died of COVID-19, said lawyers handling the three claims. Families of the three other Greeley workers who died also sought compensation, a union representative said, but Reuters could not determine the status of their claims.

JBS has said the employees' COVID-19 infections were not work-related in denying the claims, according to responses the company gave to employees, which were reviewed by Reuters.

As more Americans return to workplaces, the experience of JBS employees shows the difficulty of linking infections to employment and getting compensation for medical care and lost wages.

"That is the ultimate question: How can you prove it?" said Nick Fogel, an attorney specializing in workers' compensation at the firm Burg Simpson in Colorado.The meatpacking industry has suffered severe coronavirus outbreaks, in part because production-line workers often work side-by-side for long shifts. Companies including JBS, Tyson Foods Inc and WH Group Ltd's <0288.HK> Smithfield Foods closed about 20 plants this spring after outbreaks, prompting President Donald Trump in April to order the plants to stay open to ensure the nation's meat supply. The White House declined to comment on the industry's rejections of workers' claims. The U.S. Department of Labor did not respond to a request for comment.

Tyson has also denied workers' compensation claims stemming from a big outbreak in Iowa, workers' attorneys told Reuters. Smithfield workers at a plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, also hit by a major outbreak, have generally not filed claims, a union official said, in part because the company has paid infected workers' wages and medical bills.

Smithfield declined to comment on workers’ compensation. Tyson said it reviews claims on a case-by-case basis, but declined to disclose how often it rejects them. JBS acknowledged rejecting claims but declined to say how often. It called the denials consistent with the law, without elaborating.

Workers can challenge companies' denials in an administrative process that varies by state but typically resembles a court hearing. The burden of proof, however, usually falls on the worker to prove a claim was wrongfully denied.

The full picture of how the meatpacking industry has handled COVID-related workers' compensation remains murky because of a lack of national claims data. Reuters requested data from seven states where JBS or its affiliates have plants that had coronavirus outbreaks. Only three states provided data in any detail; all show a pattern of rejections.

In Minnesota, where JBS had a major outbreak, meatpacking employees filed 930 workers' compensation claims involving COVID-19 as of Sept. 11, according to the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. None were accepted, 717 were rejected and 213 were under review. The agency did not identify the employers.The Minnesota Department of Health said only two meatpacking plants there had significant coronavirus outbreaks: a JBS pork processing plant in Worthington, and a poultry plant in Cold Spring run by Pilgrim's Pride Corp , which is majority-owned by JBS.

Tom Atkinson, a Minnesota workers' compensation attorney who has represented meatpacking workers, estimates up to 100 COVID-19 claims were filed by employees at the Worthington plant.

In Utah, seven JBS workers filed claims related to COVID-19 by Aug. 1 and all were denied, according to the state's Labor Commission. At least 385 workers at a JBS beef plant in Hyrum, Utah, tested positive for COVID-19.

In Colorado, 69% of the 2,294 worker compensation claims for COVID-19 had been denied as of Sept. 12. Although the state does not break down the denials by industry, a JBS spokesman told Reuters the company is rejecting claims in Colorado and that it uses the same claim-review procedures nationwide.

JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett did not answer the question of whether JBS employees were infected on the job and declined comment on individual workers’ claims. He said the company has outsourced claim reviews to a third-party administrator.

"Given the widespread nature of viral spread, our third-party claims administrator reviews each case thoroughly and independently," said Bruett.

The administrator, Sedgwick, did not respond to a request for comment. Bruett, also a spokesman for Pilgrim's Pride, did not respond to questions about infections and claims at its Minnesota plant.

At the JBS plant in Greeley, where Sanchez worked before he died, at least 291 of about 6,000 workers were infected, according to state data. The company, in its written response to the family’s claim, said that his infection was “not work-related,” without spelling out its reasoning. The two sides are now litigating the matter in Colorado's workers' compensation system.

Under Colorado law, a workers' compensation death benefit provides about two-thirds of the deceased worker's salary to the surviving spouse and pays medical expenses not covered by insurance. If JBS had not denied the Sanchez family’s claim, that would have provided his widow a steady income and paid uncovered medical bills totaling about $10,000, according to his daughter.

"They don't care," Rangel said of JBS. "They are all about the big profits, and they are not going to give any money out."

MASS INFECTIONS, LITTLE COMPENSATION

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union, which represents 250,000 U.S. meatpacking and food-processing workers, said last week at least 122 meatpacking workers have died of COVID-19 and more than 18,000 had missed work because they were infected or potentially exposed.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) said on Sept. 11 that it had cited JBS for failing to protect workers at the Greeley plant from the virus. OSHA cited Smithfield this month for failing to protect workers at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota, plant, where the agency said nearly 1,300 workers contracted the coronavirus and four died.

Smithfield and JBS said the citations had no merit because they concerned conditions in plants before OSHA issued COVID-19 guidance for the industry. OSHA said it stands by the citations.

Workers' compensation is generally the only way to recoup medical expenses and lost wages for work-related injuries and deaths. The system protects employers from lawsuits, with few exceptions, and allows workers to collect benefits without having to prove fault or negligence. But the system was designed for factory accidents, not airborne illnesses.

In response to the coronavirus, governors and lawmakers in at least 14 states have made it easier for some employees to collect workers compensation for COVID-19 by putting the burden on companies and insurers to prove an infection did not occur at work. But most of the changes, which vary by state, only apply to workers in healthcare or emergency services. A similar proposal failed to gain support in Colorado.

Mark Dopp, general counsel for the North American Meat Institute, a trade association that represents meatpackers, said it is difficult to determine where workers get infections given extensive sanitation efforts taken by meat plants and workers' daily travel to and from the plants.

Tyson in April closed its Waterloo, Iowa, pork processing plant due to a COVID-19 outbreak. Ben Roth, a local workers’ compensation attorney, said five families of employees who died filed workers compensation claims for death benefits, and all were denied.

He said meat-processing companies have an incentive to deny every claim because admitting they caused even one infection can expose the firms to liability for all workers contracting COVID-19.

"That undercuts the argument that they want to make across the board: that you can’t prove you got it here and not at a grocery store," Roth said.

Tyson said it follows state laws for workers’ compensation. The company noted that Iowa law states that disease with an equal likelihood of being contracted outside the workplace are "not compensable as an occupational disease.”

In Colorado, Sylvia Martinez runs a group called Latinos Unidos of Greeley and said she knows of more than 20 JBS workers who applied for workers compensation and were denied. Many plant workers are not native English speakers and sought out her group for guidance, she said, adding that many don't understand their rights and fear being fired. The company's rejections have discouraged more claims, Martinez said.

"If you deny five or 10, those workers will tell their co-workers," she said.

'WHO IS GOING TO HIRE HIM?'

JBS also contested the claim of Alfredo Hernandez, 55, a custodian who worked at the Greeley plant for 31 years. He became infected and was hospitalized in March. He still relies on supplemental oxygen and hasn't returned to work, said his wife, Rosario Hernandez.

Generall y, companies approve claims if it looks probable that an employee was injured or sickened at work, said Erika Alverson, the attorney representing Hernandez. But JBS, she said, is arguing workers could have contracted COVID-19 anywhere.

"They're getting into, where did our clients go, what were they doing during that time, who was coming into their house, what did their spouse do, was there any other form of exposure?" said Alverson, of the Denver firm Alverson and O’Brien.

A judge will decide the Hernandez case in an administrative hearing. In the meantime, the Hernandez family has only his disability benefits – a portion of his salary – to cover his medical and insurance costs, Rosario Hernandez said.

"We're getting bunches of bills," she said.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, and Tom Polansek in Chicago; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Caroline Stauffer and Brian Thevenot)

Hog Herds to Shrink as US Farms Lose Money, Smithfield Warns


Michael Hirtzer
Thu, June 22, 2023 


CORN IN US IS USED FOR BIOFUEL NOT FOOD

(Bloomberg) -- American pig farmers are losing so much money that some may soon start selling the corn they would normally use to feed animals, according to the world’s largest hog producer.

It’s a sign that producers will soon take steps to shrink their herds, with growers losing as much as $80 a head, said Shane Smith, chief executive officer of Smithfield Foods. Demand from top buyer China is waning as the cost to feed animals is surging.

A drought in the Midwest has deteriorated crops, with corn at its worst conditions for this time of year since 1992. That’s squeezing profits and making it more appealing for growers to sell the grain, which has risen more than 20% from its May lows.

“There’s a concentration of people in the industry who grow their own corn, they grow their corn and they feed it to the animal,” he said in an interview Wednesday at the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum in Chicago. “They’re going to have to make a decision. Do I sell my corn and just forget about the animal?”

US growers usually only start shrinking herds when they face cash flow losses, and that is already happening, Smith said. He declined to comment on whether Smithfield, owned by Hong Kong-listed WH Group, is planning to cut back as well.

The US meat market is facing a glut that may take until the end of next year and into 2025 to normalize, he said. That’s all happening just as only 55% of the US corn crop was rated good to excellent, the lowest for this time of year in more than three decades, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture.

California Rules

To make matters worse, California — which consumes about 15% of the nation’s pork — passed a law requiring meat sold in the state to come from animals raised in larger spaces, raising costs for producers. Beginning July 1, only meat from animals raised under the new regulations can be sold in the state, although pork that’s already in the supply chain by that date can be sold until the end of the year, the California Department of Food and Agriculture said Wednesday.

Smithfield stopped slaughtering hogs at its only California plant earlier this year. Smith said he’s now worried other states may add their own laws, forcing more costly farm conversions.

“My concern is that at some point without intervention from the USDA or other federal bodies, we’re going to end up with a patchwork of 50 different rules to govern how food is processed, it doesn’t just have to be pork or chicken,” he said.

Meanwhile, a lack of available workers for US meat plants and little movement in immigration policy means the labor issue won’t be solved any time soon, he said.

“This industry is in an incredibly difficult cycle,” Smith said.