As COVID-19 began its march across the United States, reporter Michael Grabell knew in his gut where the virus would find some of its easiest victims: the nation’s meatpacking plants. Grabell had written extensively about the industry, touring slaughterhouses where hundreds of refugee and immigrant workers toiled in dangerously close quarters slicing up beef, pork and chicken for restaurants and supermarkets. In March, he wrote a story warning that the nation’s meatpacking plants were poised to explode with COVID-19.
Meatpacking plants have since become epicenters of COVID-19 outbreaks across the country, with more than 50,000 cases and at least 250 deaths associated with the industry, according to a ProPublica tally. In fact, some slaughterhouses have become the site of the largest workplace outbreaks in the United States.
ProPublica’s first story on meatpacking and COVID-19 became the start of a quest, not only to document the horrors unfolding at the plants – and the molasses-slow response of the meatpackers – but to investigate how the industry had ignored decades of warnings to prepare for just such a pandemic. In short, how global meat corporations had teed up their own workers, and the communities they lived in, to be among the hardest hit, and how the government had let them do it.
Grabell quickly teamed with reporter Bernice Yeung, who’d spent years exposing the sexual violence facing farmworkers and night-shift cleaners. They devised a novel plan to capture the true scope of the crisis and its devastating impact on rural American communities: With the help of research reporter Claire Perlman, they filed 180 public records requests to state and local health departments, mayors’ and governors’ offices and agriculture departments across the country, asking for their real-time emails and text messages as the virus hit local plants. The resulting trove of records captured the panic and despair of local officials as sick workers overwhelmed them, plant managers ignored them and state officials failed them.
Drawing on thousands of pages of public records obtained through records requests and hundreds of interviews, ProPublica found that mismanagement of the pandemic by meat companies, combined with the federal government’s failure to ensure that plants took appropriate precautions, has contributed to the pandemic’s dramatic toll on meatpacking workers and their communities. Specifically:
– Elected officials have intervened to keep meatpacking plants running despite efforts by public health departments to contain the virus by temporarily closing them.
– As COVID-19 cases spiked, public health departments were blindsided by meat companies, which were slow to respond to officials or failed to provide updated COVID-19 case information about its workforce.
– The meatpacking industry ignored years of pandemic warnings from the federal government, which admonished companies to stockpile personal protective equipment and to plan for a significant portion of its workforce to become unavailable during a public health emergency.
– The meat industry trade group drafted a version of the Trump executive order aimed at keeping meatpacking plants running as public health officials nationwide tried to temporarily suspend production at the plants. The USDA facilitated meetings between the White House and meat companies to discuss strategies for keeping the plants in production despite a growing number of outbreaks.
– The meat industry has systematically recruited vulnerable immigrant and refugee workers who may have few employment options. Counter to the recommendations of public health experts, some workers were incentivized to clock in when sick during the pandemic through the use of attendance bonuses. Others felt threatened that they’d be fired for failing to report to work.
– OSHA, the government agency charged with protecting worker health and safety, did not prioritize enforcing COVID-19 complaints among non-healthcare essential workers such as meatpacking workers. It has also issued a memo saying it would give companies the benefit of the doubt when it comes to COVID-19 complaints.