Trump Orders Meat-Processing Plants To Stay Open Despite Mass COVID-19 Outbreaks
Critics have described Trump’s executive order as “marching meatpacking workers off to their deaths” as safety concerns mount for worker’s lives.
Credit: Gage Skidmore
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order which essentially forces meat-processing plants and slaughterhouses to remain open amid the pandemic.
By invoking the Defense Production Act, the president declared that “it is important that processors of beef, pork and poultry (‘meat and poultry’) in the food supply chain continue operating and fulfilling orders to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans”.
The order comes amid frustration, anger and worry from workers who fear their lives are being put at risk in order to continue the production of meat.
As estimates suggest that as much as 80% of U.S. meat production capacity is at risk, workers are being asked to continue operating in close proximity and with a lack of proper safety precautions. Many meat-processing plants across the country have already been forced shut by mass COVID-19 outbreaks amongst workers.
“How many more have to fight for their life, how many more families got to suffer before they realize we are more important than their production”, one worker at a Tyson meat plant told the New York Times. Another worker explained, “our work conditions are out of control. We literally work shoulder to shoulder daily”.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union said in a statement to Bloomberg “that if workers aren’t safe, the food supply won’t be either. At least 20 workers in meat and food processing have died, and 5,000 meatpacking workers have either tested positive for the virus or were forced to self-quarantine”.
“In ordering the nation’s meat plants to stay open, Donald Trump is in essence marching many meatpacking workers off to slaughter,” US labor journalist Steven Greenhouse told The Guardian. “The president is in effect overruling safety-minded governors and mayors who have pressured numerous meat, pork and poultry plants into shutting temporarily after they had become hotspots that were spreading Covid-19 through their surrounding communities.”
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