May 14, 2022, 00:37 am
Written by Taylor Telford
Published: May 12, 2022
The biggest players in the US 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 that 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."
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," investigators wrote.
The report from the bipartisan 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 US 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 former 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 US 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 US. 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. In counties with chicken-processing facilities, the transmission rate was 20 percent higher.
Publicly, meat industry lobbyists and executives raised alarms about the threat closing plants would present to the nation’s food supply chain. The concerns about worker absenteeism hampering production came as the virus first swept across the country, and the central bank unleashed an unprecedented flood of unemployment benefits to support workers.
“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, US 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.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/12/b..._rss_brief
Published: May 12, 2022
The biggest players in the US 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 that 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."
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," investigators wrote.
The report from the bipartisan 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 US 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 former 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 US 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 US. 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. In counties with chicken-processing facilities, the transmission rate was 20 percent higher.
Publicly, meat industry lobbyists and executives raised alarms about the threat closing plants would present to the nation’s food supply chain. The concerns about worker absenteeism hampering production came as the virus first swept across the country, and the central bank unleashed an unprecedented flood of unemployment benefits to support workers.
“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, US 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.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/12/b..._rss_brief