Meatpacker Fined For Workers' Infections. Workers Can't Rely on OSHA

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

9-10-20

The US meat industry is no small potatoes as a $213 billion a year business. Total 2019 meat production in the U.S. was somewhere in the region of 103.3 billion pounds. Earlier this year some plants were forced to close due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Tyson, Cargill and other big producers were shut down temporarily after some 17,000 workers were found to be infected and 91 workers died.

 

One of the largest producers is Smithfield foods that has just been fined by the US Department of Labor for failing to adequately protect workers from infections after1,300 workers got infected back in April and four died. Smithfield’s plant in Sioux Falls South Dakota employs more than 3500 workers and slaughters 20,000 pigs a day.

Marta Zaraska pointed out in her book Meathooked published in 2016 that, “….just four pork producers control two-thirds of the market, and the top four in beef have about 75 percent of the market.” These companies spend hundreds of million on advertising, encouraging meat consumption as well as donating money to politicians for favors, we call this bribery lobbying in the US. Per capita meat consumption for US Americans in 2019 was 224.3 pounds.  We eat too much meat and meat production is dangerous, unhealthy for humans and brutal to animals as well as harmful to nature.

 

This issue of responsibility for their workers contacting the coronavirus is a contentious one for large employers like meatpacking where workers work closely together, and they have been trying to get an exemption. Smithfield is appealing the fine totaling $13,494 which is the maximum that can be levied by law according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  

 

Marc Peronne, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union had this to say, “OSHA has been asleep at the switch throughout this pandemic and this is just the latest example of the agency failing to do their job and take responsibility for worker safety,”

 

This is a pathetic statement if there ever was one. As usual, a top labor official looks to a government agency to defend his members’ interests, appeals to politicians and political parties whose policies have allowed employers to create one of the most dangerous work environments in the country. As for OSHA, it’s not “asleep at the switch”, it was born brain dead. OSHA, an agency that was opposed by the US Chamber of Commerce arguably the largest gang in the US, is a minor concession in response to unions, workers and society in general converns about workplace safety, an attempt to give the impression that an agency of the capitalist state is serious about protecting workers on the job. A 2010 report stated that, “OSHA had 1,016 inspectors, virtually the same number it had three decades earlier. By 2016, the agency was down to 952 inspectors. By Jan. 1, 2019, it had dropped to 875.”

 

Workers in meatpacking suffer serious injuries due to the nature of their employment but particularly due to the increased workloads and line speed, or belt speed as the carcasses come by them. Some have complained that animals are sometimes still alive.

 

There was a major attempt in the 1980’s to drive back the capitalist offensive in that decade that began with Reagan smashing the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association and firing 11,000 strikers banning them from working in their industry for life. Reagan coupled this with cuts in federal spending and social services. In this environment and with the heads of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of Lane Kirkland doing nothing, bosses went on the offensive, forcing concessions, cutting wages and benefits won in the past. Naturally, this was accompanied by some good old economic terrorism as companies threatened to close or move.

 

Things were no different in meatpacking. Steve Brouwer describes the situation in his 1998 book Sharing The Pie, “In 1983, Con-Agra bought thirteen plants from Armour, one of the old meatpacking giants and lowered the pay of three thousand workers from $10.69 to about $6 and hour. Average pay in another factory in Iowa in 1981; just before IBP took over, was $30,000 a year. The company cut wages to $6.00 an hour for new workers in 1982…”

 

By 1985, one factory was running its beef chain 84% faster than in 1979. This made meatpacking the most dangerous industry in the US and US News and World Report claimed that 36% of all workers were injured (Brouwer).

It was under these conditions that the 1985-86 strike by UFCW Local P9 at the Hormel plant in Austen Minnesota took place.  This was probably the most significant strike of the 1980’s.*

 

The Hormel Strike as it became known was eventually defeated primarily, as were others of the time, through a powerful combination of the employers and the heads of organized labor at the highest levels. There was tremendous support throughout the country with many union locals like my own adopting families and contributing money. Tactics like mass picketing and flying pickets that were successful in building the unions in the 1930’s were also part of Local P9’s strategy. One major failing was the reliance on pressuring investors and corporate boards.

 

The defeat of this heroic attempt of meatpacking workers to fight and the passive response from the labor officialdom gave the green light to the bosses. The average pay in this industry fell by and inflation adjusted 31.4% over the next 15 years period from the early 1980’s on. From 1969 to 1994, chain speed increased a whopping 125%. The speed was so “grueling that it resulted in turnover rate of 83% a year.”, writes Brouwer. By 1998 workers in meatpacking formerly earning more than the average manufacturing worker earned $3 an hour less.

 

With these victories under their belt and the huge turnover rate, the meatpacking bosses sought more vulnerable prey and recruited workers from Mexico and Central America. Mexican villages were penetrated and poor Mexican workers, although undocumented, were brought north. These are the very same people some US workers want to deny benefits, social security, and health care.

 

The ridiculous comment about OSHA from the president of the UFCW above is not as stupid as it sounds. It is a conscious, thought out excuse for him and the entire labor hierarchy failing to protect workers on the job, not only union members but the working class in general. It is their conscious refusal to organize the potential power of 14 million union members to act in our own interests and rely on our own strength, the ability to withdraw our labor power, our ability to shut down production, and at the same time organize production ourselves that has given the bosses the upper hand.

 

He knows that OSHA is a toothless agency.  It’s fairly accurate to say that if OSHA turns up on your job, a worker or workers have died.  “OSHA’s inspection resources are so limited that it would take the agency more than 150 years to visit every workplace under its jurisdiction just once,”, Deborah Berkowitz, formerly a senior policy adviser at OSHA told the IBEW

 

The same can be said as to why the heads of organized labor refuse to break from the Democratic Party and form or with class allies form, an independent party of the working class based on our labor organizations and organizations in the communities in which we live. As things stand, they can blame the Democrats which gets them off the hook as it leaves millions of workers in limbo, often demoralized and despaired of politics in general seeing no way out. This has ensured the coming battles will be more difficult, at times confused and, as we are seeing in a small way now, more violent before the US working class finds its feet.

For this stifling bureaucracy atop organized labor, to provide an alternative puts them in the position, giving the extreme anger that lies beneath the surface of US society, of producing the goods. Having the same world view as the bosses, and worshiping the market, using the power of their own members to bring about change terrifies them, it can only lead to chaos.

 

I have said before that this obstacle of our own leaders and their pro-market policies will be breached at some point and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, this is more likely sooner than later as some huge class battles are on the horizon no matter who wins the US election in November. The cost of this crisis will be borne by the working class of that there is no doubt.

 

*For a thorough account of this strike by a participant, read Hard Pressed in the Heartland by Peter Rachleff