‘All smoke and mirrors’: How Trump’s meatpacking order has failed to keep workers safe

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order April 28 to declare meatpacking plants critical infrastructure, he tapped the secretary of agriculture to keep the plants open amid a wave of coronavirus outbreaks.

But since the executive order, COVID-19 cases tied to meatpacking plants have skyrocketed from fewer than 5,000 at the time to more than 25,000 as of this week, according to tracking from the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.Rather than protecting workers, a half dozen experts and advocates said, the federal government is failing them.

Perdue also publicly ordered all plants to follow the meatpacking safety guidelines jointly issued by OSHA and CDC. But days later, the USDA admitted it had done nothing to confirm that plants were actually following them, according to a May 15 letter members of the Senate Agriculture Committee sent to Perdue.

At one JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, the workers’ union president asked OSHA to inspect the plant in March. An agency spokesperson said it was taking the necessary steps to protect workers from the coronavirus. The USDA did not respond to requests for comments. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about why the USDA was chosen as the lead agency on meatpacking plants during the pandemic.

It argued the same point in a lawsuit challenging that rule change — one that plaintiffs argue further endangers workers in the plants. The agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service “does not have the statutory mandate to regulate worker safety,” USDA said in court documents. Among the OSHA complaints regarding the coronavirus that the agency and its state partners have closed are myriad claims of lack of personal protective equipment, inability to distance from co-workers and companies withholding information about exposure to co-workers who have tested positive for the virus. In some instances, the agency recommends following OSHA and CDC guidelines — the same ones the complaints allege are not being followed.

USDA could have used its food-safety inspectors as a resource to understand what is happening in meatpacking plants, said Jerold Mande, a former deputy under secretary for food safety at USDA and deputy assistant secretary at OSHA.

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