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By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON—The union that represents huge numbers of the nation’s beef, poultry and pork processing plant workers is demanding that the GOP Trump administration ensure those workers are protected from the coronavirus pandemic threat as it forces them back to their jobs.
In an April 29 statement, which followed a letter the week before to Vice President Mike Pence, United Food and Commercial Workers President Marc Perrone says those workers lack adequate safeguards, including N95 masks and respirators, other protective gear, and measures to ensure safe social distancing, all needed to prevent the spread of the virus.
Perrone’s letter comes as dozens of packing plants have shut down nationwide due to the virus threat and as 5,000 workers have tested positive for the coronavirus and been ordered to self-quarantine or have had to be hospitalized. Twenty have died nationwide, so far including two at the most-notorious of the affected plants, the Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, S.D.
Overall, more than 1 million people have caught the coronavirus and almost 60,000 nationwide have died.
Perrone made it clear to Trump and Pence that he’s speaking not just for his union’s one million-plus members – including its 250,000 in packing plants — but for non-union workers, too. All suffer from...
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