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Meatpacking More Dangerous Today Than a Generation Ago, Amplifying COVID-19 Crisis

Meatpacking plants have become national hot spots for the novel coronavirus. Of the 25 largest clusters of COVID-19 cases in the United States, six are tied to meat processing plants (the rest are prisons and nursing homes). At least 48 workers have died from the virus, and another 11,000 have been sickened. Despite the ongoing threat to workers, President Donald Trump last Tuesday issued an executive order deeming meat processors essential facilities, allowing the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to reopen plants shuttered due to outbreaks. Since then, at least five plants have reopened; meanwhile, many food and labor advocates have opposed the order and called for greater worker protections.

Meatpacking has always been a dirty and dangerous job, but conditions are much worse today than a generation ago. The rise of a business model based on cutting costs and profiting from volume, paired with neoliberal policies of the 1980s that promoted union busting, deregulation, and consolidation, made plants more dangerous and susceptible to a shock like COVID-19. At the same time, workers have less power to advocate for stronger protections.

As recently as 1979, meatpacking workers’ wages were roughly $28 per hour, which was 14% more than the national manufacturing average, adjusted for inflation. This was a substantial improvement from the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which, not unlike the current industry, was defined by brutal, low-wage work done by a largely immigrant workforce. Historians attribute these wage gains to the rise of unions in the ‘30s and ’40s.

Food and labor historian Roger Horowitz says that unions standardized wages across meatpacking and established grievance systems to regulate safety. This helped prevent a competitive race to the bottom among packers. “A shop floor rule of law and standardized wages reduced the pressure on firms to exploit workers to the point of injury,” Horowitz says. “Unionization changed the economics of competition in the industry.”  

But developments as early as the 1960s began to threaten this dynamic. A new breed of meatpackers, led by Iowa Beef Packers (IBP), introduced a business model that relied on lower-cost, higher-volume production in much larger and mechanized plants with lower-skilled labor. Packers also made a concerted effort to move plants from urban centers to rural areas and to states more hostile to unionization, in order to cut wages. This shift also changed the demographics of meatpacking, as packers recruited a more vulnerable and mobile immigrant workforce that was less likely to know its legal rights or contest mistreatment. Today, two-thirds of meatpacking workers are people of color, and roughly half are immigrants.

Policy changes in the 1980s supercharged this harmful meatpacking business model and weakened unions’ ability to influence it. First, President Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of union busting and pro-corporate policy – symbolized by his firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 – that substantially weakened union power. Meatpackers began to compete with one another by slashing wages and seeking economies of scale, driving old-guard packers out of business. Packers would close union plants only to reopen them with lower wages and no union contract. In just more than a decade, wages fell from 15% above the national average to 20% below it.

This race to the bottom also turned into a race for market share, and permissive merger policy spurred a wave of massive takeovers that consolidated power among a handful of cost-cutting firms. For example, the top four packers controlled just 26% of the beef market in 1976, but by 2002, the top four dominated 85% of the market – and still do today.

Absent checks from unions or federal safety regulations, occupational hazards ballooned. From 1980 to 1990, injury rates increased 40%, driven largely by an increase in repetitive motion disorders such as carpal tunnel. Up to 45.5% of meatpacking workers experienced occupational injury or illness in 1991. At the same time, inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fell to an all-time low in the late ‘90s.

Conditions continue to deteriorate, as politically powerful packers influence policy to increase processing line speeds, which in turn increase repetitive motions and risk of injury. Poultry line speeds have more than doubled in the past half century, and the USDA recently approved rules that would lift all line speed caps in hog processing, and the agency recently granted waivers to poultry plants to operate at even faster speeds with fewer inspectors.

Faster lines naturally bring workers closer together in order to complete the same amount of work in a shorter amount of time, which increases the spread of COVID-19. “The lines run exceedingly fast,” says University of Kansas anthropologist Don Stull, who has studied the meatpacking industry for more than 30 years. “Until you reduce the line speeds, you are not able to ensure social and physical distance between workers.”

The predominant meatpacker union, UFCW, has called on the Trump administration to immediately halt all line speed increases and implement social distancing in plants, even if this slows down production. A coalition of 95 food, labor, and environmental organizations led by the Food Chain Workers Alliance also sent a letter to members of Congress and to the Department of Labor urging OSHA to issue and enforce emergency temporary health and safety standards to protect workers from COVID-19. The group also supports a House bill that would direct OSHA to promulgate these rules, and some members of the coalition have directly petitioned OSHA to enact the standards.

Find and share this story originally published on Food & Power.

What We're Reading

• President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he would ask the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate top meatpackers for market manipulation. Eleven midwestern attorneys general also asked the DOJ on Tuesday to investigate the industry. (Politico’s Morning Ag)

• A federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed on behalf of Smithfield plant workers in Missouri that sought to institute stronger safety measures against COVID-19. (AgriPulse)

• The DOJ approved Dairy Farmers of America’s purchase of more than 40 of Dean Foods’ processing plants on the condition that DFA divest three plants. (NBC)

About the Open Markets Institute

The Open Markets Institute promotes political, industrial, economic, and environmental resilience. We do so by documenting and clarifying the dangers of extreme consolidation, and by fostering discussions of ways to reestablish America’s political economy on a more stable and fair foundation.

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