The Escalating, Bloody Exploitation of Meat Workers Under Trump

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3. People are meat: The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19

https://www.propublica.org/article/documents-covid-meatpacking-tyson-smithfield-trump

The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19

Newly released documents reveal that the meatpacking industry’s callousness toward the health of its workers and its influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known.

by Michael Grabell
May 13, 2022, 3:40 p.m.

As hundreds of meatpacking workers fell sick from the coronavirus that was spreading through their plants and into their communities in April 2020, the CEO of Tyson Foods reached out to the head of another major meatpacker, Smithfield Foods, with a proposal.

Smithfield’s pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, had been hit particularly hard, and state and local officials were pressuring the company to shut it down.

“Anything we can do to help?” Tyson CEO Noel White asked in an email. Smithfield’s CEO Ken Sullivan replied that he wished there was.

But White had an idea. Would Sullivan like to discuss the possibility of getting President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to keep meatpacking plants open?

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