Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/meatpacking/)
While president-elect Joe Biden has not announced any specific plans to protect meatpacking workers, advocates believe there are things he could, and should, do.
USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting spent five months piecing together the pivotal moments in the Triumph Foods outbreak, interviewing more than a dozen current and former workers and examining thousands of pages of government records.
In April, despite his fever, a meatpacking worker continued to carve neck bones out of pig carcasses at a JBS plant in Iowa.
Two weeks later, he would test positive for COVID-19. But in the meantime, he said, he kept clocking in because of a punitive attendance system widely used in meatpacking plants: the point system.
In an August report, the CDC noted a difference between salaries employees in an office setting and the hourly workers on the production line.
Even as thousands of their employees fell ill with COVID-19, meatpacking executives pressured federal regulators to help keep their plants open, according to a trove of emails obtained by USA TODAY and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
The pounds of chicken available to consumers on a per capita basis has increased more than 500 percent since 1909, according to USDA data.
Maria Romero’s mother is among at least 4,627 Arkansas poultry workers to have been infected by COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. More than half of them, like Romero’s mother, are Hispanic.
While nursing homes and prisons made up most rural hot spots in the spring, growing evidence now points to a different major “engine of spread” that has lurked beneath the radar of public awareness and official recognition: meat-processing.
Frustrated by the lack of response to their complaint of the “imminent danger” posed by COVID-19, three meatpacking workers at the Maid-Rite Specialty Foods plant outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, took the unusual step Wednesday of filing a lawsuit against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.
More Americans have stayed home to cook during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they've paid a higher price for their home meals. While the cost of restaurant foods remained steady through the past few months, the price consumers paid for foods at grocery stores has steeply risen since March 2020.
As customers rushed to stock up on foods at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a sudden and sharp increase in demand for food, which led to higher prices. The dramatic reduction in restaurant traffic also resulted in increased demand for food from grocery stores, thus raising prices for food products, according to an April 2020 post by the USDA.
The Consumer Price Index – a measure of the average change in the prices paid by consumers for goods and services – rose 4.5 percent in June for food, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . The index for food at home increased 5.6 percent in June, following a 4.8 percent increase in May, before seasonal adjustment.
While the price of poultry products – chicken and eggs – rose modestly, the cost of meat items – both beef and pork – rose sharply in June. The temporary closure of a number of meatpacking plants decreased the supplies of meat products, which eventually led to the steep rise in retail meat prices, according to the USDA report.