Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/meatpacking/)
Bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate would add lawyers in the USDA to prosecute complaints under the Packers and Stockyards Act. Experts and advocates have said the law has been weakened over the previous decades.
In May, the agency forced Seaboard Foods to make changes to its Guymon, Oklahoma, facility to better protect workers.
An Office of Inspector General report released Tuesday concluded the two agencies could have done more to ensure the safety of meatpacking plant workers.
Climate change is making water more scarce in some areas, but water-intensive meat production isn’t slowing down.
Here are the most important things to know from our investigation into a major pork processing plant.
Workers were told their injuries were “break-in pain,” soreness that comes from adjusting to life in a meatpacking plant. But some injuries were severe enough to warrant additional testing and treatment. In one case, a man was pushed to work with what turned out to be a fractured vertebrae.
For decades, the industry has recruited immigrants and refugees to perform the dangerous job of cutting America’s meat. Now, a small but growing number of plants are employing visa workers.
It’s well-established that Trump administration officials wanted meatpacking plants to keep operating, often with industry pressure, as workers fell ill and died by the dozens. But new emails obtained by nonprofit Public Citizen show Perdue personally lobbying to keep plants open, including pressing Robert Redfield, the former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director.
The CEO's of all the major meat packers have just collectively set their hair on fire and are likely calling internal company meetings RIGHT NOW about how to handle the industry's greatest threat in, like, forever. That's because the United States Department of Agriculture announced this month that it will attempt to significantly strengthen enforcement of the 100-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act that was originally written to stop meat packers from stealing from poultry,hog farmers and cattle ranchers with a bag of tricks that manipulated live stock prices through unfair, deceptive and anti-competitive practices. As written back in 1921:
Section 202 of the PSA (7 U.S.C. §§ 192 (a) and (e)) makes it unlawful for any packer who inspects livestock, meat products or livestock products to engage in or use any unfair, unjustly discriminatory or deceptive practice or device, or engage in any course of business or do any act for the purpose or with the effect of manipulating or controlling prices or creating a monopoly in the buying, selling or dealing any article in restraint of commerce. But meat packers have had a century to go to the courts in order to chip away at straightforward protections. And chip away they did, finally hitting the mother load in 2004 in the landmark case Pickett v. Tyson Fresh Meats Inc.
U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled that to win Section 202 PSA case a meat producer or rancher had to prove a singular meat packer's buying practices reduced marketplace competition by arbitrarily lowering prices paid to sellers with the likely effect of increasing retail prices.
Some meatpacking plant workers found themselves at the intersection of two of the riskiest settings during the pandemic: correctional facilities and meatpacking plants.