Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/osha/)
Since close to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has tracked complaints it's received about the virus by industry. And through May of this year, agriculture — think crop farming, cattle ranching and the like — has had relatively few complaints.
While complaints increased, overall inspections dramatically decreased, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.
OSHA received its first complaints about meatpacking plants almost a full year ago, on March 17, 2020. At two plants in North Carolina, people were elbow-to-elbow, with no change in operations, according to OSHA data.
OSHA and USDA waited until April of last year — more than three months into the pandemic and after a plant shut down because workers fell ill — to plan a response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases at meatpacking plants, according to emails obtained by Public Citizen.
Normally, a workplace death in the United States is met with a swift and thorough response.
By law, employers must report a death within eight hours to the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration. An inspector from OSHA typically arrives within a day to interview workers, review the site of the incident, and determine whether the death resulted from unsafe conditions. For workers in the meatpacking industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the system of swift reporting and next-day inspections that should protect them has broken down.
At least 239 meatpacking workers have died and 45,000 have contracted the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, according to tracking by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. But companies reported less than half that number of deaths to OSHA, a joint investigation by USA TODAY and the Midwest Center found. Experts say that's in large part because the agency weakened reporting requirements during the pandemic.
Even fewer deaths triggered the kind of robust investigation OSHA typically conducted before the pandemic.
Advocates have said safety measures need to be enforceable in order to protect workers. Without the feds, some states have stepped in and done so.
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.
Last month our worst fears were confirmed after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a pair of COVID-19 safety violation related fines against Big-Meat giants China WH-group owned Smithfield Foods and Brazilian-owned JBS. Mismanagement at Smithfield’s meat packing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota resulted in almost 13-hundred COVID-19 positive tests. Four plant workers died. JBS is equally culpable. At the JBS USA plant in Greeley, Colorado 290 workers tested positive for COVID-19. Six have died.
Some states have enforced rules to prevent COVID-19's spread among farmworkers, but the federal government hasn't done so, leaving many workers unprotected, advocates said.
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.