Last August, in a record-setting sting operation, immigration officials swept through seven chicken-processing sites in Mississippi, rounding up 680 mostly Latino workers.
It followed a similarly high-profile raid, in April 2018, on a meatpacking plant in Tennessee, where, according to a class-action lawsuit, “(ICE officers) forcefully seized and arrested approximately 100 Latino workers.”
Fast-forward to 2020, and meat-processing plants function differently in the national narrative. Suddenly, they’re portrayed not as supposed vectors of criminality but as vital tools for keeping Americans hale and hearty in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
And yet, in the absence of greater workplace protections, it seems all but guaranteed that President Donald Trump’s new executive order to keep meat-processing plants open will put employees at even greater risk.
High-production plants are ill-equipped to protect against the spread of an aggressively contagious disease. Steve Meyer, an economist with the commodity firm Kerns and Associates, told CNN Business that workers stand about three or four feet apart from one another – short of the six feet necessary to adhere to social-distancing guidelines.
Keep in mind, CNN Business’ Ann Colwell and Rob McLean reported that nearly 30% of meat-packing workers are foreign-born, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. Nearly two-thirds are Latino (35%), black (20%) or Asian (8%), according to a 2016 Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center report.
(Notably, while major meat processors say that they’ve taken steps to increase safety, some workers say that such measures haven’t been enough, citing the tendency of decision-makers to prioritize dollars over people.)
“I just don’t know how they’re going to do it when there are people dying and getting really sick,” an employee of Tyson Foods’ Independence, Iowa, site told CNN Business, referring to the news to continue operations. “Who’s to say people are even gonna show up to work?”
This comment speaks to the sobering irony lurking in the President’s order. The same kinds of facilities that federal agents in recent years had turned into targets have become part of America’s critical infrastructure – a change that’s forcing the already vulnerable Latinos who make up sizable shares of the meat-processing workforce to weigh their livelihoods against their safety.
There’s the growing body of data showing that, given how closely health disparities track poverty and race, the virus poses a unique threat to Latinos, among other racial minorities.
“These are essential frontline workers. They are just as important as doctors and nurses, but they are not being treated that way,” Domingo Garcia, president of the civil rights group League of United Latin American Citizens, said in April, after the deaths of several Latino workers at a meat-processing plant in Colorado.
Regrettably, to treat these workers differently would require the current administration to do something it reliably fails to do: demonstrate empathy for the most vulnerable among us.