Meat processing plants having Covid-19 Outbreaks is a preventable tragedy

The Quarantine Zone
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trump signed an executive order on Tuesday invoking the Defense Production Act to keep meat processing plants open, a senior White House official told CBS News. Plants owned by some of the country’s largest food companies have struggled with outbreaks of the coronavirus among workers and a growing death toll.

a couple of quotes from the above link:
The order from Mr. Trump is intended to stave off a decision from food companies to temporarily close a majority of their processing plants, which could reduce the country’s processing capacity by up to 80%, the senior White House official said.

United Food and Commercial Workers said, and 22 meatpacking plants have temporarily shuttered.

Here’s a Fox quote from Smithfield, one of the largest US meat processing companies (which was sold to a chinese company in 2013) Sullivan’s statements came after the company’s pork-processing plant in Sioux Falls was forced to close on April 12 after hundreds of its approximately 3,700 employees tested positive for COVID-19. According to Smithfield, this one plant alone accounted for “4 to 5 percent” of the entirety of U.S. pork production.

IMHO, it sure looks like the processing plants didn’t do much to prevent Covid-19 from entering their plants, and not much to prevent the spread.

Up until the beginning of March, I worked for Apple’s biggest supplier of iPads, iPhones, headsets, etc, with dozens of factories in China.

  1. Initiated temperature checks on entry and exit of every person going to the factory a few days before the Wuhan lockdown.
  2. If a person had a temperature, they were not allowed in the factory campus area (these can be hugeas in several square miles with tens if not hundreds of thousand employees)
  3. before the end of January (as in within about a week of the Wuhan lockdown), they spun up their own manufacturing lines to ensure that the million employees had at least one mask per day
  4. Majority of the line workers live in dorms on the factory campus
  5. They live in a shift section, go on shift in a group, are temperature checked starting the shift, during lunch (which they go to as a group and have enforced social distancing), and after the shift.
  6. If one person has a fever, then
    a) Chinese CDC has to be notified within 2 hours
    b) person with fever gets taken to an external CDC monitored site for further testing
    c) entire shift goes into hard 2 week quarantine in a dorm inside the campus
    d) the production area has to be sanitized and pass a government health department check to reopen.
  7. All employees wear masks all the time
  8. There are more prevention steps but you get the idea.

This is all SARs era protocol. The factories are freaking paranoid about even one case because that can shut down the entire factory complex for weeks. There has not been a shut down of the dozens of factories in my old company. And, conspiracy theorists aside, if there is Covid outbreak in a Chinese factory that makes Apple products (or frankly any other reputable brand) then you would hear about it. Whilst it may seem that the Chinese government controls ALL information flows, that is simply untrue in the current connected age. Apple would know virtually in real time (certainly within 24 hours maximum) if even one of their contract manufacturing factories was not producing the daily run rate. And by US law are required to disclose such material information.

I have zero knowledge of US meat processing plants, but there are complaints of no PPE and no social distancing. If the US meat processing companies and associated local/state health bureaus were on their game, then there should not be mass closings that could impact significant amounts of the US meat supply. Farmers are starting to ‘Depopulating’ Chickens, Euthanizing Pigs And Dumping Milk in addition to the meat processing plants shutting down with hundreds of infected employees.

This is a tragedy that could be avoided and is being avoided in other countries. Just had to vent. YMMV

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There are a bunch of meat packing plants in my area (pork and beef), including one my former room mate works at. They’ve split their workforce into three groups, and only one group can work at a time. He’s currently nearing the end of a 9 day (12 hrs each day) stretch. He’s pissed off and exhausted and I don’t blame him. I want people to stay safe, but at the same time, I worry about people’s livelihoods if the packing plants all close. This is entirely lose-lose, and I hate it.

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I don’t want to this to be interpreted as a political potshot, but it’s impossible to discuss this topic without discussing the political dimensions related to it and which motivate the decisions to put federal muscle behind the order.

I can’t help but view the federalization of the facility as essentially a hearty middle finger to unions, which corporate America has been trying to break for a long time. The order doesn’t mean that employees can’t quit - you can’t make quitting illegal. But it provides protection for plant executives who want to fire employees who do quit, and the union might be powerless to stop them. If they go on strike, they get fired. End of story, end of the union.

Every response from the White House - and I mean every last one - is meant to increase whatever leverage they have at a time when more and more people are starting to smell the stench of their b.s.

Getting back to the health angle of this, there is no rational reason to do this at all. If anyone cared about these workers, they would have these protocols that China Guy mentioned. It’s almost as if certain people are perfectly willing to sacrifice human labor as the cost of getting America’s economy back on its feet.

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The biggest issue here is that the US food supply chains are extremely optimized for low cost and fast delivery up and down the chain. This is great in normal times- farmers can unload their produce/animals, processors do their thing, it’s shipped to stores and sold in a relatively short time, with as little lag time or inventory on-hand as possible. That’s not to say that there’s no buffering capacity (to use a computing term), but not very much. The idea is that in general, demand for these products is either constant or seasonal, and that all along the chain, things can keep moving steadily, with the buffer capacity on hand for minor hiccups like weather-related natural disasters such as snowstorms or floods that hang up the trucks or trains. Processing plants are part of this- their whole goal is to disassemble the animals as quickly and cheaply as possible, to keep that chain moving. And everything is optimized for economies of scale as well- we have huge processing plants like the one in Cactus, TX or Waterloo, IA that process upwards of 4-5% of national production EACH.

But when the throughput of a bottleneck segment (the processing plants) suddenly slows down significantly due to plant closings, it has effects up and down the chain. Farmers don’t have anywhere to put their excess livestock that would have been processed, so they have to kill the animals- there’s no other option. And it disrupts things downstream- suddenly retailers can’t get stuff from the warehouses, because the processing plants are not shipping products. For farmers, it’s particularly bad, in that while farming is a fairly high cash-flow business (i.e. there’s a lot of money being spent to farm large numbers of animals and crops), it’s not a high profit business, so every animal they kill represents some amount of money invested that didn’t return ANYTHING at all. Most can only do so much of this before they’re broke and out of business entirely.

The other thing is that conditions in processing plants are often terrible and hard enough when they’re fully staffed and not doing PPE/social distancing, and that kind of thing only makes it worse and slows things down. Workers are often very low paid and often refugees, as they’re jobs that most native-born people refuse to take.

So… TL;DR- the whole supply chain between the farms and table is a highly optimized, fairly precarious thing under normal circumstances, and shutting down processing plants is causing massive disruptions. That’s why the President is mandating that it stay open; otherwise, it screws farmers, processors AND consumers, not only in the short term but in the long term as well. Of course, this is all done on the backs of the workers in the plants.

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Yes, a big part of the problem is that the plants do not take any precautions, and even have a work while sick culture. Of course the management denies this, but what else are they going to do? This culture usually brings about actual policies such as employees can be fired for not showing up, whether they are sick or not. Or requiring a doctor’s note, which is very difficult to get, or a positive test, which may be impossible to get. These are all things well beyond the standard hourly-wage practice of simply not having paid sick leave.

Anyway, it was only about three weeks ago that one meat packing plant in northern Colorado started to take any precautions, and that was after an active Covid-19 outbreak at the plant.

So the plan was “come to work like usual,” because anything else would affect profits, and surprise, outbreaks happened. Maybe there was something to the idea that we all had to stay home.