On her phone, Crystal Rodriguez keeps a photo of her father hooked up to a ventilator. Nurses at the hospital sent her the image after he’d spent close to a month in the intensive care unit at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, Colorado, battling severe complications from COVID-19. At 58, he was unable to speak or visit with family. Rodriguez is convinced that her father was exposed to the coronavirus at work on the meatpacking line at JBS, a Brazilian-owned multinational that brings in $50 billion annually as the world’s largest meat processor. They have so much money and so much knowledge of everything, Rodriguez says. Why didn’t they help protect us?
A 33-year-old single mother of four, Rodriguez grew up in Greeley, Colorado, home to JBS’s American headquarters and a massive plant that employs 6,000 workers. Rodriguez has worked there, on and off, alongside her father since she was 18. In the photo on her company ID, she has thick black hair and a wide smile, but her happy expression belies the reality at work. She says JBS is like a bad ex-boyfriend who you keep trying to leave, but you still go back for some reason.
Every workday in Greeley, plant employees herd 5,000 cattle onto the kill floor, where more workers stun, bleed out, dehide, dehair, gut, and split the carcasses. The hanging halves are chilled and aged, before a line of still more workers, standing along a snaking conveyor system, butchers each into individual cuts for packaging. For eight hours each shift, Rodriguez stands elbow to elbow with a dozen other employees, pulling slabs of beef off a conveyor belt and swiftly trimming them into cuts of lean brisket. The work is taxing, and the repetitive, forceful motion takes a toll. Rodriguez says her hands tingle at night, and her fingers are curled and misshapen from holding a knife and hook all day. She calls them her grandma hands.
On Tuesday, President Trump issued an executive order to classify meatpacking plants as critical under the Defense Production Act, meaning that plants would be required to remain open. We thank the Administration for acknowledging the important role food companies serve and ensuring that our food supply will remain resilient during these unprecedented times, JBS wrote in a statement praising the move.
Workers fear that JBS is signaling that it intends to use the White House order as cover to continue production, even as advocates argue that protections for workers are insufficient.
In rural America, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains, meatpacking plants have emerged as the most significant COVID-19 hot spots. More than 1,000 cases have been linked to a single Smithfield pork packing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakotaover half of all cases in the entire state. The situation in Sioux Falls was so localized and severe that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deployed an investigation team to assess work conditions at Smithfield. The agency used the case study to develop guidelines for slowing the spread, unveiled by Republican Gov. Kristi Noem at a press conference on April 20. The changes seemed modest: improved social distancing, use of face shields and other protective equipment, and better lines of communication with workers and their families. There’s nothing in this report that I think will be difficult to accomplish, Noem said. Still, the interim guidance, issued jointly by the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is entirely voluntary and explicitly allows asymptomatic workers who have been exposed to COVID-19 to remain on the line.
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