By Gabby Esposito
May 2021
Online Journalism/UConn
The United States Department of Agriculture was sued three times last summer for neglecting and disregarding the care of workers’ health and animal treatment.
In this May 1, 2020, file photo, civil rights attorney Tom Frerichs stands in his office in Waterloo, Iowa. On June 25, 2020, Frerichs filed a lawsuit on behalf of the estates of three Tyson Foods workers at its pork processing plant in Waterloo who died after contracting coronavirus. The lawsuit alleges the company knowingly put employees at risk during an outbreak and lied to keep them on the job. (AP Photo / Charlie Neibergall)
The lawsuits were controversial as union, industry and government leaders questioned what decision could have prevented the deaths of 239 workers in meatpacking plants across the country.
Simultaneously, the wellbeing of the animals before slaughter was jeopardized as workers were being pushed to work harder to feed not only their own families, but an entire country.
The lawsuit against the USDA on July 28 came from six unions representing workers who filed complaints about faster slaughter line speeds. According to the complaints, this put pressure on workers which resulted in less humane care of animals.
Photo of Joe Emenheiser. (Provided by Emenheiser)
Should the plants have been closed altogether?
According to University of Connecticut Animal Science professor and livestock specialist Joe Emenheiser, the answer to ensuring the safety of both animals and workers is more complicated than just that.
Emenheiser grew up on a farm and has worked with livestock all his life as a Vermont state livestock specialist. He said he has witnessed firsthand worker and animal mistreatment as well as the more publicly recognized cases that have prompted political industry debates.
However, according to Emenheiser, it would have been more harmful to the animals to shut down the plants.“Stopping the processing chain altogether would disrupt the welfare of the animals themselves,” Emenheiser said.
Should there have been more oversight?
In the following phone interview audio, Emenheiser provides his own perspective on oversight.
Despite what happened last year, Emenheiser said that he has witnessed most of the problems before the animals are ready to be slaughtered. “In my experience, I don’t see most of the problems in the meat plants and slaughter houses but rather the livestock and farming,” he stated in the interview.
The ethical battle with the meat industry has been longstanding — since before Emenheiser was born and even before government oversight, regulations, unions or the USDA came into place in the early 1900s.
In his 2014 article “The Politics of Meat,” author and social scientist Steve Johnson traces the politics of meat back to journalist Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel, “The Jungle.” The book was a revolutionary force that blatantly exposed the corruption and gross conditions the meat, animals, and workers experienced in the industry.
How “The Jungle” Changed American Food | The Poison Squad | American Experience | PBS
Over a century later and government oversight and regulations have dramatically transformed the industry. Still the numbers of cases against the meat industry have risen in recent years. According to data from November 2020, nearly every month since 2019 there has been at least one or two antitrust lawsuit cases filed against companies including Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Wayne Farms, JBS, Cargill, Sanderson Farms, Hormel Foods, and Smithfield Foods.
In this May 7, 2020, file photo, workers leave the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Indiana. The plant has closed April 25 after nearly 900 employees tested positive for the coronavirus. (AP Photo / Michael Conroy)
As the coronavirus pandemic shut down businesses and unemployed nearly a fifth of the country, these companies received criticism for staying open.
As coronavirus hotspots were traced back to meat plants, the criticism turned into lawsuits. According to an article from The Guardian, nearly half of all hotspots in May of 2020 were linked to meat processing plants.
However, many workers of these plants were proponents of keeping their company open, such as Ahcut Deng, who works in a Smithfield meat plant in South Dakota. In an interview with the The Daily, Deng said she was trying to support nine family members on her salary at Smithfield.
Ultimately, Deng got sick with the virus. She and other sick employees were paid for 40 hours a week for their time off. But for Deng, who works overtime every day, this was not enough. Despite feeling deathly ill, she wanted to get back to work. Like many other workers at these plants (almost 40%), Deng is an immigrant.
“A lot of these workers come from lower-income families and many are immigrants. At the end of the day, their number one concern is supporting themselves and their families,” Ivana Prats del Valle said in a phone interview. Del Valle is a UConn animal science major on track to become a veterinarian. Her family immigrated from Puerto Rico.
Emenheiser, who has experience working in meat plants, says that there are employees who could have avoided putting their lives at risk. “I don’t mean to generalize this, because it is not always true, but generally we can always quit our jobs,” Emenheiser said. “Certainly it is the employers job to keep employees safe.”
Like del Valle, PETA Senior Educational Projects Manager Kenneth Monteville disagrees with this. “Most everyone who works at these places does not want to have that job,” he said in a Zoom interview. According to him, where a person works largely depends on the dominating industry in their geographic area.
Below is a clip from the interview with Monteville. He talks about the effect the pandemic has had on workers and animals in the meat industry. He also mentions a recent lawsuit against the mink industry.
Most meat plants are located in lower-income places where lower-income families live and look for employment. “This is a larger issue we call environmental racism,” Monteville said. Ultimately, in a time like the pandemic there is pressure from not just worker’s own home-life, but also the economy, and the companies themselves to keep working.
With quitting not only would the employee’s income be at stake but so would 5.6% of the GDP which the meat and poultry industry account for. According to Manager of Student Organizing at PETA Bridget Dillon, these large meat companies like Smithfield are deeply woven into politics through relationships to powerful government figures.
“The meat industry targets their approach to a small number of key lawmakers and regulators that have a direct impact on their business interests, Johnson states in his CBS article.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s like a lot of things in this country. Immigrants and lower class workers are treated with less respect and the profits of the big industry is put above their lives,” del Valle said.
“Across industries we’ll see corners being cut to maximize profits and it’s always the workers and animals who pay the price,” Monteville said.
While the lawsuits from the virus will eventually come to a close, they take place against two larger issues looming in the background — is the meat industry too powerful and is it sustainable?