How Labor Secretary Scalia Played Chicken With Meatpacking Workers’ Lives – Mother Jones

A typical poultry, pork, or beef plant employs hundreds of people—by and large immigrants, refugees, and people of color—toiling shoulder to shoulder to dismember and break down carcasses moving down the kill line at rates as high as 390 cattle, 1,295 pigs, or 10,500 birds per hour. Meatpacking workers have always faced hazardous conditions and high injury rates, and their tight working conditions make them highly susceptible to viral pathogens. What spreads inside a meat factory doesn’t stay within its walls: By late May, rural counties that had meatpacking plants with COVID-19 outbreaks had average infection rates five times higher than the rest of rural America. As of mid-July, at least 168 meatpacking workers had died from the disease.

“It’s a terrible experiment in achieving herd immunity,” says David Michaels, a professor of occupational health at George Washington University who led the the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under Obama. By the time the pandemic runs its course, he predicts, “everyone will have become infected” at meatpacking plants. ....
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/07/labor-eugene-scalia-meatpacking-osha-stress-carpal-tunnel-coronavirus-covid/