Meatpacking is on my mind today, as I weigh the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on rural Midwestern counties. Last week, the large Smithfield pork producing plant in South Dakota was forced to cease operations when hundreds of employees were diagnosed with COVID-19.
Even when a factory floor worker became infected, the company insisted it would sanitize the place and keep cranking out pork products, because the Trump Administration deemed the facility an essential link in the nation’s food chain.
The plant itself is in South Dakota’s largest city, Sioux Falls, but don’t be fooled; the city, an urban oasis in the middle of miles and miles of monocrop farmland, much of it tended by migrant workers, is home to less than 200,000 residents.
Hundreds of silent, empty miles stretch from Sioux Falls in all directions. Once, the land was a biodiverse prairie dotted with clusters of free-roaming bison. Today, it seems vast and blank, a sea of genetically altered crops overseen by a sparse collection of trees.
In this space sit two large, foreign-owned meatpacking plants, one in Sioux Falls and the other just sixty-two miles away in Worthington, Minnesota. When the roads are mostly empty and traffic amounts to a stream of passing semis and travelers heading somewhere else, sixty-two miles feels like a very small distance.
The Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls is owned by the W.H. Group, a Chinese company with hundreds of similar facilities across the United States. In Worthington, the pork plant is part of JBS S.A.—a Brazilian firm that nabbed millions in government contracts during a 2019 bailout of the agricultural industry, thanks to the trade war launched by President Trump.
COVID-19 outbreaks have also been reported at meatpacking plants in Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Iowa saw its highest spike in confirmed cases in a single day, April 19, at 389 cases. Of those cases, 67 percent were linked to employees of meatpacking plants.
The day after, there was a COVID-19 outbreak of twenty-one cases at a plant in Chicago’s south side, and in Wisconsin, where a health department spokesman said the largest spike involved a JBS meatpacking plant in Green Bay.
In usual times, people who reach for a package of bacon or sausage at their local grocery store rarely stop and think about who helped turn the pig into something easy to prepare for a meal. But now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are being afforded a look behind factory walls.
It’s not pretty.
There are 3,700 workers at the Smithfield plant, standing shoulder to shoulder on the factory line and in crowded cafeterias. For weeks, as the coronavirus outbreak spread across the globe, the plant’s management team denied the risk to employees.
Even when a factory floor worker became infected, the company insisted it would sanitize the place and keep cranking out pork products, because the Trump Administration deemed the facility an essential link in the nation’s food chain.
It took a secretive news tip, shared with a local reporter via Facebook, for the information about an infected Smithfield worker to spread. The tip came from the daughter of two Smithfield employees who were immigrants and not proficient English speakers.
She was afraid that COVID-19 was moving rapidly through the plant, and that the workforce was vulnerable.
Her fears were valid. While the Smithfield corporation attempted to assure the public that precautions were being taken to stem the pandemic, the virus was rapidly passing from one factory worker to another, until the Sioux Falls plant became the number-one hot spot for COVID-19 in the United States.
Hundreds of people became infected. South Dakota’s governor, Republican Kristi Noem, pressured Smithfield into shutting down the plant but still refused to implement a stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order, either locally or across the state.
The JBS pork producing plant in Worthington, an hour’s drive from Sioux Falls, has been shuttered as well, after the coronavirus began to spread among factory workers.
Many of those workers have family members who work for the Smithfield plant across the border in South Dakota. While Minnesota has had a stay-at-home order in place for weeks, South Dakota still does not.
Did this help spread the virus to Minnesota? It seems likely. Smithfield’s unwillingness to cease production until forced to, combined with Governor Noem’s refusal to advise South Dakotans to stay home, certainly put a vulnerable—but essential, right?—workforce at risk.
There are many invisible thread lines to follow here, and some don’t involve the production or packaging of meat. The jobs at the JBS and Smithfield plants, at least in the Midwest, are union jobs. They pay relatively well, especially for rural communities, and they come with benefits.
But the consolidation of meatpacking in the United States that has taken place in recent decades means these plants are vast operations staffed by large numbers of employees. This increases the risk of infection and disease for those workers while also making the meat supply more vulnerable as well.
If more meatpacking plants shut down, prices will rise and jobs will be lost.
Another side effect of plant closures is the forced reduction in the pig population, as hog farmers in the Midwest are currently experiencing. With nowhere to take the meat, there is no reason for an excess of pigs to be kept alive.
This reminds me somehow of the monocrop farms that surround both the Smithfield and JBS pork plants. We put too much stock in consolidation, turning once vibrant prairie land into soy or corn fields only. Rivers, farms, ecosystems, and communities suffer because of this.
It seems we have also backed ourselves into a corner by surrendering a significant portion of our meat and food production to global conglomerates worth billions of dollars.
Closing the meatpacking plants in South Dakota and Minnesota was the right thing to do, but it should have happened much earlier, and the failure to protect workers and their communities in such situations must not happen again.