Costco Chicken Plant in NE is Hot Spot for COVID19

[tomturbomatic]

Just heard Rachel read this the from front page of Omaha paper on program 4-21-2020. Costco Chicken is one of the famous products that people pick up for dinner on the way home from work.

Dear God, we have no idea of our blessings that we do not have to work in meat packing or poultry processing plants. I remember years ago there was a poultry processing plant in the Carolinas, I think, where fire doors were locked illegally and a hydraulic line ruptured and caught fire. It killed people because they could not get away from the fire. I don't know if I read this in a newspaper or if it came to me because I was a union steward. These are places where people have to wear incontinent garments because they cannot take restroom breaks. None of this is right.

I am posting this here so that it is available to everyone.

 

[frigilux]

Three pork processing plants have closed (temporarily) in this area. Smithfield in Sioux Falls, SD (workforce of 3,700; over 900 COVID-19 cases including workers & subsequent close contacts); JBS in Worthington, MN (2,700 in the workforce; about 80 cases in workers plus another 30 close contacts). Comfrey Farms Prime Pork here in town (workforce of about 685; 1 worker and 2 related; this just happened today.)

I think Prime Pork learned from the Smithfield debacle. Cases linked to JBS in Worthington are still in the doubling every day stage. We also have a Toro manufacturing plant in town (roughly 800 workforce) with spouses who work at JBS.

No cases reported at Toro as of noon today. They have, however, told workers that if anyone in their household works at JBS they are to stay home for 14 days.

 

[frigilux]

A large Tyson pork producing plant in Waterloo, IA, just closed indefinitely. Approximately 3,000 workers, about 4% of nations pork production. “Indefinitely” usually means a target restart of 10-14 days. Let’s hope so!

It’s maddening to hear that farmers have to euthanize mass numbers of hogs and dump thousands of gallons of milk into fields because of extended breakdowns in the food chain. These meat plants generally handle anywhere from 10,000-20,000 hogs per day. Chaos ensues when things have to come to a screeching halt, even if only for a week or two.

Predictably, unfortunately, there has been a run on meat products at our local HyVee grocery store. Everyone’s trying to fill their freezers at the same time.

Local hog farmers are literally giving away hogs to people who can butcher their own. A few small-business butchers in the area have already said they are booked through May.

[this post was last edited: 4/22/2020-10:45]

 

[vacerator]

Won't catch me in a Costco

right now either! Can live without pork. We buy Annie's or Bell and Evans chicken. If I can't get that, we have protien powder, both whey and cassien.

 

[gansky1]

The now (temporarily) closed chicken processing plant near Fremont, NE was a source of much protest and consternation by local officials that tried unsuccessfully to keep the plant out of their areas a couple of years ago.  These processing facilities, paying low wages for low-or-no-skill labor bring crushing poverty and dependency on local systems such as schools, healthcare and social systems that are not able to meet the demand with the existing tax base and infrastructure.  Low wages and exploitative practices, often based on immigration status, force many to live in often unsafe, overcrowded conditions that bring added stress to areas already struggling to hang on as rural life is ever less appealing to younger generations who leave for jobs and opportunity elsewhere.  

 

The seemingly low price of everything we eat has a very dark and long-ignored underbelly, that has existed for more than a century.  As a kid, I heard many stories of the horrors of streams of European immigrants maimed and killed in the packinghouse industry that defined and built South Omaha, NE, now a part of the city proper.  Injured workers were often lain in their front yards by fellow workers as there was no provision for health insurance or coverage of any kind.  Conditions are only marginally better today.

 

It is now, by tragic pandemic twist of fate that many are just realizing for the first time where their meat, produce and dairy products really come from and the human cost built in to those neatly packaged chicken parts and strips of bacon.  There are plenty of documentaries and studies of these fellow human beings we depend upon for 'our daily bread', though this exploration is  not for the queasy or faint of heart.  Tread lightly into these dark corners of our food supply.

 

Frequently appearing in local news are stories of ICE raids in food processing plants, rounding up the undocumented and removing them from the U.S.  White House Immigration advisor Stephen Miller suggested using trains/boxcars to transport them back to the border as a tool of dissuasion, but that was abandoned for possibly bad optics.  Lobbyists for the industry have very successfully partnered with immigration hawks and shifted the blame to the individuals whom have broken the law coming here to work, branding them as "invaders" or "vermin" and worse.  Commonly, the companies that employ them are let off with  token fines or a sternly-worded  warning.  It has become all too easy for us to ignore the human costs and blame the workers for their plight while multinational companies get richer and richer on their backs. 

 

Perhaps now we can acknowledge as essential our farm-to-store chain of workers,  value them and compensate them accordingly.  One can hope.  

[this post was last edited: 4/22/2020-16:22]

 

[frigilux]

You are so right, gansky. Unfortunately, I don't think things will change much. We're too used to food being (relatively) inexpensive.

To give you an idea of who works at these large meat processing plants, there are 40 (yes, forty) different languages spoken in the workforce of 2,000 at JBS in Worthington (a town of about 13,000).

 

When Smithfield in Sioux Falls shut down on April 13, workers applied and were accepted for jobs at JBS.  Worthington and Sioux Falls are about an hour apart. The result is predictable: Huge COVID-19 breakout at JBS.

 

In an effort to smooth over what has become a PR nightmare for JBS, they are paying their workers for up to two weeks that the plant may be shutdown.

 

And it continues: Windom (where I am; pop. 4,600) and Worthington are 28 miles apart. Quite a number of people who live in Windom commute to work at JBS and some of their spouses or other members of their households work at the meatpacking plant or at Toro here.  There is a lot of contact tracing going on in this little town in an effort to avoid what has happened at JBS and Smithfield.

[this post was last edited: 4/22/2020-14:56]

 

[vacerator]

Yep!

Food and grocery people, teachers, some nurses, all underpaid!

 

[tolivac]

My younger brother lives in Soux Falls-he told me about the Smithfeild slaughter house closed down for decontamination and reworking work stations so workers will be further apart and better shielded from each other.