News broke last week that meatpacking companies exported a record amount of pork to China after using warnings of shortages to get Donald Trump to order them to stay open despite massive coronavirus outbreaks in their plants. Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren are not letting that issue go, sending a letter to the CEOs of top meatpacking companies.
Warren and Booker have questions for those CEOs about exports and price increases. “These actions raise questions about the circumstances of the president’s executive order, your honesty with the American public about the reasons for higher food prices, and your commitment to providing a safe, affordable and abundant food supply for the nation,” they wrote in their letter.
Meatpacking plants remain a major concern for coronavirus outbreaks. The United Food and Commercial Workers union is calling for workers to be tested every day, saying workers would be less afraid to go to work if they could “look around the plant, or look around the locker room, or the break room, and … know that everybody inside these walls is COVID-free.” The director of health in Nashville, Tennessee, says that probably isn’t possible, but that workplaces—not just meatpacking plants but nursing homes, construction sites, and others—should conduct random tests so they could quickly get on top of new outbreaks.
That fear remains a serious issue for workers around the country, many of whom face the choice between going to workplaces they don’t consider safe and losing the wages they need to pay their bills. Many of Iowa’s 10,000 refugees from Myanmar work in meatpacking plants and are coming up against exactly that.
”If they don’t go to work, how they will survive? That is a big question,” Pastor Benjamin Sang Bawi told Iowa Public Radio. “And of course every, every family [is] concerned about that.”
Advocates for the refugees also point to racism, with refugees being told “we are the virus,” and to the need for social services and interpreters for a group that speaks 27 languages and dialects. “Families that are self-isolating in their homes need for food delivery. Not a phone number to the food pantry. They need food delivered to their door,” Abigail Sui, of the refugee advocacy group EMBARC, told officials in Waterloo, Iowa.
This blog originally appeared at Daily Kos on June 24, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Full-time staff since 2011, currently assistant managing editor.
