Meatpacking deaths from Covid-19 are three times worse than thought; new OSHA rule requires vaccination or testing

A new federal rule will mandate that employers of more than 100 must "require vaccinations or test everyone regularly and enforce mask-wearing includes meatpacking plants, which have been linked to tens of thousands of Covid-19 cases and hundreds of deaths," Sky Chadde reports for the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The rule "is the kind of enforcement that advocates of meatpacking workers and unions representing plant employees had been asking for since the early days of the pandemic." The rule is set to take effect Jan. 4.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis obtained data from the five largest meatpacking companies and discovered far more infections and deaths among workers than previously known, Chadde reports: "In roughly just the first year of the pandemic, 269 people who worked for Tyson Foods, JBS, Smithfield Foods, Cargill and National Beef died due to complications from the coronavirus . . . Combining the subcommittee’s data with Investigate Midwest’s tracking shows that, across the industry, about 86,000 workers tested positive during the pandemic and that 423 died."

Meatpacking workers have received little mandatory protection during the pandemic. President Trump declared meatpackers essential to keep them open during the pandemic, but his administration did not require the industry to take specific precautions to protect workers, Chuck Abbott reports for the Food & Environment Reporting Network. And though President Biden asked OSHA to better protect workers earlier this year, meatpackers were exempted from workplace safety rules published in April.

Labor unions applauded the new rule, though they worried it doesn't go far enough, Abbott reports. However, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives denounced it, saying that, though the Jan. 4 deadline "does take farmer co-ops past harvest and does exempt employees working exclusively outdoors, implementing this standard will be disruptive, and it contains no provisions included to help ensure the integrity of the food and agriculture supply chain."