The pandemic exposed the human cost of the meatpacking industry?s power: ?It?s enormously frightening?

Early in the pandemic, Covid outbreaks were rampant in America’s meatpacking plants – the factories that kill, cut and package animals.

But the chairman of one of biggest meat companies in the US, Tyson, argued that these factories should stay open to feed Americans.

“It is as essential as healthcare,” John Tyson wrote in several newspaper ads. Days later Donald Trump issued an executive order to keep meat plants running.

The following month, 49 meatpacking workers died of Covid.

The message was clear: Americans needed meat, and workers needed to risk their lives to provide it. And Osha – the labor department agency that is supposed to protect workers – could seemingly do little to protect them.

In a factory in Greeley, Colorado, owned by meat conglomerate JBS, at least six workers died early in the pandemic. Osha is supposed to investigate every workplace fatality reported to them, but it took months for them to send an investigator.

When Osha finally showed up to investigate, it found JBS failed to make its workplace free of “hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm”. The penalty: a proposed fine of $13,494.