The Packing Plant Outbreaks and Organizing Around Workers’ Issues

Text of speech to Brown County (WI) Democrats

Hello, everyone. I hope you all are well. As Mike just said, my name is Jarrett Brown. First of all I want to thank Mike for inviting me to speak with you all and for his leadership during this crisis. He has done a great job of keeping us all informed and connected. I’d also like to thank all of you for joining this meeting and giving me a chance to speak. You all are activists and leaders who have been fighting the good fight for a long time, so for me, it’s an honor to speak tonight. And, real quick, I want to thank our friend, Jon Shelton, for offering me some tips. He works at UWGB and is an excellent speaker, which you already know if you’ve heard him before.

Tonight I am going to talk about the packing plant outbreaks and how we can organize around workers’ issues.

One of the reasons I moved to Green Bay in May 2018 was because there are job opportunities in the food processing industry. I’ve been working in the industry since 2007, so I knew that I would be able to find a stable job here. From May 2018 until Jan 2020 I worked at JBS as a saw operator. While I was there, I was very vocal about safety issues. Luckily for me, I wasn’t there when the coronavirus pandemic became a threat.

Before I get started I want to give everyone some background information about the packing plants and what it is like to work there.

Some of the major players in the meatpacking industry are National Beef, Cargill, Tyson, JBS, Smithfield, American Foods, Perdue, Sanderson Farms, and Hormel.

The majority of the production workers in the industry are immigrants. Typically, there are workers from dozens of countries and a dozen or more languages can be heard spoken on a daily basis within the plant. Some are educated, but lack the language skills to find employment in their field in the United States. Others have limited or no formal education.

Everyone here knows that the packing plants and their workers have been a vital part of Green Bay’s economy for around 120 years. The products that they produce end up on dinner plates all around the world.

In order to make that happen and to be profitable, the plants require workers to perform tasks repetitively and quickly. The workers perform the same tasks over and over all day, every day. There is a lot of pressure coming from high above for the supervisors to meet production goals. The supervisors have to push their employees very hard in order to meet expectations and keep their bosses off their backs.

Very often, the supervisors cut corners and ignore safety issues in order to keep production flowing. Production is their main focus because production determines profit. The supervisors don’t do enough to stop injuries from occurring either because it isn’t their priority. Instead of removing hazards to workers and thus making the workplace safer, the companies point their fingers at workers when there is an injury.

Every company in the U.S. has a safety policy and safety slogans. If you walk into any plant I guarantee you that you will see a sign that says something like “Safety First,” “Safety is Our #1 Priority,” Safety is Job #1, or “Our Employees Are Our Most Valuable Asset.’’ The problem is that there is often a disconnect between the safety policy and slogans and what actually happens on a daily basis.

Workers who are vocal about safety issues can face retaliation from their supervisors and lose their jobs.

The coronavirus pandemic first showed up on most of our radars in January or February. By March, it was clear that it was going to be an issue that affects everyone across the globe. Some companies, government entities, and organizations did a better job than others in preparing the arrival of the virus.

One industry that has been in the spotlight is the meatpacking industry because companies in the industry generally failed at protecting their workers. The evidence of that is that there have been large outbreaks at plants across the country. At a pork plant in South Dakota, more than 700 people tested positive for coronavirus. At a poultry plant in North Carolina nearly 600 employees tested positive. At the flagship JBS plant in Greeley, CO, hundreds of employees tested positive and 8 have died.

Here in Green Bay, JBS and American Foods each had hundreds of employees who tested positive for the virus. Dozens of employees at Salm Partners in Denmark also tested positive.

The actual number of infections and deaths is unknown because most companies have stopped reporting the numbers. The companies don’t want the public to know how many people have been infected. But, I think we have a right to know because it’s a public health issue that affects everyone.

So the question is, why have so many people in the plants tested positive and who is to blame? I’m going to answer that and then explain why we as local activists and leaders should care and how we should organize around this issue and other workers’ issues as the November elections approach.

Inside the plants the production flow is like an assembly line. Every job leads to the next job. But, in this case the workers are cutting an animal carcass apart instead of putting a product together. Most of the workers work side by side with their co-workers. In some cases they brush eachother or almost touch. When they go to break they are face to face with their co-workers while they are doffing and donning their equipment. In the breakroom with 500 people or more. There could be 50 or more people in the bathroom. There could be 50 or more people in the hallway. In the locker rooms, workers could be inches away from their co-workers when they put on and take off their hardhats and boots each day.

The fact that the workers are commonly in tight quarters with other people creates the opportunity for the virus to spread. Also, the breaks are really short which sometimes leads employees to skip certain sanitary practices in order to avoid getting in trouble for arriving late.

The companies in the meatpacking industry knew or should’ve known that the coronavirus pandemic was a threat to the health and safety of their workforce. They should’ve taken action immediately in order to protect their workers. Generally speaking, they did too little, too late. That lack of action caused more than 5,000 workers to get sick and dozens of deaths.

The reason that the companies didn’t take action is because of greed, plain and simple. The companies make money by processing as much product as they can as quickly as they can and by cutting associated costs by any means necessary. In this case, the companies didn’t want to spread out workers and decrease chain speeds. They didn’t want to increase break lengths to give employees more time to wash their hands and equipment. They didn’t want to stagger breaks to decrease the amount of workers in break rooms, bathrooms, locker rooms, and common areas. They didn’t want to provide faceshields, masks, hand sanitizer, or protective equipment in work areas. They waited too long to start checking temperatures and testing for the virus. They put too much pressure on employees to work while sick. Those decisions not to act caused the spread of the coronavirus in the plants.

The companies are clearly to blame for the outbreaks at the plants. If they would’ve taken action sooner, we wouldn’t have seen all the headlines and I wouldn’t be talking about this with you tonight. Their decision to procrastinate caused thousands of people to get sick and led to many, many deaths.

But, just to be fair, the government and the unions get to share some of the blame.

The Trump administration, from the beginning, supported the industry’s goal of staying open no matter what. The plants and the workers were deemed essential to the food supply chain. They are and they always have been, but if the health and safety of the workers had been at the forefront, this situation could’ve been avoided.

It’s important to point out that OSHA has given exactly ZERO citations to companies for health and safety violations related to the coronavirus pandemic. The companies had no reason to be afraid of punishment by the government because the government sat on its hands and did nothing.

After JBS shut down temporarily, OSHA opened an investigation that will most likely go nowhere and do nothing. It is mostly a face saving operation to make it look like the Trump administration is taking action. OSHA was created to keep workers safe and healthy, but it failed to do that during the last few months.

The CDC released guidelines about how companies should respond to the coronavirus threat in order to protect their employees. The problem is that the CDC’s guidelines are merely recommendations. The companies get to decide whether or not to implement them. This means that a company could decide that the guidelines are too expensive to implement or that they’re not feasible. Some companies will comply more than others.

The companies that choose not to fully implement the guidelines are putting their businesses, their employees, and the general public at risk. What we need are enforceable regulations that ensure that all companies are playing by the same rules and doing everything they can to protect workers and the public.

Most of the packing plants in the U.S. are located in small towns and rural areas. They are often the largest source of revenue for local governments. It seems that some local governments are hesitant to create tension with the companies by asserting authority. Instead, they wait for the state or federal government to intervene. By waiting, I think they miss an opportunity to quickly and effectively take action to protect their communities.

The unions have the obligation to defend the rights’ of their members and protect their health and safety. Instead, the unions, namely UFCW and its local unions, allowed the companies to operate however they wanted and didn’t do what was necessary to protect their members. The union leaders chose to maintain cordial relationships with the companies and stable finances over workers’ health and safety. The unions waited until their members were sick to start putting out meaningless press releases.

If the unions were more organized and engaged, they would’ve had more power and could’ve forced the companies to act sooner, which could’ve saved union members from getting sick, and in some cases, dying.

Some companies have tried to put the blame on workers, but that’s just a cop-out. There are things that workers can do to protect themselves, like following safety rules at work and CDC guidelines at home, but ultimately the workplace is only as safe as companies make it.

So, now that we know what happened and who is at fault, let’s talk about why it matters and how we as activists can organize around workers’ issues in 2020.

The outbreaks at the plants have exposed how the companies operate and how workers are affected by corporate greed. They’ve shed light on how laws, regulations, policies, and politics keep government agencies from doing what’s in the best interest of workers. It’s also become more obvious that strong unions with engaged and organized members are needed now more than ever.

So, what we need are companies that are forced to act responsibly, government officials who put the well-being of workers ahead of big money special interests, and unions that are strong enough to have a fighting chance when they stand up to large corporations.

The workers at the plants are vital to our economy and our community. They spend money in stores, buy their own homes, and raise their families here. The workers, most of whom are immigrants, enrich our community in every way. It’s really important that we show them solidarity by making them feel welcome and appreciated. Language barriers make it difficult to communicate our values directly, but we can show them how we feel through our actions.

The Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently made a statement that I found disrespectful to people who work in the plants. She drew a contrast between plant workers and “regular folks.’’ It sounded to me like she was making an allusion to the fact that many plant workers are immigrants who aren’t affluent.

The fact of the matter is that the people who work in the plants live here just like everyone else. We are directly connected to them as they are to us. If the coronavirus is spreading in the plants, pretty soon it will be spreading everywhere else because the workers go to stores, dine in restaurants, play at parks, attend church, seek healthcare services, and send their children to local schools.

We need to stand up for the workers because it’s the right thing to do for them. But, it also benefits us to do it because if we don’t we will see more people getting sick in the community and we will have to pay the direct and indirect costs associated with that.

When Republican politicians in Madison and D.C. favor the interests of large corporations over the interests of workers, the companies make money hand over fist and we as citizens and taxpayers end up burdened by the costs.

We need to elect Democrats in November who are willing to stand up and fight for workers instead of Republicans who do the bidding of large corporations.

When we make phone calls and canvass door-to-door, I think it is important for us to connect with potential voters by talking about issues affecting workers because Green Bay is a blue-collar city. By talking about kitchen table and pocketbook issues we can communicate our values and connect with people we haven’t reached yet. These are issues that most everyone in Green Bay and Brown County can relate to.

We have to explain how electing Democrats in November will directly ease the burdens that they are facing.

If we are successful, they will come away from the conversation knowing that Democrats support workers, Democrats care about families, Democrats care about small businesses, and Democrats fight everyday so that everyone in our community will have a better life.

Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to continuing the fight for a better future alongside you.