Olivia Paschal, a journalist in Northwest Arkansas, has been reporting on poultry processing workers. Read the complete article first published by Facing South on August 20, 2020 and translated and republished with permission. This is Part 2 of 4. Part 1 available here.
When factory workers began to become sick from COVID-19, poultry companies took steps to ensure business could continue as usual. In late March, Tyson human resources managers contacted local police departments to ensure poultry plant employees wouldn’t be arrested on their way to work in case of a shelter-in place order.” As the largest U.S. food company, Tyson Foods has been designated by the United States Department of Homeland Security as critical to the infrastructure of the United States,” one such email read. Arkansas never instituted a stay-at home order. And Tyson refused to shutter its plants in the state, claiming such an action would jeopardize the nation’s food supply chain.
Tyson Foods — headquartered in Arkansas’s Washington County, with thousands of employees throughout the state — took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at the end of April. It was an open letter from Chairman John Tyson, claiming that the food supply chain was collapsing because meatpacking plants with COVID-19 outbreaks were being forced to close. “Our plants must remain operational,” Tyson wrote. “We have a responsibility to feed our country. It is as essential as healthcare.
Tyson has spent well over $1 million lobbying the federal government each year since 2016, and its PAC has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to congressional candidates in the last two election cycles. The day after its ad appeared, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring meatpacking plants critical infrastructure — an order interpreted by federal agencies to supersede state and local governments’ authority to close plants.
One week later, Chairman Tyson spoke to Arkansas’ Economic Recovery Task Force, a committee charged with helping Hutchinson plan the state’s economic path through the pandemic. According to meeting notes obtained by Facing South, Tyson discussed the “op-ed”— the ad — and said it had “spurred discussion” over the complexity of the supply chain. At the meeting, he told members of the task force that poultry supply chains had been “less impacted than other meat,” despite writing the week before in the ad that “as pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain.” Tyson spokesperson Derek Burleson told Facing South that the ad was meant to reference “the food supply chain as a whole.”
In terms of pure production, it may have been true that the chicken industry was doing just fine. But the industry’s processing plant workers, their families, and their communities paid a massive cost for continuing to pump out the nation’s chicken. As the virus traveled through plants, it seeded outbreaks outside plant walls and sent essential workers into unpaid quarantine.
“A lot of people did not get paid because they were exposed to it. There was somebody on their line, or they rode the carpools with them to work,” said Albious Latior, a Marshallese community leader in Springdale who has been helping to coordinate economic aid to families with breadwinners in unpaid quarantine. Some Marshallese plant workers have missed six weeks of work and pay because they live in households with other workers; when one is exposed, all have to stay home.
Poultry companies often didn’t tell workers when their colleagues tested positive, didn’t pay them for mandatory quarantine days while waiting for test results, and didn’t inform them of how to collect short-term disability or other benefits that might have lessened some of the early economic devastation, according to Latior and workers interviewed by Facing South. Many poultry companies that instituted hazard pay for their workers made the pay dependent on attendance, incentivizing workers to show up even when they feared exposure. After the consul general’s June email, he told Facing South, some companies began taking steps to compensate Marshallese workers for mandatory quarantine days —but it’s often a lengthy process to get those funds, and many Marshallese families don’t have much cushion.
“Once they’re out of money, they’re out of money,” Consul General Eldon Alik said.
Burleson, the Tyson spokesperson, told Facing South in an email that any decision to close plants is “made on a case-by-case basis, involves input from state and/or local health officials and is typically done to enhance health and safety measures, conduct additional deep cleaning and sanitization and/or to conduct facility-wide testing.” Tyson did not answer specific questions on whether it had considered closing any of its Arkansas plants.