You probably won’t be surprised to learn that America’s “biggest meat companies” lied about inevitable shortages, to “allow plants to stay open despite coronavirus risks.” The Federal government tried to quietly slip a controversial report out the door on Thursday, while nobody was looking.
Manufactured meat crisis
It’s not “profiteering,” exactly, high-paid lawyers for companies like Tyson and Smithfield insist. The entire meat industry spun into damage control mode over the weekend. The report released Thursday, May 12, flat out accused top company leaders of lying.
They totally misinformed Donald Trump’s administration officials about potential “shortages” during the pandemic, and it worked beautifully, for them.
In April of 2020, Trump scribbled his autograph on an executive order which totally ignored known “infection hazards” to keep workers slaving away in factories. The report says that strategy turned out to be a huge mistake.
“The investigation alleges that the unsafe conditions killed at least 269 workers while companies reaped profits,” EatThis writes. They point out that some companies limboed so low that they exported meat to China.
Meatpacking companies knew all about “the risk posed by the coronavirus to their workers.” They also knew Americans were prepared to accept a little hardship to keep fellow citizens safe. Meat packagers “knew it wasn’t a risk that the country needed them to take.”
Even so, “they nonetheless lobbied aggressively — successfully enlisting [the U.S. Agriculture Department] as a close collaborator in their efforts — to keep workers on the job in unsafe conditions, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless to mandate otherwise and to be protected against legal liability for the harms that would result.”
Strategically misled the public
This bombshell report wasn’t done by just anybody. It was blasted out by the select subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. All the major meat packers are on the hot seat after their probe uncovered enough to indict Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef.
It’s alleged that “these companies repeatedly and strategically misled the public.” They made up crisis causing rumors of “protein shortages” which would happen the moment they eased up on production one bit. That, the final report says, was a “baseless fear.”
Committee investigators had to wade through more than “151,000 pages of documents.” They made “over a dozen survey calls” to meat workers union representatives.
They dragged former Agriculture Department and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials in for grilling, then they turned the blowtorch on authorities at state and local levels.
It seems that when the chairman of Tyson’s board, John H. Tyson, wrote a full-page newspaper ad, in April of 2020, he lied through his teeth about an impending meat crisis. What he said is “the food supply chain is breaking.” Investigators say the reality is that “U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high at the time.” Not only that, “key players in the meat industry” kept the lie moving.
“Particularly the leaders of Smithfield and Tyson, who were in close contact with the White House in the days before the executive order was signed.” They managed to get their processing plants declared “a critical infrastructure.” In fairness, The North American Meat Institute answered back to the report, claiming it “distorts the truth about the meat and poultry industry’s work to protect employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.“