Feds Deal Gently with Smithfield Oppressors of Working Class

Pramod Acharya of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting reads the CDC’s August report on the early coronavirus outbreak at Smithfield Foods and finds that two thirds of the cases occurred in the production-line departments (harvest, cut, and conversion) where employees have to stand within six feet of each other:

Smithfield left its hourly workers at more risk of coronavirus than its better-off salaried employees:

The CDC report also noted a difference between the salaried employees in an office setting and the hourly workers on the production line.

Salaried employees could adjust their work stations to maintain social distancing so not as many contracted the virus, according to the CDC report.

“These differences highlight the importance of engineering controls (e.g., physical barriers) and administrative controls (e.g., cohorting employees) in mitigating the risk for SARS-CoV-2 transmission in meat processing facilities,” the report reads [Acharya, 2020.09.16].

In other Smithfield news, a couple readers buzzed me this week insisting that I had to turn on my TV and watch Rachel Maddow discuss documents showing that the CDC watered down its safety recommendations to Smithfield in April.

[Pause]

Evidently I need to remind my dear readers that I don’t have cable TV. On the occasions when I’ve had cable TV, I’ve found it functions mostly like Facebook, luring me in to mindlessly click through mostly useless content with which I would not have bothered under normal circumstances. Maddow’s journalism falls outside the “mostly useless” category, but I still don’t work with her material much because she leaves most of her material in unsearchable, unclippable video form that doesn’t conduce to my text-based research and writing.

[Depause]

According to Wonkette, Maddow obtained the original Epidemiological Assistance report on Smithfield, which contained the CDC’s usual direct recommendations about what the infecting company should do to prevent further sickness. Maddow  then learned from two sources that CDC director Robert Redfield’s office ordered a recall of that report and a softening of the language (apparently, the insertion of a bunch of if possible/feasible phrasing) to stress that the recommendations weren’t mandatory.

And of course, just days after the CDC soft-pedaled its recommendations to Smithfield, the Trump Administration responded to meatpacker pressure and issued its executive order declaring that national defense depends on a steady supply of wieners and bologna.

Media Matters for America notices that the local TV stations don’t seem interested in this latest evidence of favoritism toward the meatpacking industry:

So far, this travesty committed by the CDC director’s office hasn’t been covered by TV news stations in the four states which border the Smithfield plant — South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota — where the outbreak likely would have had the most impact. A search of the Kinetiq video database for local TV news segments in those states mentioning the CDC and the Smithfield meatpacking plant turned up no results.

…As long as the TV stations in the areas surrounding the plant in Sioux Falls fail to inform their viewers about the role President Donald Trump’s CDC director may have played in a major local outbreak, they will continue to do their viewers a huge disservice [Zachary Pleat, “Local TV News Is Failing to Cover MSNBC’s Scoop That the CDC Weakened Its Covid-19 Guidance for a Meatpacking Plant,” Media Matters for America, 2020.09.25].

(Wait—there’s a searchable video database? I should get that! Oh, wait—$75,000. I’ll stick with transcripts.)

But it’s not just local TV; when I Google the Smithfield/CDC language story, I don’t find any other network or newspaper picking it up. Perhaps other reporters are holding off until they see the documents themselves.

But the numbers and the gentle response of the federal government are clear. Smithfield created and maintains working conditions that leave hourly workers at greater risk of coronavirus than the salaried higher-ups, and the feds are treating those favored capitalists with kid gloves.