This story is from a collaborative reporting initiative between the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA TODAY Network and is supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Maria Romero’s phone rang one June with the terrifying sound of her breathless mother.
The employee of the 59-year-old Arkansas poultry plant struggled in a slight whisper to tell her daughter that she had been rushed to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with COVID-19.Romero could hardly sense the words, but he knew his mother frightened and confused.
“She knew something bad, but she didn’t know what was going on,” said Romero, 36.”I can feel that she is scared.
Romero’s mother, who has asked for her identity to worry about wasting her work, is one of at least 4,627 Arkansas poultry employees who have been inflamed with the new coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
More than one part, like Romero’s mother, are Hispanic.
Americans rely on low wages to produce a stable source of beef, red meat, and poultry, but as coronavirus spreads through meat-packing plants across the country, minorities like this have disproportionately borne the brunt of the spread of the disease.
Hispanics, blacks, and immigrants have 8 out of ten jobs in the front-line meat packaging industry, according to the Center for Economic and Political Research.
And now they account for 90% of coronavirus cases in meat packers in the country, according to 21-state research through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.More than part are Hispanic.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Arkansas, the time when the most giant poultry generate the state through weight in the country.Unlike many states with giant epidemics in meat-packing plants, Arkansas collects information on the number of coronavirus cases in the meat packaging industry across race and ethnicity.
The data, received through the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA TODAY, display that Latinos account for 33% of all Arkansas poultry workers, yet about part of all COVID-19 instances in poultry plants.
The media asked several other states with primary epidemics in meatpacking plants for the same knowledge, adding Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska, but the states have said no.
The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA TODAY spent two months interviewing workers, plant managers and fitness mavens about the disproportionate rate of minority infection among meat processors.They also reviewed loads of pages of government documents and reports as component of this story, which funded through a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Cheap poultry and meat come at a cost: how American meat plants the hot spots of the coronavirus.
Even before the pandemic, these workers had to spend long hours in unsafe situations for a meager wage.For years, the federal government has detailed systemic industry disruptions without doing anything to correct them.
But now, with a fatal virus in those factories, the government has adopted an even more practical technique for employee safety.The Trump administration last April provided recommendations on how to plant pandemic plants, but refrained from making the measures mandatory or implementing them.
Even as the number of cases in poultry plants soared, calls from staff and activists seeking fundamental protective measures were met with months of indifference by the government and meat-packing companies.
In northwest Arkansas, at the center of the state’s poultry industry, CDC research revealed widespread transmission of the disease and blamed the state government for its disproportionate effect on Latin American and Pacific island communities.
Jennifer Dillaha, a state epidemiologist for the Arkansas Department of Health, said the state seeks to put as many CDC recommendations into effect as imaginable and recently hired two corporations to perform touch tracking.
But with limited government oversight of COVID-19 protection measures in factories, the production of breast and bird nuggets packages has occurred at the expense of lives, the defenders said.
“It’s a multi-business challenge at the national level. Meat packing plants were prepared for this epidemic,” said Domingo García, president of the United Latin American Citizens League.”Initially, control and owners of the five primary meats Packaging players were unable to respond as temporarily as they could, and it takes lives.”
Spokespersons for two of the country’s largest meat packaging operations told journalists that they were taking all mandatory precautions for staff by implementing protective measures such as temperature controls and plastic barriers for workstations.
Derek Burleson of Tyson, who operates 20 poultry plants in Arkansas, said the company’s most sensible priority is the fitness and protection of staff and community.He said the company had implemented a variety of protective measures and conducted large-scale testing on its Arkansas staff..
Cameron Bruett of JBS, who operates a plant in the state, provided a statement.
“We are doing everything we can to provide a running environment for our team members who are generating food for the country in those unprecedented times,” Bruett said.
Such measures did not prevent Romero’s mother from getting sick.The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA TODAY do not call the factory where you work to find out your identity, but state records show that your property has lots of COVID-19 cases.
The day his mother was hospitalized, Romero was so busy playing his mom’s Spanish and answering calls from worried parents that he only cried after having his children in bed.
Then, he said, he burst into tears and begged God to keep his mother alive.She hadn’t asked God for four years, since the day she discovered she was pregnant with twins.Then he promised not to ask for any other favors. Now that relatives across the country were praying the rosary for their mother, Romero also fell to his knees.
“Don’t do that. I love her,” she recalls, praying.” I want him to survive.I want him to do it so that we can go back and live this life that you have for us.”
Arkansas has been deeply rooted in the poultry industry since the last 19th century with the formation of the Arkansas Bird breeding association and is home to one of the largest poultry production corporations in the United States: Tyson Foods, founded in Springdale.
The state has about 6,000 poultry farms and more than 60 poultry processing plants that together employ about 40,000 workers.About a third of them are Latino. More than one in five is black or Asian.
By mid-August, 30 Arkansas poultry plants had outbreaks, according to state data, and at least seven have noticed that many workers tested positive for COVID-19.
However, despite calls from staff to temporarily close the factories for thorough cleaning, the state has not ordered the closure of any plants.Tyson, the largest bird processing company in the United States, has not de inactive any of its facilities in the state.Instead, it has implemented a number of measures such as the installation of separators between staff, the provision of masks to staff and the designation of social remote monitors.The corporation also announced that it would review some employees for COVID-19 each week..
Although its spokesman, Burleson, said the company met or exceeded CDC protection guidelines, staff rights teams filed a civil rights complaint in early July as opposed to the two largest meat-packing companies in the United States, claiming that the pandemic was disproportionately exposed.Minority staff at COVID-19 and amounted to racial discrimination.
Alfredo, a 37-year-old device operator at a poultry plant in Tyson, said he saw firsthand how the company responded to the coronavirus outbreak and found it insufficient.
Alfredo, a Mexican immigrant, said he and other staff members occasionally cannot stay home when they are in poor health and their supervisors are forced to return to work.He asked to be known only through his first call for fear of being fired.
“There are other people who come to work in poor health,” he said through an interpreter.
A 2016 Government Accountability Office report also signaled a reluctance in the undocumented and immigrant component to reporting illness and injury.
Alfredo’s elderly parents tested positive for COVID-19 and contracted the disease through his paintings on poultry plants.Her little ones cried when her parents told them the news, convinced that their grandparents would die.
“It’s overwhelming,” he says.
Less than two weeks after her mother tested positive for COVID-19, the Tyson plant where she painted was continually calling her to press her back to the production line, she said. His mother, still coughing and having a fever, refused to paint until she tested negative.
Burleson, Tyson’s spokesman, said painters can paint if they have symptoms.
“If the team member is positive, they get paid leave during the quarantine era required through the CDC and can only return to the paintings when they have met the criteria set up through the CDC and Tyson,” he said.
However, Alfredo stated that Tyson’s staff is not paid to quarantine unless a corporate doctor sends them home or gets a positive COVID-19 test.Workers and activists said staff can paint as long as they don’t have a fever.
Workers who have come into contact with a positive user have to be quarantined and can continue to paint as long as they have no symptoms, said Dillaha, a state epidemiologist.
Poultry activists have said that painters paint even if they are exposed to someone with COVID-19, a fear when the virus can be transmitted through asymptomatic people.
Workers are hesitant to admit they have tested positive for COVID-19 or have symptoms, said Lorena Quiroz, founder of the Mississippi-based Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity.
“They will go to the pictures if they are asymptomatic because they are concerned about being fired or because the networked paintings treat them or even affect their immigration status,” he said.
According to a review conducted through the Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center, about 91% of Arkansas poultry staff have not paid low for ill health, and two-thirds reported that they were sick before the pandemic began.it can mean losing weeks of pay or even your job.
“The company exposes them to getting sick and they don’t care about their fitness or their lives,” said Magaly Licolli, founder of the poultry workers’ rights organization founded in northwest Arkansas, We’ll Win.
More than 120 social justice groups, adding to Venceremos, have introduced a week of action that requires Tyson to offer paid leave in case of poor health, reduced line speeds and normal tests for workers.Arkansas factories with COVID-19 cases.
“It is transparent that the main explanation for why staff feel compelled to move into paintings when their health is bad is that they do not have access to paid leave for ill health,” said Angela Stuesse, professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina and the e-book “Scratch a Life: Latinos, Race and Work in the Far South.”
The First Family Response Act to Coronavirus, which guaranteed paid licenses for ill health for workers with COVID-19, excluded corporations with more than 500 workers, meaning that the handful of giant corporations that dominate the meat packaging industry are exempt from the requirement.
Undocumented immigrants and their families have been excluded from the federal stimulus package to alleviate monetary pain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Vox.
“We want our immigrants who revel in symptoms from not working, and many of them don’t have that option because they don’t have to protect network systems and have been excluded from economic recovery,” said Mireya Reith, executive director of the immigrant group.human rights group, Arkansas United.
After 10 days in the hospital, Romero’s mother arrived at the house dizzy, sore and tired.Faced with a medical bill coming up, she resumed her work at the poultry factory that supplies some of the only remaining paints in her rural village, where she placed many raw birds on plastic foam trays and on a conveyor belt, Array said.
A note from the doctor put her on a friendly service, due to the persistent weakness of her fight against the virus, as well as the burning back and shoulder pain she accumulated after thirteen years of repetitive movements on the production line.pounds at once of seven.
Although her factory has installed plastic barriers between staff and increased the distance between employees, she fears she will recover when staff meet in the cafeteria and when they leave the factory, Romero’s mother said.
Romero said he wondered if his mother’s body could be subjected to any other fight opposed to the virus.In a factory where there is a lot of staff with the virus, his mother earns about $11 an hour and has not earned premiums from threats, he said.
Meanwhile, at the Tyson plant, Alfredo works looking to look at other employees, separated from them through a thin plastic sheet or nothing at all, he said.in combination when they point, they replace garments and use the bathroom.
The plant has installed a hand-depositing station, but Alfredo said it does not bleach or disinfect the interior, even though an increasing number of staff test positive, and fears that the virus will persist in machines, in non-unusual spaces and in the air, along with the pungent smell of rotten meat.
“I don’t feel safe, ” he said. I get nervous when I’m out there and I’m afraid to paint because they never closed the factory to disinfect or clean.The virus is still inside.”
He works six days a week, hours a day, crushing blocks of frozen bird into a pulp used to make bird nuggets.At the end of the day, his mask is drenched in sweat.He rubs his face and hands with hand sanitizer and removes the strips.your garments on the lawn before entering your home.
“What worries me most is that one day I’ll go to work, then get healthy and still have my children, my family, everyone in poor health,” she says.
The meat packaging industry is known for its low wages, high injury rates and low profits. Now, a pandemic, Alfredo said it has become clearer how the industry ignores the safety of the paintings.themselves quarantined or just going out, doing mandatory overtime was exhausting, he said.He said his children would not paint on poultry like his parents and grandparents.
Meet staff who have fallen ill and two who have died, some of whom came here from the same little Mexican in the city where Alfredo was born.
“Instead of getting better, it’s getting worse and worse,” he says. I feel powerless so I can’t help.All I can do is pray for them.
Frank Hernandez of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting contributed to this story.