Another black eye for the meat industry — currently rolling in huge profits from product pricing that contributes to the inflationary curve.
In a report released Thursday, the committee alleges that Tyson Foods’s legal team prepared a draft with input from other companies that became the basis for an executive order to keep the plants open that the Trump administration issued in April 2020, making it difficult for workers to stay home.
“Meatpacking companies knew the risk posed by the coronavirus to their workers and knew it wasn’t a risk that the country needed them to take,” according to the report by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. “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.”
The toll on workers, families and the community was enormous. Arkansas, too, joined in the push to help the meat processors. Governor Hutchinson often praised them as exemplars of good practices.
Said Tyson about the report:
Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, said that the company has worked with government officials at many levels in both the Trump and Biden administrations as it navigated the pandemic.
“This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” Mickelson said in a statement. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the U.S. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”