With "Midnight" Executive Order, Meatpacking Slaughterhouses Become Trump's Forced-Labor Camps of Human Sacrifice
April 30, 2020
Meatpacking: At a Smifhfield facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, more than 700 workers have been infected with the Cornavirus. (Matt Brown)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
BuzzFlash warned for weeks that Trump was ramping up to let the Coronavirus run through the US like wildfire, despite his claim to be following the advice of medical experts. In the past few days, he has proven that he is operating on a “cull the herd strategy.”
This includes his announcement on Tuesday that he was ending a federal social distancing recommendation on Thursday, his support of Red States “reopening the economy,” and his executive order late on Tuesday evening to invoke the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to stay open. They were closing across the country because of a COVID-19 epidemic within a pandemic that has resulted in at least 5000 slaughterhouse infected workers and at least 20 dead thus far.
Trump had told the DC Press Corps Tuesday morning that he was going to issue such an executive order, but he waited until the cover of darkness so that many of the details would be lost by the media as a fresh news cycle began Wednesday morning. However, the scope of the executive order and its context in his plan of “an experiment of human sacrifice” (Atlantic Magazine), reinforces Trump’s now barely veiled decision — which BuzzFlash has said he made at least as far back as February — to let the Coronavirus run wild.
Trump’s gamble with tens of thousands of human lives likely to be lost is that beefing up the economy will win him re-election despite the enormous loss of life and millions upon millions of infections. This is a certainty given that there are probably millions of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spreaders who will infect others in workplaces. As BuzzFlash has written, we have been seeing this in the “essential worker” economy, but the media, in general, has not reported widely on a clear reality: Trump’s assurance that reopening the economy is with little risk is a diabolical lie that is built upon a foundation of the dead and the dying in the future.
His “experiment” in human sacrifice became clearer in the details of the executive order and the Defense Production Act, which he wouldn’t use for forcing manufacture of Personal Protective Equipment but is using to order high-transmission risk meatpacking facilities to stay open.
1) Trump granted the request of what corporate CEO’s have demanded if they are going to reopen their businesses: immunity from liability if workers become infected with Coronavirus on the job. Indeed, Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia, who oversees OSHA and is Antonin Scalia’s right-wing son, had his minions go a step further: OSHA would help defend companies against any suits brought by an infected employee, as noted by Common Dreams:
The stated mission of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is to protect workers, but the agency is signaling that it may actively defend meatpacking corporations against workplace safety lawsuits filed by employees who contract Covid-19 on the job if the companies show they made a "good faith" effort to comply with federal health guidelines….
…Companies will have leeway to flout standards that they determine are not "feasible in the context of specific plants and circumstances," provided that they "document why that is the case."
In short, meatpacking firms, notorious for their violation of safety rules in general, will not be held to account for failing to take steps to protect workers from the Coronavirus.
2) OSHA has already been allowing meatpacking companies to “self-regulate” the agency’s guidelines for creating a work environment to reduce COVID-19 transmission. There is no enforcement mechanism for ensuring that the firms actually reduce the possibility of infection among its workers. This position “of voluntary” compliance is condoned by the Trump administration.
The Common Dreams article states:
Between January and early April, OSHA was flooded with thousands of worker complaints accusing employers of violating federal Coronavirus guidelines and endangering employee safety by failing to provide adequate protective equipment.
But the agency, overseen by Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, has thus far refused to use its authority to force employers to comply with Covid-19 safety guidelines. OSHA is also massively understaffed with vacancies at 42% of its top career leadership positions, including such crucial spots as director of enforcement and director of whistleblower protection.
3) The CDC recently changed its “guidelines” to no longer suggest a worker who is exposed to a person known to have tested positive for the Coronavirus to be quarantined for 14 days, let alone tested. Instead, as noted in a recent commentary, “The Second Wave of Coronavirus Infections and Deaths Is Already Underway, With a Willful Boost From Trump,” I cited an April 8 NPR article, which BuzzFlash summarized at the time:
NPR reports that the CDC has indeed issued new “guidelines,” which will result in the increased infection and likely deaths of more essential workers. NPR reports that “critical” infrastructure roles can return to work after being exposed to a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus” without quarantining for 14 days [and without a COVID-19 test]. These revised “guidelines” will result in new outbreaks of the Coronavirus, with resulting infections and deaths. It is a sign of how dangerous Trump’s obsession with “reopening” the economy presents, as he puts American lives recklessly at risk.
A key new CDC “guideline” is that both the employee and the employer should take the temperature of the returning worker who has been exposed to COVID-19. However, recent studies have revealed that those persons infected with the Coronavirus may not always have a fever, particularly in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infected individuals. In essence, the CDC is providing a deadly false reassurance in the absence of requiring testing and quarantining.
Also remember that these Trump administration guidelines are not enforced and many meatpacking firms are reportedly not complying with them.
4) In our “Second Wave” commentary, BuzzFlash also noted the Trump administration was no longer requiring employers, including meatpacking facilities, to report on the job Coronavirus infections, while it still requires other workplace injuries to be reported.
Further indicating that Trump is going to “open up the economy” by causing more infections and deaths is an April 12 Truthout article headlined, “Trump Admin Says Employers Don’t Have to Record Coronavirus Cases Among Workers”:
President Donald Trump’s Labor Department has quietly issued guidance informing most employers in the United States that they will not be required to record and report Coronavirus cases among their workers because doing so would supposedly constitute an excessive burden on companies.
The new rules, released Friday by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), were met with alarm by public health experts and former Labor Department officials who said the new rules are an absurd attack on transparency that could further endanger frontline workers.
Because COVID-19 is officially classified as a recordable illness, employers would typically be required to notify OSHA of coronavirus cases among their workers.
5) Trump is not requiring that the COVID-19 transmission-friendly meatpacking facilities be reconfigured, along with implementing social distancing and other worker virus-transmission changes in any way.
6) A key lethally coercive feature of Trump’s creation of worker death camps is uppermost in the minds of cruel and sadistic Republicans: work or starve. As the Trumpster Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds warned meatpacking workers, return to work (and risk contracting Coronavirus) or lose your unemployment compensation benefits. This is key to the Trump and Republican Gulag strategy, being implemented across the Red States. Trump and his political acolytes are forcing a chilling choice upon meatpacking workers (and it will be the same for other “expendable” workers with the exception of the rich): risk losing your life or try and live with no money.
7) Another indication of Trump’s contempt for “disposable workers,” the USDA is allowing poultry processors to increase their “line speed,” which increases risk of Coronavirus infection. According to an April 24 USA Today article:
As coronavirus cases mounted at meatpacking plants this month, the federal government granted 15 poultry processors waivers to cut chickens faster, usually by crowding more workers onto their production lines.
Overall, poultry plants with such waivers are at least 10 times more likely than the meatpacking industry as a whole to have Coronavirus cases among workers, USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted more of those waivers in one week in April than it had in any previous month over the past eight years of the program’s existence….
“I’m convinced that the USDA is probably just putting those out there because they think we’re all preoccupied with COVID and not paying attention to what they’re doing,” Mark Lauritsen, the United Food and Worker’s Union director of food processing, meatpacking and manufacturing said.
8) Of course, the meatpacking industry, like many “essential” jobs, is largely minority, including migrants who in the not distant past ICE was arresting in plant raids (but never holding owners responsible). They have an unconscionable option to accept starvation over possible slaughter. An April 29 CNN article is headlined, “Meat plant workers to Trump: Employees aren't going to show up.” Trump is betting that what he values most — money — will leave the workers with no option but to potentially take a bullet for Trump’s re-election strategy, which rests on thousands upon thousands of more Americans dying.
As BuzzFlash has stated before, only in magical and opportunistic thinking does the highly infectious COVID-19 “disappear like magic.”
In relation to Trump’s meatpacking executive order, his sociopathology is in plain sight as he incrementally adopts a policy of mass death to advance his political aspirations.
Where is the outrage? Where are the calls for Trump’s resignation?
Also Read:
Trump Intentionally Let the Coronavirus "Wash Over" America, a Failure by Design
And by Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: The GOP Fat-Cat Billionaire War on Workers Steps Up, Forcing Them to Choose Between Starving or Risking Their Lives
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