IF YOU WORK HERE, ASSUME YOU HAVE IT

Meatpacking workers are sick and dying, and the food supply chain is beginning to falter

- Peter Waldman, Lydia Mulvany, and Polly Mosendz

BY LATE MARCH, Rafael Benjamin’s family was pleading with him to stay home from work even if it cost him his job. He promised he would, but not until after April 10. That would be his work anniversary, his 17th at Cargill Inc.’s pork and beef processing plant in Hazleton, Pa.—a milestone for topping up his pension when he retired in October.

So Benjamin, 64, soldiered on, a second-shift worker earning $15.35 an hour. Around him, colleagues were falling ill; on the employee grapevine, people said it was the coronavirus. Supervisors said that wasn’t true and told workers not to discuss who might be infected. But before long, Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, ran through entire departments. By April 7, 130 of the plant’s 900 employees had tested positive, according to the workers’ union, United Food & Commercial Workers International, but neither Cargill nor local officials were disclosing any numbers. Amid the information void, Benjamin kept working, with growing unease.

March was a time of spreading disease and denial across the U.S. meat and poultry industry. Laborers in the immense slaughterhouses and packing houses passed the contagion on processing lines and in locker rooms, then in their homes. Plants began to slow or to go idle. The toll on workers and the nation’s food supply is only now becoming clear.

By mid-March there were reports of panic buying, and President Trump and other federal officials sought to reassure the public that the food supply was sound. “You don’t have to buy so much,” he told Americans on March 15. “Take it easy. Relax.” Plants were running overtime to meet the surge in demand. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue weighed in on April 15: “In the United States, we have plenty of food for all of our citizens.”