Trump Is Helping Companies Use COVID to Strip Workers' Rights

If you think for one minute that Trump or Republicans gives one damn about working class people, read below and then vote.

On April 28th, forty-eight hours after Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, ran a full-page ad in several newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking,” Trump issued an executive order defining slaughterhouse workers as essential.  The executive order commanded meat-processing facilities to “continue operations uninterrupted to the extent possible.”

The Labor Department released an accompanying statement that all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to covid-19.  It assured employers in essential industries that the agency wouldn’t hold them responsible if they failed to follow the C.D.C.’s health guidelines, as long as they made a “good faith” effort.

How did this happen?  Corruption of course.

Unlike meatpackers, two-thirds of whom belong to unions, only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor—and those who are unionized face mounting pressure. The industry, which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire, has grown increasingly concentrated, expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees.

Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken.... The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America.

Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures, including Ronald Cameron, Mountaire’s reclusive owner. In 2016, Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy.

The White House had appointed Ronald Cameron to an advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact.   

 To be crystal clear, there are COVID-19 outbreaks in U.S. meat processing plants and workers are being stripped of their rights, forced to work and die, by Trump and tycoons giving millions to gut the rules intended to keep us safe.  A new guilded age.

United Food and Commercial Workers International Union....represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. 

Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus.  The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.

....in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, Mountaire Corporation.... conspired, along with Trump, to “kick us out.”

This is a much longer story.  Read at our source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/how-trump-is-helping-tycoons-exploit-the-pandemic