Report shows Foster Farms tried to bully Merced County to keep plant open amid COVID
Major meatpacking companies, including the San Joaquin Valley’s Foster Farms, worked with Trump administration officials to keep workers in unsafe conditions at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a congressional report released on Thursday.
The 61-page report shows that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry processing, worked with leaders of meatpacking companies to keep workers on the job by evading local and state regulations established during the pandemic.
“This coordinated campaign prioritized industry production over the health of workers and communities, and contributed to tens of thousands of workers becoming ill, hundreds of workers dying, and the virus spreading throughout surrounding areas,” said Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. “The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated.”
Meatpacking plant workers were among the workers deemed essential when the pandemic began in 2020. Essential workers, such as those in food, health care and public safety, could not work from home.
The report includes messages from meatpacking lobbyists and company executives, such as one sent to a Foster Farms leader in Merced County. It said the former USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety, Mindy Brashears, “hasn’t lost a battle for us” in regard to blocking local government attempts to shut down the plant.
Foster Farms tried to skip suspension
In August 2020, Merced County Public Health officials recommended that Foster Farms temporarily close its Livingston plant to curb coronavirus infections. Foster Farms is the largest employer in Livingston, where the company is headquartered.
By then, almost 400 employees had contracted the virus and nine had died, according to the Merced Sun-Star.
Foster Farms employs about 12,000 people nationwide, with more plants in Fresno and Turlock.
The company refused for months to implement safety measures, according to the report, and had falsely classified deaths from the virus as “resolved cases” in county reporting, MCPH officials told the committee.
When MCPH officials notified Foster Farms of their recommendation to suspend the plant, Senior Vice President Robert O’Connor emailed a representative a of a major poultry production lobbying group, the National Chicken Council. The representative said Brashears had been notified.
Brashears called the county’s health department and said USDA had jurisdiction over the plant, not MCPH, health agency officials told the committee. She said MCPH had to come up with an alternative to temporary suspension that did not involve reducing the plant’s operations.
Someone on a second call between the USDA, Foster Farms and MCPH referred to death counts as “toe tag resolutions,” likely in reference to tags used to identify corpses in a morgue, officials from the health department told the committee. Officials were unsure who, according to the report.
The report continues that the USDA dropped its demand that the county avoid suspension but asked that MCPH give Foster Farms an extra 48 hours to allow the company to divert operations to other plants.
The plant was ultimately shut down for six days.
Merced County gave good marks to its overall implementation of pandemic safety protocols with essential businesses, including Foster Farms, in response to questions about these events on Thursday.
Merced County Board of Supervisors Chairman Lloyd Pareira said in a statement emailed to The Bee that they “all had to navigate some unfamiliar territory” in developing the safety rules and that they “appreciate our partners at the local, state, and federal levels who helped guide us through.”
Neither Foster Farms nor the USDA immediately responded to a request for comment Thursday.
A spokesman for the National Chicken Council cited an earlier statement from the organization’s president, Mike Brown.
“We regret that this report failed to shine light on the momentous efforts between industry, government and state and local health officials to keep employees safe and to keep Americans fed during one of the most challenging and uncertain times in our nation’s history,” Brown said.
An email to Brashears got an automatic reply that she would be away from that inbox until May 20. Brashears is a professor of food safety at Texas Tech University, a job she held prior to joining the Trump administration in March 2020 . She returned following the change of administration in January 2021.
Report on chicken, meat producers
Broadly, the report claims that meatpacking executives and lobbyists pushed the White House and USDA officials to discourage workers from staying home or quitting over fears of the virus, which led former Vice President Mike Pence to admonish meatpacking workers for absenteeism at a press conference in April 2020.
Representatives from Tyson Foods shared a draft of a potential executive order to keep plants open in the face of local health recommendations with USDA officials, the report says.
About a week later, Trump signed an executive order that authorized meatpacking plants to stay open throughout the pandemic. Internal emails showed that the Trump administration then asked that meatpacking companies “issue positive statements and social media about the President’s action on behalf of the industry,” the report read.
Companies meanwhile asked for federal liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected, per the report.
The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis assembled in 2020 to look into the governmental response to the pandemic and its impact. It released a report in October 2021 that about 59,000 meatpacking plant workers at five major companies had contracted the virus and at least 269 of them died from COVID-19 complications, higher than was previously reported at the time. The workers were from Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef.
The committee read more than 151,000 pages of documents from meatpacking companies and interest groups and spoke with workers, union representatives and current and former officials to compile Thursday’s report.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 10:02 AM with the headline "Report shows Foster Farms tried to bully Merced County to keep plant open amid COVID."
