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The Smithfield Foods processing plant in Tar Heel employs up to 5,000 workers and slaughters 30,000 to 35,000 hogs a day: Photo credit: Melissa Sue Garrets, The Fayetteville Observer

Congressional subcommittee launches investigation into coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants

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Congressional subcommittee launches investigation into coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants - North Carolina Health News

The subcommittee says the plants refused to take basic precautions to protect workers and showed a “callous disregard” for their health.

By Greg Barnes

A congressional subcommittee is investigating multiple coronavirus outbreaks at meat and poultry processing plants in North Carolina and throughout the country.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis announced Feb. 1 that it is seeking internal documents from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and three of the nation’s largest meatpackers — Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods and JBS USA. All three companies have plants in North Carolina.

In letters to OSHA and the three meatpackers, the subcommittee’s chairman, James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), requested documents related to the coronavirus outbreaks, including worker complaints, inspections and the number of infections and deaths at individual plants. The documents are due to the subcommittee by Feb. 15.

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Clyburn wrote that public reports indicate the companies “have refused to take basic precautions to protect their workers, many of whom earn extremely low wages and lack adequate paid leave, and have shown a callous disregard for workers’ health.”

Clyburn also wrote that inaction by the meatpackers appears to have resulted in thousands of workers getting infected with the coronavirus and hundreds of them dying as a result. He said the outbreaks at the plants spread the coronavirus to surrounding communities, infecting and killing many more people.

Clyburn blasted OSHA, as well, saying it “failed to adequately carry out its responsibility for enforcing worker safety laws at meatpacking plants across the country, resulting in preventable infections and deaths. It is imperative that the previous (Trump) Administration’s shortcomings are swiftly identified and rectified to save lives in the months before coronavirus vaccinations are available for all Americans.”

Smithfield Foods defended its response to the pandemic, saying the company has met or exceeded federal, state and local health and safety guidance.

In a statement, Keira Lombardo, Smithfield’s chief administrative officer, said the company has invested more than $700 million in measures to protect employees during the pandemic.

“It is unfortunate that there are inaccuracies and misinformation in the media on this issue and we look forward to providing the Subcommittee with correct information,” Lombardo said in the statement.

JBS USA released a similar statement, saying it, too, has spent millions to protect workers and welcomes the opportunity to present information to the subcommittee. Tyson Foods could not be reached.

Coronavirus raced through plants

In his letters, Clyburn wrote that nearly 54,000 workers at 569 meatpacking plants in the country have tested positive for the coronavirus, and more than 270 had died as of July 21.

In his letter to Smithfield Foods, Clyburn noted that a single case of the coronavirus spread to 929 employees at a South Dakota plant in just five weeks.

Citing an article in the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Clyburn wrote that meatpacking plants were associated with between 236,000 and 310,000 coronavirus cases and 4,300 to 5,200 deaths, indicating that the plants were responsible for transmitting the virus to people in nearby communities.

The Tyson Foods, JBS and Smithfield Foods plants in North Carolina did not escape widespread coronavirus outbreaks.

In late April, the world’s largest hog slaughterhouse, a Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, almost shut down because of the pandemic.

In May, 570 of the more than 2,200 workers at Tyson’s poultry plant in Wilkesboro tested positive for the coronavirus.

Read the letter sent from Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) to Smithfield Foods asking for information about COVID-19 outbreaks in the company’s plants. 

Workers scared

At the height of the pandemic last spring, workers at meat and poultry plants in North Carolina reached out to NC Health News and other media outlets to complain about unsafe working conditions.

An employee of the Smithfield Foods plant in Bladen County said in April that she hadn’t returned to work for almost a week because she didn’t think the plant had done enough to keep workers safe.

“I just want them to shut down for a while to make it better for everybody else and their families,” the worker said, declining to be named out of fear that she could lose her job.

A worker at a Mountaire chicken-processing plant in Siler City expressed similar fears in April.

“When this pandemic started, Mountaire was doing nothing,” that worker told NC Health News. “They just started giving employees face masks/shields & putting up glass between people about two weeks ago. The distance between people on the lines is literally elbow to elbow. The risk of the virus spreading in the company is extremely high because of this.

“It’s scary. I’m putting my life at risk going to work and Mountaire is only worried about profit from their chicken.”

The majority of workers at the Mountaire Farms plant are Black or had Latin American roots. In May, the ZIP code that includes the plant had the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state.

At that time, a third of all COVID-19 patients at UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill were transferred there from Chatham Hospital in Siler City. An internal UNC Hospitals report from back then shows 41 percent of all patients treated for COVID-19 at UNC Hospitals were Latino.

Smithfield fines less than $11 per infected worker

In his letter to OSHA, Clyburn wrote that the agency’s mission is to ensure safe and healthy working conditions by setting and enforcing standards.

“Yet under the previous Administration, OSHA did not set a single new standard or regulation requiring employers to protect meatpacking workers from the coronavirus—and did not meaningfully enforce existing standards,” Clyburn wrote.

Clyburn noted that OSHA issued more than $3.9 million in penalties related to the coronavirus but only eight citations and $80,000 in penalties to meatpacking companies.

Clyburn wrote that on Sept. 8, OSHA cited Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls “for failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus.” OSHA concluded that at least 1,294 Smithfield workers there contracted the coronavirus, and four employees died.

The agency cited Smithfield for a single violation and fined the company $13,494, which amounts to less than $11 per infected employee. Smithfield’s chief executive officer earned $14 million last year, Clyburn wrote.

“Although OSHA’s citation identified four distinct actions Smithfield failed to take to protect its workers, the agency lumped them together as a single violation and declined to classify the conduct as ‘willful’ — decisions that reduced a potential $2.7 million penalty down to just a few thousand dollars,” Clyburn wrote.

Clyburn also said coronavirus testing at the meatpacking plants has been inadequate.

“Many plants reportedly rejected testing offered by state authorities without arranging for alternative testing,” Clyburn wrote to OSHA. “Others reportedly told employees they needed to get tested ‘on their own.’ “

Tyson managers place bets

In his letter to Tyson Foods, Clyburn noted that more Tyson workers have been infected and killed by the coronavirus than at any other meatpacking company — 12,413 infections and 39 deaths.

Clyburn wrote that Tyson “does not appear to have taken basic precautions to prevent these outbreaks,” saying the company “did not carry out facility-wide testing at many facilities.”

Clyburn also wrote that some of the meatpacking companies “have shown a callous disregard for the health of their workers.”

At a Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, he said, managers ordered workers to remain on the job and then “organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.”

Tyson fired seven of the managers but has not released a report on an independent investigation it had commissioned.

N.C. regulators remain mum

In his letter to Smithfield Foods, Clyburn wrote that 3,554 of its meatpacking employees have been infected with the coronavirus, and eight have died. Citing the outbreak at the South Dakota plant, Clyburn said OSHA found that Smithfield failed to provide a workplace that was “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees.”

It’s impossible to know how many of those infections and deaths happened at individual Smithfield Foods plants in North Carolina. State Department of Health and Human Services officials won’t say, despite repeated requests from NC Health News and other media outlets.

Early in the pandemic, NC Health News requested the information under the state’s open records laws. The nonprofit news publication believed — and still does — that workers are entitled to the information so they can learn about infections in their workplace and take precautions.

State officials denied the request. In May, Mark Benton, deputy secretary of Public Health for DHHS, said revealing the outbreaks at individual plants could jeopardize the department’s working relationship with the private meatpacking companies, as well as the privacy rights of its workers. The department does reveal outbreaks at private nursing homes in the state.

“We are grappling with that,” Benton said in an interview with NC Health News in May. “These are not long-term care settings. These are not residential care settings. The workers don’t reside in the facilities 24/7 and so, I assure you, we are looking at this from a multitude of angles.

“First and foremost, what is in the best interest of the public health. What’s also in the best interest of those that are diagnosed and also what’s in the best interest of ensuring that, in the long run, we have been able to assemble a group of people, a coalition, a partnership that is going to sort of drive us toward a successful resolution to this pandemic.”

Petition rejected

As founder and executive director of The Hispanic Liaison in Chatham County, Ilana Dubester has fought for workers rights at the Mountaire Farms plant in Siler City and other meat and poultry-processing facilities throughout the state.

Dubester acknowledges that conditions have improved at Mountaire since the pandemic began, but she said much more could be done. She said Mountaire workers often gather in large groups, and the company still doesn’t monitor whether they are wearing masks.

“There are hundreds of workers in the room together, and not everybody’s wearing a mask,” she said.

Dubester said contract workers still get paid less and receive fewer benefits than regular employees, and they can still lose their jobs at will.

In an emailed statement, Mountaire spokeswoman Catherine M. Bassett countered that the company “has been aggressively fighting this virus with every tool in our arsenal.”

In October, Dubester’s organization and five others in North Carolina filed a petition for rulemaking with the North Carolina Department of Labor. The petition asked the department to adopt an emergency rule that would protect workers during the pandemic by putting an end to dangerous workplace conditions.

The department rejected the petition in December, saying in part that it believes collaboration among state agencies and meatpacking companies is more effective than “aggressive regulatory actions” specific to COVID-19.

The group of safety advocates has since filed civil action against the labor department in a Wake County court. A hearing is pending.

North Carolina now counts 4,455 cases of the coronavirus and 22 deaths at meat and poultry processing plants in the state.

A small storefront has become a Latino grocery store called Tienda Centro reads the sign. Siler City has one of the highest rates of COVID infection in North Carolina

Latinos, the coronavirus and a single ZIP code

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Latinos, the coronavirus and a single ZIP code - North Carolina Health News

The 27344 ZIP code, which includes Siler City and Mountaire Farms, has become a hotspot for the coronavirus in North Carolina. Latinos who live in the ZIP code are suffering greatly, but nonprofit organizations can only do so much.

By Greg Barnes and Victoria Bouloubasis 

This story is being co-published with Enlace Latino NC. Read it here in Spanish.

Maricela Martinez still remembers getting her first paycheck from a chicken processing plant in Siler City — $280 for a week’s worth of work back in 1999.

“It made me cry,” Martinez said. “This was my first job at a company and allowed me to earn my own money and support my sons.”

Martinez arrived in Siler City 21 years ago, joining an influx of Latino immigrants who continue to be drawn to this small Chatham County town on the promise of steady employment, decent wages and more economic stability than they had back home.

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But now, as the coronavirus continues to race through North Carolina’s meat and poultry processing plants, workers at Siler City’s Mountaire Farms and other facilities across the state are facing the grim decision of whether cutting up chicken is worth risking their lives.

Despite a multitude of recent safety precautions, the plants remain breeding grounds for the virus, largely because hundreds of workers stand closely together on production lines and eat together in cafeterias.

Neither Mountaire nor state health officials will say how many of Mountaire’s nearly 1,800 workers in Siler City have contracted the coronavirus, but the ZIP code that includes the plant and the city suggests that it is a sizable number.

Only one of the more than 1,000 ZIP codes in the state has more confirmed cases than the 27433 ZIP code that encompasses Siler City in Chatham County. There, as of Wednesday, 414 people had tested positive.

Reasons abound for such a high number. The coronavirus has disproportionately affected Latinos and African Americans, partly because of poverty, crowded living quarters, employment in service-related jobs, underlying health conditions and a reluctance to interact with the health care system.

Latinos comprise 35 percent of the state’s 24,140 confirmed cases of the coronavirus but make up only 9.6 percent of the state’s population.

U.S. Census figures show that 30 percent of the 18,798 people living in the Siler City ZIP code are Latino, but that percentage is believed to be low because many undocumented immigrants go uncounted.

Related: As COVID races through Mountaire Farms poultry plant, workers deemed vital feel dispensable 

As a group, the statistics show, people living in the ZIP code have a lower income, have fewer years of education and are more likely to live in a small home with many other family members. The figures show that 30 percent of children in the ZIP code live in poverty, 1.3 times the state’s rate.

Nonprofits can only do so much

All of those factors have turned the ZIP code into one of the top coronavirus hotspots in North Carolina. And because of that, advocates say, a large segment of its Latino community is struggling to meet even the most basic needs.

Nonprofit organizations are trying to help as best they can. Funds and networks have been set up to assist, but they can only do so much.

With the support of five other nonprofit groups, El Vinculo Hispano — also known as The Hispanic Liaison — established the Chatham Solidarity Fund, largely to help Latinos who didn’t qualify for a federal stimulus check because of their immigration status.

The initial goal was to raise $360,000. Organizers don’t expect to reach that level, but they have raised nearly $160,000, which will go a long way toward helping people pay their bills and put food on the table.

“It’s a one-time infusion to help alleviate some financial stress,” said Ilana Dubester, founder and director of The Hispanic Liaison. “It is not going to be a long-term solution, but for many, I’m sure, it will be a big relief. They might be able to pay two months of rent. They might be able to buy food or whatever else they need.”

Marcella Slade, who coordinates a new Neighbor2Neighbor program through the Chatham County nonprofit chapter of Abundance NC and the Chatham News + Record, said most of the people contacting her want help with rent or utility payments.

But that’s far from all, Slade said.

They ask for “water, milk, toilet paper, potatoes, beans,” she said. “The people that are poor are the ones suffering the most. It’s definitely pulled out that social difference.”

Adults aren’t the only ones suffering. The problems experienced by parents are being passed down to their children.

Selina Lopez, who manages a Latino youth group at The Hispanic Liaison, said many of the teenagers she works with have parents who work at Mountaire Farms.

“It’s not just a corporation issue. It very much affects the family as a whole,” Lopez said. “My youth are having increased anxiety and stress. They’re really scared for their parents’ health and, being removed from the daily routine of adult mentors like teachers, they are having increased feelings of isolation. They really fear for their parents’ safety and feel their families are not being supported. It’s taking a huge toll on them.”

 “Welcome to Work”

Through economic lulls and booms, the textile and poultry industries have long anchored their factories in Siler City. In a 1964 campaign touting new factory jobs coming to town, a narrator excitedly proclaims: “Siler City can say confidently to its young people and future citizens: ‘Welcome to Work.’” The last three words are emblazoned on screen, beckoning generations of new workers to the rural South.

The “polleras,” or poultry plants, are a looming presence in Siler City’s working-class communities, historically employing African Americans and, as the term was coined then, “ethnic whites” of European descent.

In the 1980s, recruiters sought cheaper labor and called on immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border to work.

The Townsend chicken plant stood where Mountaire Farms is now. Gold Kist, another former poultry plant, was located closer to downtown, near Dubester’s office. It was later bought by Pilgrim’s Pride.

Latino newcomers entered an already racially segregated labor market and were met with community tension from Siler City natives, both black and white, especially as the Latino population grew.

In 1990, the town’s population totaled 4,995. Of those, 3 percent were Hispanic (as classified by the Census). By 2000, the Latino population jumped to 40 percent. That same year, a few prominent locals invited former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke to host a rally in town. His words specifically targeted the Spanish-speaking population. Records from that time note that many Latino residents thought it was an event sponsored by local officials since it was held on the steps of Town Hall.

Latinos continued to cut and process chicken until plant closures. Siler City’s Pilgrim’s Pride factory shuttered in 2008, leaving more than 800 people jobless; Townsend closed in 2011.

In 2010, as the town fumbled to recover from the 2008 economic recession, Siler City’s total population dropped by 1,000, to less than 4,000 people. Yet Latinos made up 49.8 percent of Siler City’s population in 2010, making them the majority group in town, with established families, several church congregations (both Catholic and Pentecostal), celebrated youth soccer teams, and flourishing, visible businesses in historic downtown storefronts and modern strip malls.

A small storefront has become a Latino church: Espiritu Santo reads the sign. Siler City has one of the highest rates of COVID infection in North Carolina
Siler City’s Latinos make up 43% of the town’s population. Several downtown storefronts are home to tiendas and Spanish-language churches. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

When Townsend closed, many Latinos found work at chicken plants in neighboring counties or found other jobs. But they maintained their homes in Siler City.

Today, Latinos still make up almost 43 percent of the total population according to the most recent U.S. Census data.

Emilio Vicente, a community organizer, has lived in Siler City since he was old enough to start elementary school in the 1990s. His family came from Guatemala and spoke K’iche’, an indigenous Mayan language; his mother was the only adult who spoke enough Spanish to acclimate them to the area. She worked at the poultry plants, too. So did Vicente’s father and uncles.

He says he was too young to remember the David Duke rally, save for rumblings he may have overheard from the adults in the community.

“I wasn’t old enough to process what it meant,” Vicente said.

But in college he began putting together the pieces of his adopted hometown’s history; one he was shielded from as an immigrant child.

“When I did learn about it, I wasn’t surprised that it had happened or that there were people in the community who invited David Duke to come to Siler City. Even now, that tension is still there.”

Latino families who scratch out a living working in poultry plants are also at their mercy. In November 2017, when Mountaire Farms took over the shuttered Townsend property, the company also purchased Johnson’s Mobile Home Park, adjacent to the plant.

By May of 2018 Mountaire sent eviction notices to the 28 families on that property; many owned their mobile homes. Dubester’s nonprofit organization — The Hispanic Liaison — stepped in and after months of negotiations with Chatham County officials and the company, a settlement of $10,190 per family was reached.

“That was such a particularly unique opportunity,” Dubester said. “And thanks to (the families’) courage to stick their necks out we were able to do what we did.”

Today, Mountaire Farms workers are turning to The Hispanic Liaison for support, as well as to Vicente, who helped the nonprofit organize those same families in Johnson Mobile Home Park. But public pressure proves more difficult than ever amid workers fearing for their health and, at the same time, potential retaliation from their employer if they ask for better protections and pay.

“There have been sadly so few workers willing to come forward,” Dubester said. “Organizing is challenging in normal times, even in a place like Siler City where the community is close-knit. A lot more people are afraid of sticking their necks out.”

Outbreaks across the state

The outbreak surrounding the Mountaire processing plant isn’t an isolated incident. Although the state Department of Health and Human Services won’t divulge the number of workers infected with the coronavirus at individual plants, it does report the number of cases at the plants statewide.

As of Wednesday, state officials reported 2,146 cases in 28 processing plants in 18 counties. That represents nearly 10 percent of all confirmed coronavirus cases in North Carolina.

In the 28328 zip code that includes a Smithfield Foods plant in Clinton, 254 people have contracted COVID-19. In the 28365 zip code that includes a Butterball plant in Mt. Olive, 204 people have tested positive. Butterball is in Duplin County, which has the highest ratio of cases per capita of anywhere in the state — 120 out of 10,000.

Cases aren’t extremely high in other ZIP codes that contain processing plants, but they are still higher than most. In the Wilkesboro ZIPcode, which includes a Tyson Foods plant, 126 people have tested positive for the coronavirus. Tyson earlier this month tested almost all of its more than 2,000 plant workers and found that 570 had the virus.

That suggests many workers live in nearby communities, potentially spreading the virus to those areas. During a news conference last week, DHHS Secretary Mandy Cohen said the growing number of cases in neighboring Forsyth County is due partly to the Tyson plant. The high number of infected workers caused Tyson to temporarily shut down so the plant could be thoroughly disinfected.

The working class

But it isn’t just workers of processing plants that are getting sick, said Brian Toomey, the chief executive of Piedmont Health, which provides health clinics in Siler City and throughout the state.

It’s the working poor, Toomey said.

In April, Piedmont Health partnered with state officials and the National Guard to test 356 Mountaire workers and their family members for the virus over two days in mid-April. Of those, 74 tested positive — or 21 percent.

But Toomey said test results over a much longer period at four Piedmont health clinics — in Siler City, Moncure, Carrboro and Burlington — found a higher percentage of infected people in the general population — 32 percent of the nearly 1,200 tested.

We see a tent amid cones that are directing cars into a line. The tent is for testing people for COVID-19
Members of the National Guard worked with Piedmont Health and the Chatham County Health Department to test 356 Mountaire Farms workers and their family members in April on the grounds of the plant in Siler City. Photo credit: NC National Guard

“It’s the working poor community who live in congregate housing, and in that section (of Siler City) it’s a lot of Latinos,” Toomey said. “It has hit that group hard, and most of it in this situation was because one person gets sick and shared a living environment. There’s no space for you to go into your own private room to quarantine from everybody else. So that’s one of the ways it’s affected this population of working class in a very different way.”

Toomey told a story of three farmers who went to a Piedmont Health clinic to get tested for the coronavirus. The tests confirmed that all three farmers had the virus. Health officials then went to test the farmworkers at one of the farmer’s properties, in Lee County. Nineteen of those workers tested positive, he said.

Toomey told another story, about a father who took his 11-day-old baby into a clinic. The baby tested positive for the virus. The mother never exhibited any symptoms, Toomey said.

Those types of stories have become common in and around Siler City.

Slade, the advocate for the Neighbor2Neighbor program, said a man suffering from the coronavirus learned that his sister had died about two hours earlier from the coronavirus. Slade said she suggested that the man go outside, look at the stars and think about his sister.

The man declined the advice, she said. He was under quarantine and was told that he could not leave his home.

His sister lives about two hours away, and he won’t be able to attend her funeral.

“His sister died and he can’t go see her,” Slade said. “Sad stuff.”

‘Good corporate citizen’

For nearly 20 years, Mountaire Farms and its workers at a plant in the Robeson County town of Lumber Bridge have doled out thousands of free meals at Thanksgiving to the less fortunate. That tradition has carried over to the year-old Siler City plant.

It’s just one of myriad ways that the company has been a good corporate citizen, said Vickie Newell, director of Chatham Literacy, one of the nonprofits that has helped to organize the Chatham Solidarity Fund.

Newell said Mountaire, Siler City’s largest private employer, has helped Habitat for Humanity build houses in the county. The company has worked with the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club and the Salvation Army, she said.

“The biggest way I think that probably their workers or the community benefit from them is through nonprofits,” Newell said. “I mean they support plenty of nonprofits through sponsorship. I don’t know if they give direct grants to people but I know they’re always sponsoring, and by that I mean giving money so that nonprofits can go out and do the work that we do in the community, to make it better.”

Anti-immigrant tensions

Dubester sees irony in that. Ron Cameron, Mountaire’s CEO, was President Donald Trump’s fifth-largest contributor in the 2016 presidential election, donating $2 million. Dubester said Mountaire has never donated to The Hispanic Liaison.

She is also irked by the refusal of Mountaire and state health officials to reveal how many plant workers have contracted the coronavirus.

State officials say it’s a matter of protecting employees’ privacy rights and retaining cooperation from the private industries.

Dubester disagrees.

“It affects our community response and our community education efforts. It makes it more dangerous and more risky for people still working there,” Dubester said. “It’s unconscionable that (DHHS is) not sharing. They need to stop protecting employers.”

Dubester said racial tension has always been just under the surface in Siler City. But when Trump got elected, she said, the tensions heightened. Trump’s policies on immigration haven’t helped, she said.

“Everybody’s experiencing microaggressions and overt statements and overt aggressions, not physical, thank goodness, that I know of,” Dubester said. “I experienced that and other people have in my community.”

Tense workers

As the coronavirus tightens its grip on the Mountaire plant, tensions are also mounting between the company and its workers.

Vicente, the community organizer, and a group of community members, including workers and many first-generation immigrants whose parents work at Mountaire Farms, started an online petition with a list of demands from workers.

The petition has been signed nearly 3,500 times, and a company representative is emailed every time a signature is added. The group set up a hotline last week so that workers can speak to Vicente and other community organizers whom they trust about their concerns around safety and their rights on the job, especially the contract workers.

“People are afraid in general,” Vicente said. “The people contracting them are abusing them by not giving them their promised vacation time, not paying them the same amount that Mountaire Farms is paying the workers.”

Vicente hopes that with testimonies collected via the hotline, they can better understand the issues at Mountaire. He wants to use the information to make clear demands so the company will better serve its workers, especially during the pandemic.

we see an industrial complex / poultry plantwhere multiple workers have tested positive for COVID-19
The 40-acre Mountaire Farms complex in Siler City employs almost 1,800 people. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

“Mountaire should offer paid leave to every single worker with the promise that they will pay them for the duration of a period that is safe for workers to stay home,” Vicente said, “and not have them make the decision of either coming to work or losing their jobs.”

The tension between workers and employers isn’t isolated to Mountaire. Similar rifts are occuring at Smithfield Foods, at Tyson Foods, at Butterball and at other meat and poultry processing companies across the country.

Many of those plants have already experienced temporary shutdowns caused by the coronavirus. Like Mountaire, many have also experienced a significant decrease in production as workers get sick or just decide it’s better to stay home. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, 11,000 workers at just three companies — Smithfield, Tyson and JBS – have been stricken by the virus.

Meanwhile the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has confirmed to the News & Observer that farmers around the state have started euthanizing more than 1.5 million chickens as capacity at processing plants has slowed.

A report last week from CoBank, a cooperative serving rural America, found that the national supply of meat could soon shrink by 35 percent and prices could spike by 20 percent.

On May 8, the NC Justice Center, the state AFL-CIO and the Western North Carolina Workers Center held a news conference demanding that state officials do everything in their power to better protect workers at meat and poultry processing plants.“The way we protect our food supply is to protect our meatpacking workers, but unfortunately there seems to be more concern about satisfying our hunger for meat than taking care

of our workers,” said MaryBe MacMillan, president of the state AFL-CIO. “We cannot risk workers’ lives for burgers, bacon or blue jeans.”

we look through a chain link fence into an industrial complex / poultry plantwhere multiple workers have tested positive for COVID-19

As COVID races through Mountaire Farms poultry plant, workers deemed vital feel dispensable

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As COVID races through Mountaire Farms poultry plant, workers deemed vital feel dispensable - North Carolina Health News

Mountaire criticized for moving too slowly to protect workers who weren’t aware of coronavirus cases in workplace.

By Victoria Bouloubasis and Greg Barnes

This story is being co-published with Enlace Latino NC. Read it here in Spanish.

On a rapidly moving production line at Mountaire Farms in Siler City, Ana uses a sharp knife to slice the wings off a chicken in less than two seconds, making sure they land into a bin without any mess.

In the swift motion she makes to lift and extend her arm to make a cut, Ana must avoid bumping elbows with the worker beside her. Her body stays clenched for hours as she repeats this task 32 to 36 times a minute, thousands of times a day.

Ana, who asked that her real name not be used, worries about the news: coronavirus outbreaks at jobs like hers are skyrocketing, and workers are dying, such as Adelfo Ruiz, 65, a worker at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Lee County.

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But Ana and thousands of others who work at meat and poultry plants scattered throughout North Carolina say they have little choice but to keep working. They have families to feed, households to maintain and other obligations to meet — all on a low-wage income.

The federal government has also declared them essential workers, a vital cog in the nation’s food supply chain. Without the workers, there would be no meat or poultry on grocery store shelves. Mountaire Farms is the sixth-largest poultry processing company in the United States, processing about 400 million chickens a year, according to a spokesperson.

But their work comes at a heavy cost. The meatpacking plants have become breeding grounds for the coronavirus, spreading rapidly among the nearly 1,800 workers in Siler City and into the surrounding communities.

On May 20, Tyson Foods announced that 570 workers at its poultry processing plant in Wilkesboro had tested positive for COVID-19 — more than a quarter of the plant’s workforce.  Most of the workers who tested positive had shown no symptoms, according to a company statement.

The virus has swept through Mountaire, Tyson and 27 other meatpacking and poultry processing plants in North Carolina. That’s more plants than in any other state in the country, according to a report published May 19 by the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

North Carolina ranks third in the nation for the highest number of meatpacking workers who have contracted COVID-19. As of May 27, 2,146 cases had been confirmed in 28 outbreaks at meat-processing plants in 18 counties: Bertie, Bladen, Burke, Chatham, Davie, Duplin, Hoke, Lee, Lenoir, Randolph, Richmond, Robeson, Sampson, Surry, Union, Wayne, Wilkes and Wilson.

Many, if not most, of those infected meatpacking workers are Latino immigrants who for decades have been drawn to North Carolina to do the grueling work that few others are willing to do.

And perhaps nowhere in the state has the virus struck harder or had the most debilitating impact as it has in Siler City, where Latinos comprise nearly 43 percent of the population.

photo shows a central store or Tienda Centrol in Siler City with its windows full of colorful signs in Spanish
Siler City’s Latinos make up 43% of the town’s population. Several downtown storefronts are home to tiendas and Spanish-language churches. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

In a single ZIP code that includes Siler City and Mountaire Farms, 414 of the 18,798 residents have tested positive for COVID-19, state figures show. That’s the highest per capita rate of any ZIP code in North Carolina.

Mountaire and the state Department of Health and Human Services won’t say how many workers at the Mountaire plant have contracted the virus. Despite repeated requests, DHHS refuses to identify the processing plants that are experiencing outbreaks or how many workers at those plants have COVID-19.

But a look at UNC Hospitals may provide a clue.

As the pandemic neared an early peak for hospitalizations, UNC spokesman Alan Wolf said in an email, a third of all COVID-19 patients at the sprawling UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill were transported there from Chatham Hospital in Siler City.

Related: Latinos, the coronavirus and a single ZIP code

An internal UNC Hospitals report provided anonymously to NC Health News shows that by mid-May, 41 percent of all patients treated for COVID-19 at UNC Health were Latino.

According to the U.S. Census, Latinos make up about 9 percent of the state’s population.

Slow to respond, share info

Mountaire and other processing plants in North Carolina have now taken some measures to keep their workers safe. All employees wear the same uniform, which now includes a protective face shield.  They have installed plexiglass barriers between production line workers, added hand-sanitation stations, extended sick leave, and taken other precautions. But the plants have also been criticized for moving too slowly to try to protect workers and for not being transparent.

In mid-April, Mountaire posted a bilingual notice at the plant saying three workers had tested positive for COVID-19, according to workers.

But the company had known four to six weeks earlier about those sick workers and didn’t notify anyone, said Ilana Dubester, founder of the nonprofit El Vinculo Hispano, or The Hispanic Liaison. A spokesperson for Mountaire said the company began “taking steps” in early March to begin safety and precautionary measures.

On April 23, shortly after the notice was posted, the National Guard and Piedmont Health tested Mountaire employees and their family members for the virus at a drive-thru clinic set up in the plant’s parking lot. Of the 356 people tested, 74 were confirmed to have the virus, said Brian Toomey, CEO of Piedmont Health.

In other words, 21 percent of the total tested had COVID-19.

Ana says she was among the few hundred tested that day, at a company with almost 1,800 employees. Mountaire declined to elaborate on how many of that number are contract workers.

Her results were negative; she continued working. Ana said no other details have been provided to her or any other Latino workers since the notice was posted.

photo shows the concrete walls and large tanks around the outside of the Mountaire Farms poultry processing plant in Siler City which has experienced coronavirus outbreaks
The 40-acre Mountaire Farms complex in Siler City employs almost 1,800 people. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

Transparency wanted

By the end of April, Ana said, she exhibited COVID-19 symptoms. At that point, she had heard through the grapevine of several more workers who subsequently had tested positive.

This worried Ana: she lives with her husband, who is currently out of work, and her elementary school-aged child. If anyone were to bring the virus home, it would be Ana. But the family also relies on her paycheck to cover their monthly expenses, which total roughly $1,200.

The lack of oversight and transparency at the company leaves workers like Ana confused about safety protocols and their ability to take paid leave if they get sick. Ana was not hired directly by Mountaire Farms, but instead by the independent contracting company NIPCAM.

When a doctor advised her to stay home for two weeks, Ana said, the company promised to pay her for a full 40-hour workweek. She said she was paid for only 16 hours.

Ana said her symptoms had subsided by the time she returned to work, but she noticed that many more of her coworkers were not showing up.

Eventually, Ana claimed, the production lines were cut by half. Normally, the de-boning floor consists of eight lines with 17 people working each one. It is now down to four lines, she said, yet the same amount of chicken is being processed with fewer workers. The purported claims that the meat supply is dwindling due to the pandemic is news to Ana, who said she is doing double the work to keep the product moving.

photo shows a red white and blue sign telling people where to apply for jobs at Mountaire farms
Mountaire Farms advertises job openings on a sign near its Siler City plant. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

When asked if any production lines have been cut at the Siler City factory, a Mountaire Farms spokesperson said, “We have had to make several changes to how we operate as a result of staffing issues, but overall our plants have been operating.”

“The chickens are very fat and there are so many now,” Ana said. “Imagine doing this over and over, all day. And if you miss one (chicken) a supervisor will angrily come over to you.”

‘What we pay you for’

Ana said she has witnessed a few workers get yelled at for asking to take a break. Last week, she recalled one man who told a supervisor his hands were hurting and his joints felt stuck.

The supervisor forced him to continue and said “this is what we pay you for,” Ana said. “That makes me really angry. But I can’t do anything for them. I sometimes want to defend my people, but then I’ll get myself into trouble.”

Ana suspects that the majority of the workers still on the production floor are fellow contract employees, those without company benefits or health insurance. According to Alvaro Villaveces, who owns NIPCAM, his company contracts 300 employees to Mountaire Farms.

“A bunch of people are not going to work, but that’s a hard call because they don’t want to lose their jobs,” Dubester said. “Some temporary [contract] workers basically have been told that [they are] dispensable.”

An extra dollar

For Maricela Martinez, that’s exactly what happened.

In early April she was contracted by NIPCAM for a three-month gig at Mountaire to work with five other new housekeepers hired to clean during the pandemic. After her husband suffered a recent back injury that kept him out of work, Martinez welcomed a job that was less physically strenuous than the construction demolition work she did before. Martinez hoped to work at the plant beyond the three-month contract, maintaining their single-income household at $11.70 per hour.

During the first month of work Martinez was given a dollar raise for “doing a good job,” along with 10 pounds of chicken at no cost. She wants to go back to her job because she needs it. But she says contract workers aren’t given the same benefits as workers directly employed by Mountaire.

photo shows the outside of a building in Siler City that is decorated with a colorful mural showing people of different ethnicities
A mural in downtown Siler City invites residents to celebrate diversity despite a recent history that includes a protest by the Ku Klux Klan. Photo credit: Victoria Bouloubasis

In an email, a Mountaire spokesperson said all workers are paid between $12 and $14 an hour. But, according to a check paid to Martinez through NIPCAM, the contracting company, she makes $11.70 per hour. Ana said her hourly wage is $11.40, which is in line with what Dubester hears from workers, too.

According to Villaveces, the NIPCAM owner, Mountaire sets the pay rate and NIPCAM charges Mountaire a percentage above. He said Mountaire sets the hourly rate lower for contract workers to “give them an incentive to come to work for them directly. They don’t want to have contractors.”

“It’s in our best interest to make sure that all of these people are protected and healthy to work. If not, this whole thing breaks down,” he maintained. “We spend a lot of time making sure workers are happy because they are a very scarce commodity. The idea that we can mistreat these people does not exist.”

“You can’t have two sets of rules inside the processing plant. The workers need to feel like they are part of the team. If they are not part of that, it becomes complete chaos,” he said. “Worker morale is very important to us.”

Both Ana and Martinez, however, say contract workers are generally confused about their benefits, which are not clearly communicated to them by NIPCAM or Mountaire.

Villaveces, who does not live in North Carolina, says that the people who work with him on the ground in Siler City communicate directly with poultry plant employees and that the employees will be paid for every day they miss if they prove they test positive for the coronavirus.

That wasn’t Martinez’s experience.

On April 23, after a temperature check at work, Martinez was sent home for five days. She says she was among 15 workers who had an above-normal temperature. She didn’t exhibit any other symptoms, but her husband did two days later.

They went to the hospital on April 25 and he tested positive for COVID-19. Martinez was asked to come back to work but explained to the subcontractor that the doctor (who hadn’t tested her) recommended she stay home a total of two weeks since her husband tested positive. For this, Martinez said, she was fired.

Despite the risk of speaking out, Martinez has used her real name, here and in other news stories.

“I want to talk because everything I am saying is true,” she said.

Martinez wants to work a job that gives everyone paid time off — especially during a pandemic.

“Deep down, we (contract workers) knew we weren’t going to be given anything,” she said.

Raw chickens hang from wires at a poultry plant. Poultry companies are selling chicken for cheap amidst coroanvirus

Poultry companies selling chicken cheap out of the back of trucks

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Poultry companies selling chicken cheap out of the back of trucks - North Carolina Health News

Companies say the sales are a way to be good corporate citizens during the pandemic, but there are also other forces at play.

By Greg Barnes

Maggie Hooks waited in a long line of vehicles that snaked from behind the Salemburg Fire Department to Main Street and far beyond.

Hooks and hundreds of others — perhaps more people than this small Sampson County town has residents — were there to get chicken that the House of Raeford was selling for less than a buck a pound out of the back of a refrigerated tractor-trailer.

The North Carolina-based poultry company has been doing these sales for some time now, taking its show on the road to Kinston, Rocky Mount, Pink Hill, Wilmington, Clinton, New Bern, Riegelwood. Even as far away as Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina.

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Another poultry processor has been doing the same. Mountaire Farms has held sales at its plant in Siler City, in Raeford, at the Farmers Market in Raleigh and elsewhere, causing traffic jams wherever it sets up shop. At a recent sale at its Siler City location, Mountaire sold out of 80,000 pounds of poultry in two hours.

Corporate citizens

Mountaire and the House of Raeford say they are conducting these sales primarily as a way to be good corporate citizens.

“As you know, grocery stores had a difficult time keeping up with demand once restaurants closed, and so we felt it was important to be a good community partner and see what we could do to make a difference,” Mountaire spokeswoman Catherine Bassett wrote in an email to NC Health News.

Hooks and others waiting in line in Salemburg agreed. Chicken is hard to come by in the grocery stores, and the prices are great.

But there may be something else going on here. The state’s order to close schools, restaurants and bars has diminished the demand for bulk sales of poultry.

While retail sales of chicken at grocery stores has increased, the processing plants have had to adjust their packaging. The companies sell poultry in bulk to restaurants and bars, while store-bought chicken is typically individually packaged.

Panic buying and other pressures

Converting processing plant operations from bulk to individual sales can be a time-consuming process, which is probably partly to blame for the absence of poultry and other meats in the grocery stores, said Rob Handfield, a distinguished professor of operations and supply chain management at N.C. State University.

Another N.C. State professor, Todd See, speculated that panic buying, at least in the early stages of the pandemic, also has led to the shortage of poultry on store shelves.

“People are stocking their freezers with more than they normally would,” said Dave Witter, a spokesman for the House of Raeford. “People are buying way more than they probably will ever need. They’re putting it in freezers. So that’s one of the reasons that stores can’t keep stock fast enough.”

Add to those problems a shortage of labor at some processing plants that had existed even before the pandemic. These days, as an increasing number of processing plants have reported outbreaks of the virus, plant employees have become reluctant to return to work.

The state Department of Health and Human Services has reported outbreaks at seven meat processing plants in the state. As of Thursday, 190 cases of COVID-19 had been reported at those plants, a DHHS spokeswoman said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no evidence to suggest that the coronavirus can be spread through food.

Lack of freezer space

Handfield and See said Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order, changes in meat packaging and a labor shortage could all be contributing to a backlog of chickens at the state’s poultry farms. It takes only about two months from the time a chick hatches until it is ready for market, they said. The chickens have to go somewhere.

Witter, the House of Raeford spokesman, said his company does mostly bulk sales of fresh poultry. He acknowledged that one reason for selling chicken directly to the public is a lack of freezer space.

“A lot of the freezer facilities are full right now, so we really don’t have too many places to put it,” Witter said.

But he said the House of Raeford can fairly easily regulate the number of chickens going to market to keep them from overpopulating the farms. According to published reports, at least one poultry company, Allen Harim Foods of Delaware, has had to kill up to 2 million chickens before they could be sold to consumers because of staffing shortages caused by the coronavirus.

Witter said the House of Raeford has not experienced much of a staffing shortage. Even it had,  he said, the company would simply reduce the number of eggs at the hatcheries.

“If you don’t have the eggs then the chicken is not going to be there,” Witter said. “So that’s what we would do. We would certainly not be depopulating a farm. We’re not going to do anything like that. Oh, my goodness, I can’t imagine doing that.”

Witter said the main reason for selling chicken out of the back of a truck is to help its employees, its farmers and the countless number of people who are laid off or are struggling in other ways to put food on their tables during these trying times.

State agricultural officials say the chicken is safe, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there is no evidence that the coronavirus has affected poultry, pork or beef.

Hooks and other people who waited in the long line at the Salemburg Fire Department seemed to appreciate the House of Raeford’s back-of-a-truck chicken sale. They definitely appreciated the low prices.

“We need some chicken. We low, low, low and it’s so good,” Hooks said.

The Smithfield Foods processing plant in Tar Heel employs up to 5,000 workers and slaughters 30,000 to 35,000 hogs a day: Photo credit: Melissa Sue Garrets, The Fayetteville Observer

Two more processing plants identified as having coronavirus outbreaks

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Two more processing plants identified as having coronavirus outbreaks - North Carolina Health News

The state says 190 workers at seven meat and poultry processing plants have tested positive for COVID-19. That’s up from 118 on Tuesday.

By Greg Barnes

Two more meat processing plants in North Carolina are experiencing coronavirus outbreaks, bringing the total number of meat and poultry plants with COVID outbreaks to seven, state health officials announced Thursday.

The state Department of Health and Human Services still won’t name the plants or say how many workers have tested positive at each one. The department defines an outbreak as two or more workers at a plant being diagnosed with COVID-19.

On Tuesday, DHHS said 118 workers had the coronavirus at five plants. That number reached 190 by Thursday afternoon, a 61 percent increase since Tuesday.

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DHHS said the two new counties where the outbreaks have occurred are Wilson and Wilkes. They join Bladen, Robeson, Duplin, Lee and Chatham counties. All but Wilkes County, near Winston-Salem, and Chatham County, in the Triangle, are in the eastern part of the state.

Testing at Mountaire

Although DHHS and Smithfield Foods won’t say, local media has reported that one of the processing plants is the giant Smithfield Foods hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel in Bladen County. That plant is believed to be the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world, processing as many as 35,000 hogs a day and employing between 4,400 and 5,000 workers.

Mountaire Farms in Siler City is also on the list, having at least 11 positive cases at a plant that employs about 1,580 people, the company has confirmed. Another Mountaire plant, in Robeson County, is also among the seven.

On Thursday, Mountaire and DHHS partnered to begin testing any employees or their family members experiencing symptoms of the coronavirus at the Siler City plant. Testing will also be done Friday from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. in the plant’s parking lot.

“Our teams have been proactive in providing PPE (Personal protection equipment) to our employees and in creating personal workspace barriers throughout all of our facilities,” Phillip Plylar, president of Mountaire Farms, said in a statement. “We are doing everything in our power to protect our team members from the virus.”

NC Health News seeks records

North Carolina Health News first requested that DHHS reveal the names of the plants and the number of positive cases at each one on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the nonprofit online news publication asked for the information through a public records request to DHHS. NC Health News asked that the information be provided that day.

On Thursday, DHHS spokeswoman Kelly Haight Connor said the request had been forwarded to “our public records folks. They’ll reach out to you.” No response had been received by Thursday night.

N.C. Health News believes the records should have been released by now. Under state law, the custodian of a public record must produce it upon request “at reasonable times and under reasonable supervision.”

Rose Hoban, editor and founder of NC Health News, said the public has a right to know the names of the plants and how many workers have contracted the virus at each one.

“It’s essential that the state provide these records,” Hoban said. “If I was employed at one of those plants, I’d want to know how many of my co-workers had the virus so I could determine whether I needed to take more safety precautions.”

State forms working group

The state is taking the threat of the coronavirus on the nation’s meat and poultry supply seriously. On Tuesday,  it announced that N.C. Emergency Management and its State Emergency Response Team partners had formed a Food Supply Chain Working Group to address food production and distribution issues across the state.

“North Carolina is one of the nation’s largest producers of poultry and pork,” Brigadier General Allen Boyette of the N.C. Army National Guard said in a statement. Boyette is leading the Food Supply Chain Working Group. “If production falters, the impacts will be felt hard within our state and far beyond our borders.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is no evidence to suggest that the coronavirus can be transmitted through food.

Companies taking action

Workers at Mountaire’s Siler City plant and an advocate for the Latino community expressed concerns this week that the plant didn’t do enough, soon enough, to protect employees.

Mountaire, like Smithfield, has taken major steps in the last two weeks to provide personal protective gear, hand sanitizing stations and plastic dividers between workers on assembly lines. Mountaire has increased hourly salaries by $1, added a sick pay program and relaxed its attendance policy. Smithfield has promised workers in Tar Heel a $500 bonus if they did not miss work through the end of April.

Despite the improvements, more than 3,300 people have signed a petition demanding Mountaire Farms guarantee that all workers, including temporary workers, keep their jobs if they elect to stay home because of the virus and that they will receive paid leave immediately. The petition was made by a group calling itself “Justice for Mountaire Workers.”

Smithfield in South Dakota

At Smithfield Foods, a company spokesman again declined to say how many workers at the Tar Heel plant have tested positive for the coronavirus.

At a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, nearly 1,000 workers and others associated with the plant have contracted the virus. That plant is now considered the biggest hotspot for coronavirus in the country. It has been closed since April 14. Two plant workers have died.

That plant processes about 5 percent of the nation’s pork products. The Smithfield plant in Tar Heel processes about 8 percent. As the shutdown of the South Dakota plant continues, it is threatening to cause farmers there to kill off some of their hogs. The hogs, which continue to grow, don’t have anywhere else to go.

On Thursday, the CDC issued a 15-page memo that details conditions it found at Smithfield’s South Dakota plant and recommends improvements. The report was made after CDC officials spent a week inside the plant.

Among the biggest findings was a failure to communicate with workers who speak a multitude of languages. According to the CDC’s report, workers who showed symptoms of the virus were sent home with an informational pamphlet about the virus that was written in English. Among the recommendations in the report is for Smithfield to improve communications with workers, follow a strict social-distancing policy, and ensure that workers wear masks at all times.

Smithfield had little to say initially about the report.

“We will thoroughly and carefully examine the report point by point and respond in full once our assessment is complete,” Keira Lombardo, a Smithfield spokeswoman, said in a statement.

shows hog carcasses hanging in a processing plant.

Coronavirus invading N.C. meat processing plants

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Coronavirus invading N.C. meat processing plants - North Carolina Health News

Five processing plants, including the mammoth Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, are experiencing outbreaks of the coronavirus, state health officials say.

By Greg Barnes

Additional contributions by Enlace Latino NC staff

It didn’t take long for the coronavirus to sweep through a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

On March 26, the plant announced its first case of COVID-19. By April 13, more than 300 workers had tested positive. Today the plant is considered the largest coronavirus hot spot in the nation with nearly 900 cases linked directly to Smithfield Foods.

Fourteen hundred miles away in Tar Heel, North Carolina, it was reported over the weekend that an employee at the nation’s largest hog-slaughtering plant had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Smithfield won’t confirm that case or say whether other employees have since tested positive. It’s not saying much of anything now, other than to reiterate the many steps the company has taken in the last couple of weeks in an effort to protect its employees and keep them working.

In North Carolina, the outbreak of the virus hasn’t been confined only to Smithfield. The state announced in a news release Tuesday that five hog and poultry processing plants have confirmed two or more cases of the virus; in Bladen, Lee, Chatham, Duplin and Robeson counties. The state considers two or more cases at a plant an outbreak.

The state Department of Health and Human Services, which issued the news release, declined in a subsequent email to name the plants with outbreaks or how many cases each plant has reported. The department would say only that 118 people have tested positive for the coronavirus at the five plants.

In response to the outbreak, state health and agricultural officials have developed interim guidelines in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus in the state’s 200 processing plants. The new guidelines are in addition to those already established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the news release said.

Workers aren’t the only ones threatened

Only time will tell if the new guidelines can stop the virus’ spread in the processing plants. But if the Smithfield plant in South Dakota provides any clues, it may already be too late.

At a Mountaire Farms chicken processing plant in Siler City, employees were notified on April 13 that three of their co-workers had tested positive for COVID-19.

Ilana Dubester, an advocate for Hispanic workers at Mountaire, said the plant’s spokesman  Mark Reif told her Saturday that 11 employees had tested positive.

Neither Mountaire nor the Chatham County Health Department would confirm that number or say how many employees have contracted the virus since then. They said it was a matter of protecting employees’ privacy rights. According to state records, Chatham County had 131 confirmed cases of the virus on Tuesday, up from 127 the day before.

The virus is not only threatening workers at the processing plants, if its spread is not contained it could eventually threaten the nation’s supply of meat and poultry, said Rob Handfield, a distinguished professor of operations and supply chain management at N.C. State University.

The coronavirus could also threaten the livelihoods of North Carolina’s hog farmers, many of whom were facing an unsteady financial future long before the pandemic.

Mountaire’s response to the outbreak

Catherine Bassett, director of communications at Mountaire’s Delaware headquarters, said in an email that the company notified its Siler City plant employees about its first worker testing positive for the coronavirus the same day.

Dubester disputes that. She is the founder and executive director of El Vinculo Hispano, which translates in English to The Hispanic Liaison, a 25-year old nonprofit organization that seeks to give Hispanics a voice in their community.

Related: Proposed changes in hog farm permit rankle farmers, leave environmentalists calling for more

Dubester said Reif, the plant’s spokesman, told her that Mountaire knew about the first case at least four weeks before announcing on April 13 that three employees had tested positive. Reif didn’t acknowledge whether that was true or not, instead kicking the question up to Bassett. Dubester said Reif told her he didn’t know about the positive cases before Mountaire told the workers.

Before announcing the coronavirus cases, Dubester and a Mountaire employee who asked not to be named, alleged the company did little to protect its workers against the virus.

“When this pandemic started, Mountaire was doing nothing. They just started giving employees face masks/shields & putting up glass between people about 2 weeks ago,” the worker told N.C. Health News through Facebook’s messenger service. “The distance between people on the lines is literally elbow to elbow. The risk of the virus spreading in the company is extremely high because of this.”

The employee, who asked not to be named out of fear that she could lose her job, said she works on a deboning production line. She said about half of the workers in her department have stopped showing up regularly to work, herself included, out of concern that they could get the virus.

“It’s scary,” she said. “I’m putting my life at risk going to work and Mountaire is only worried about profit from their chicken.”

Dubester and the employee acknowledge that Mountaire, which opened its $170 million Chatham County plant exactly a year ago, has taken many strides to improve the safety of its workers since shortly before disclosing the cases of COVID-19.

They just don’t think it came soon enough.

“When the outbreak started and now it is spreading it became really obvious that what they were doing wasn’t enough,” Dubester said.

Mountaire’s improvements

Among other protective measures, Mountaire now conducts temperature checks on all employees, provides face masks or shields, added social distancing requirements on its lines, improved disinfection, added hand sanitizer stations, relaxed attendance policies and gave employees a pay raise as a way to thank them during these difficult times.

A second worker, who also asked not to be named, said she appreciates the efforts Mountaire has taken to make the plant safer. Among the precautions in place now, she said, Mountaire orders people to wear masks at all times and has placed plastic dividers between workers on the lines.

“Our company is doing the most they can to keep us safe and we ourselves are doing the best job we can to be safe as well,’’ said the woman, who is single, from Mexico and has worked at the plant since it opened last year.

But she said many workers remain fearful of the virus.

“People aren’t coming to work nearly as much, and you can tell because the parking lot used to be filled but now it’s half empty most of the time,” she said.

She thinks the plant should tell workers when someone tests positive for the virus.

“I think we deserve the right to know if someone has it and who the person is because we all work in close proximity with one another,” she said. “It helps us to know because we want to be able to prevent it.”

Those same types of precautions made by Mountaire, and perhaps more, have been implemented by Smithfield at all of its processing plants, said Andre Barnett, secretary/treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1208.

Barnett praised Smithfield’s response to the pandemic.

“They have made every effort to do whatever the CDC recommends, and they have gone above and beyond to ensure the safety of their employees at the Tar Heel facility and in every other facility throughout the United States,” Barnett said.

He took a swipe at some of the plant’s workers.

“A lot of employees want this plant shut down,” Barnett said. “They just want to have time off, and I understand that. You know, they are scared for their health. They are scared for their safety.”

But he said there is a reason the plant’s workers are deemed essential. They help provide food for the table.

North Carolina processes about 10 percent of the country’s pork supply, said Kelly Zering, a professor and extension specialist at N.C. State University.

“Lost capacity here would have national impacts on pork products available to consumers and the prices of remaining supplies,” Zering said.

Smithfield has had to shut down two of its other plants, in Wisconsin and Missouri, that received products from the Sioux Falls plant. Other meat-processing plants have also closed across the country. Another big pork processor, JBS in Minnesota, announced Monday that it was shutting down because of the coronavirus.

Smithfield’s operations continue

At this point, Smithfield’s operations at its Tar Heel Plant continue relatively unabated. The plant still employs about 4,400 workers and processes up to 35,000 hogs a day, nearly twice as many as in Sioux Falls.

But the estimated 2,300 hog farmers in North Carolina are nervous. They are well aware of what is happening in South Dakota and are hoping not to meet the same fate.

“I am concerned about it and I get more concerned as time goes on,” said Chad Herring, a Mt. Olive hog farmer and executive director of N.C. Farm Families. “You see what happened to the South Dakota plant. I’m trying to be optimistic about things. I think  we can get back going and can get back to normal soon.”

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These days, normal hasn’t been exactly rosy for North Carolina’s hog farmers, though. Long before the pandemic, the farmers had been under economic assault from tariffs, high feed costs, low pork prices and an avalanche of lawsuits alleging hog farms have upended their neighbors’ ways of life. Smithfield has lost all five lawsuits that have been filed, resulting in verdicts totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. More lawsuits wait in the wings.

Most of the state’s hog farms are concentrated in three eastern North Carolina counties, Duplin, Sampson and Bladen. According to a recent N.C. State study, pig production and pork processing account for 44 percent of the jobs in Bladen County and 23 percent in Sampson County.

The industry as a whole generates more than $10 billion in economic output for the state and creates more than 44,000 jobs, the study shows.

South Dakota’s sobering situation

It’s hard to fathom what might happen if the coronavirus forces Smithfield to shut down its Tar Heel plant for an extended period of time.

But the shutdown of the company’s South Dakota plant offers some clues.

It’s been 10 days since that plant closed, putting workers out of jobs and threatening to wreak economic havoc on the state’s independent hog farmers, about 550 of whom are under contract with Smithfield Foods. Smithfield, South Dakota’s governor and the CDC are working to negotiate an agreement on how the plant could reopen. It sounded Tuesday as if the agreement was close to being reached.

North Carolina is home to roughly 8.6 million farmed pigs, on hog farm such as this. Many of the pigs are kept in confined shelters, producing malodorous waste that can harm nearby residents. Photo courtesy of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
North Carolina is home to roughly 8.6 million farmed pigs. Photo courtesy of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

With the slaughterhouse closed, farmers have few if any options to take their hogs to market. If the plant doesn’t reopen soon, some farmers may have to start killing their hogs, said Glenn Muller, executive director of the South Dakota Pork Producers Council.

“That’s a last-case resort, and I think every day we get closer to that point,” Muller said on Monday. “We’re hoping for a bright spot, some agreement that can be made… but every day becomes a little more critical.”

Zering, the N.C. State professor, said he is not aware of any hogs in the U.S. having to be euthanized. But he understands how it could happen.

“Since pigs are 5 to 6 months old when they go to market and are conceived 9 to 10 months before they go to market, it is difficult in the short term to reduce the number of pigs reaching market age,” Zering said in an email.

Now, in both North Carolina and South Dakota, hog farmers are worried about bankruptcy.

“It’s a tremendous financial and emotional strain on our producers right at this point in time and we’re very concerned about their financial and mental well-being,” Muller said.

This story was reported with help from Enlace Latino NC an independent nonprofit news organization publishing in Spanish that covers politics, government, immigration, and community affairs in North Carolina.

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