You won’t find any sympathy from me about this news. I have been warning for years (long before a virus marched across the world) that if you like to eat meat—beef, pork, chicken—you need to find a source of locally raised meat.
They are changing America by changing the people!
Of course my major interest has been about how BIG MEAT has a voracious appetite for cheap immigrant/refugee labor that has been supplied to them by the federal government and by the supposed do-gooder ‘religious’ charities that shill for these global giants as they make up the majority of US refugee resettlement contractors…
And, how that ‘need’ for cheap labor is changing the character of middle America.
Below is one of what I am sure will be many stories about immigrant labor and your food supply.
Iowa Plant Workers Describe Inaction, Safety Concerns, Fear
Widespread outbreaks at meat packing plants in the Midwest are quickly becoming the latest crisis in the ongoing pandemic. Hundreds of workers, many of whom are immigrants and refugees, are becoming sick, some have already died, and the resulting plant closures are risking the nation’s food supply chain.
In Iowa, a significant percentage of the state’s new positive COVID-19 cases this week came from a Tyson meat packing plant in Louisa County, a small, rural county in Southeast Iowa. 186 positive cases were recorded from the one plant alone and two people have died, which has driven Louisa County to be one of the nation’s biggest hot spots for the virus, while also impacting surrounding counties.
Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds: But they promised me!
At her Wednesday press conference, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said that plant executives had assured her that sufficient precautions to protect workers had been put into place.
“When I reached out to the CEOs of both the plants, they indicated they had already taken the steps,” Reynolds said of mitigation efforts encouraged by the state. “They’re trying to be very proactive to not only protect their workforce, but to make sure they can, you know, can keep the plant up and going.”
[….]
….while most of the focus has been on Latino workers at these plants, it’s important to note that many meat packing employees are refugees from non-Latin American countries. Large numbers of Burmese refugees, for instance, work at the Columbus Junction and Waterloo plants.
Nearly all the workers disputed the idea that employees were being provided the kind of protections that Reynolds said was happening.
And, I’ll bet if you check the Iowa hotspots at this interactive map you will find some global meatpacker or other large manufacturing facility that is the source of the local infectious outbreak.
See my BIG MEAT archive by clicking here. I had already been writing about meatpackers within the first year of writing RRW and their refugee labor appetites when I came across this news in 2008 about how Bill Clinton first came up with the idea of supplying his meatpacking buddies with Bosnian refugee laborers—in Iowa!
