In the latest episode of CPR Board President Rob Verchick's Connect the Dots podcast, he and CPR Member Scholars Michael Duff and Thomas McGarity explore worker safety issues in the era of the coronavirus.
McGarity begins the conversation with the story of Annie Grant, a 15-year veteran of the packing line at a Tyson Food poultry processing plant in Camilla, Georgia. One morning in late March, weeks after the nation had awakened to the danger of the coronavirus and states had begun locking down, she felt feverish. When her children urged her to stay home rather than work with a fever on the chilled poultry line, she told them that the company insisted that she continue to work. Furthermore, Tyson was offering a $500 bonus to employees if they worked for three months without missing a day. So, she went in to work, where she labored shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of other workers slicing chicken carcasses – thousands of them a day. She soon became too ill to continue, checked herself into a hospital, and later died of COVID-19. Two of her co-workers died of the same disease within days. Tyson later implemented social distancing measures, installed dividers between stations, slowed production lines, and took employee temperatures before allowing them into the plant.
Those steps could and should have been taken long before, but Tyson had other priorities. Vice President Pence had told poultry workers that they were part of the nation's critical infrastructure and needed to continue to work. And there was money on the line.
Grant, McGarity observed, was in a position many American workers find themselves in right now. They can go to work and risk their lives, or they can stay home and risk losing their jobs. With meatpacking plants ordered open by President Trump, workers who stay home to stay safe could lose both their jobs and their unemployment checks.
Now, to compound the problem, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the White House are moving to pass legislation that would insulate Tyson and other companies from liability for failing to provide a safe workplace – thus disincentivizing them to take reasonable measures if it costs them more than they care to pay. The clear message: Money first, workers second.
Duff brings not just his experience as a law professor to the issue, but his years as a Teamster. He describes in specific terms the safety shortcuts inherent in some blue-collar jobs – lack of control over physical space, work occurring in close quarters with others, and working at a fixed and often too fast speed.
Listen or download the podcast here.
This is Verchick's second Connect the Dots episode focused on the coronavirus. Last month, he interviewed Dr. Andrew Duxbury, a Birmingham, Alabama, geriatrician and professor of medicine, about the unique challenges posed by the pandemic. Verchick and Duxbury are old friends, and that comes through in the conversation, particularly when the conversation turns to Duxbury's work in local theater. You can listen or download that conversation here.
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Matthew Freeman | May 8, 2020
In the latest episode of CPR Board President Rob Verchick's Connect the Dots podcast, he and CPR Member Scholars Michael Duff and Thomas McGarity explore worker safety issues in the era of the coronavirus. McGarity begins the conversation with the story of Annie Grant, a 15-year veteran of the packing line at a Tyson Food poultry processing plant in Camilla, Georgia. One morning in late March, weeks after the nation had awakened to the danger of the coronavirus and states had begun locking down, she felt feverish. When her children urged her to stay home rather than work with a fever on the chilled poultry line, she told them that the company insisted that she continue to work.
Daniel Farber | May 7, 2020
If we get a vaccine against a national epidemic, could Congress pass a law requiring everyone to get vaccinated? That very question was asked during the Supreme Court argument in the 2012 constitutional challenge to Obamacare’s individual mandate. The lawyer challenging Obamacare said, “No, Congress couldn’t do that.”
Matthew Freeman | May 7, 2020
In a recent op-ed in the Waco Tribune-Herald, CPR Board Member Thomas McGarity lays bare the real cost of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's efforts to extend a liability shield over businesses that endanger employees or customers by failing to take adequate precautions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Such a shield, he writes, would "destroy a powerful incentive for companies to protect their workers, their consumers, and their neighbors from this invisible killer."
Michael C. Duff | May 6, 2020
In what for me is an ominous development, the Smithfield Foods public nuisance case, about which I blogged earlier, has been summarily denied by a Missouri federal district court and the case has been dismissed. The decision took all of twelve days. In a nutshell, the court accepted the primary jurisdiction arguments that I have previously discussed but will not repeat here. Sometimes cases are illustrative of clear legal principles. This, for me, is not one of those cases. Sometimes cases set "mood points." And I fear that is the situation here. I have great concern about the prospect for an unreflective, anti-liability fervor enveloping the Great Reopening, though this decision did not directly reach questions of liability that could impact state workers' compensation or tort law.
Matthew Freeman | May 6, 2020
One of the most telling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been its disparate impact on minority communities in the United States. At least three factors seem to be at work in the elevated death rate: uneven access to health care, greater prevalence of preexisting (and often inadequately treated) comorbidities, and greater likelihood of on-the-job exposure. Writing in the Boston Globe last week, CPR Member Scholar Shalanda Baker, together with co-authors Alecia McGregor, Camara Jones, and Michelle Morse, point out yet another way that the pandemic is taking a particular toll on low-income communities and communities of color.
Darya Minovi | May 5, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the globe, public health data continues to show that the virus’s worst effects are felt by communities already weighed down by the burden of multiple social and environmental stressors. As of May 3, in CPR’s home city of Washington, DC, African Americans account for 79 percent of coronavirus deaths, despite making up only 45 percent of the city’s population and 47 percent of diagnosed cases. This inequitable trend appears to be playing out across the country. These issues and more were addressed last week in CPR’s fourth installment of our climate justice webinar series, titled, “Vulnerability and Resilience to COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis.” The featured speakers were Dan Farber, Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, and Dr. Aaron Bernstein.
Michael C. Duff | May 5, 2020
As Senate Republicans and corporations continue to lobby for the broadest possible "liability shields" in connection with the Great Reopening, a novel lawsuit framed in terms of public nuisance theory is being litigated in a Missouri federal court.
Matt Shudtz, Rachel Micah-Jones | May 4, 2020
President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to order meat and poultry plants to continue operating despite COVID-19 outbreaks, exposing Maryland's poultry workers to enormous risks. Poultry processors haven't demonstrated they're able to keep workers safe and healthy, but they know that many of these low-wage workers will be forced to return. To top it all off, one of the president's goals with this order was to provide legal immunity to companies, so that they can't be sued by employees who are infected as a result of unsafe working conditions.
Sean B. Hecht | May 4, 2020
For decades, "states' rights" has been a rallying cry of the right wing. Most Americans are familiar with the dynamics that required the federalization of civil rights law, both in the 1860s and again in the 1960s, the protection of much of our nation's federal lands, and the national crises that necessitated the federal government to enact national minimum standards to protect public health and the environment. Many of us are also familiar with the right-wing backlash to these movements—indeed, the devolving of baseline environmental standards and public land management to the state and local level has been a keystone of the political right since at least Ronald Reagan's presidency. But federalism—the division of authority between state and local governments, on one hand, and the federal government on the other—doesn't have to tilt in one (rightward) political direction.