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By Friday, over eleven thousand coronavirus cases had been confirmed with ties to the US meatpacking industry. At least forty-nine meatpacking workers had died of COVID-19. The workers who died worked at twenty-seven different plants across eighteen states.

The virus is so widespread in the meat processing industry that forty plants have shuttered, either because they were ordered to by public health officials or because so many workers were out sick that ordinary production was impossible.

The closures have threatened to cause meat shortages, prompting Donald Trump to pass an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act commanding that they stay open. Due to the severity of the ongoing health crisis, the plant closures have continued in violation of Trump’s executive order, leading the Department of Agriculture to warn that “further action” would be taken against companies if they don’t reopen plants as soon as possible.

Meat shortages won’t lead to hunger, but they will cause meat suppliers to lose money, and inspire frustration in meat-loving consumers who are also, often enough, voters. To avoid these outcomes, the Trump administration is scrambling to preserve the integrity of the meat supply chain.

One strategy has been to displace blame for coronavirus cases in meatpacking onto workers themselves. On Thursday, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said that the sickness and death of meatpacking workers, their family members, and others in their communities were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of meatpackers’ lives than conditions in the plants. He even menacingly suggested sending law enforcement into the neighborhoods where meatpacking workers live to enforce social distancing.

But while Azar is playing dumb, meatpacking companies have themselves acknowledged that there are special problems inside their facilities that make them vulnerable to contagion. Smithfield Foods, one of the largest meat processing companies in the United States, published a statement saying, “There are inescapable realities about our industry . . . Meat processing facilities, which are characterized by labor-intensive assembly-line style production, are not designed for social distancing.” There’s no doubt that conditions inside factories are indeed responsible for the spread of the virus.

It’s not a coincidence that workers are getting sick in plant after plant, all across the country. One major reason that meat processing workers have become hotbeds of coronavirus lies in the labor-intensive nature of the work itself. Assembling the geometric and standardized parts of an automobile is a more machine-friendly task than disassembling organic material like meat. While advances in automation have changed the industry already and continue to do so, many stages of production still require human hands, and therefore a lot of humans.

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