The analysis supports what many meatpacking workers and advocates suspected during the early months of the pandemic — working shoulder-to-shoulder coupled with high line speeds contributed to the virus’ spread.
At times, the H-2A visa program that brings non-citizen farmworkers to the U.S. has been used to facilitate human trafficking, experts and activisits said. But the number of people trafficked through the program appears to have increased.
OSHA and USDA waited until April of last year — more than three months into the pandemic and after a plant shut down because workers fell ill — to plan a response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases at meatpacking plants, according to emails obtained by Public Citizen.
USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting spent five months piecing together the pivotal moments in the Triumph Foods outbreak, interviewing more than a dozen current and former workers and examining thousands of pages of government records.
Even as thousands of their employees fell ill with COVID-19, meatpacking executives pressured federal regulators to help keep their plants open, according to a trove of emails obtained by USA TODAY and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
Although agriculture is a $31 billion industry in Iowa, it’s a topic absent from this election season’s share of presidential stump speeches. That’s not all too surprising, though. Instead of getting involved in presidential elections, major agribusinesses have historically chosen to pump their mone
