To the Virginia Safety and Health Codes Board:

On behalf of our 27,000 Food and Water Watch members, we urge you to mandate employers practice COVID-19 safety worker protections. Currently the draft emergency temporary standard plan does not require employers to enact the most comprehensive protection measures for meatpacking workers due to the job’s standing as being low to medium risk for COVID-19. However, Virginia’s meat packing plants have shown to be COVID-19 hotspots therefore we also urge the board to include the following provisions regarding meatpacking worker safety in the finalized emergency temporary standard plan. 

A meatpacking employer must:

• Notify local health departments and facility workers immediately when an employee tests positive for COVID-19 with companies providing information on:

  • The department(s) and shift(s) worked by the employees testing positive for COVID-19. This is a continuing request for information if other employees test positive for the COVID- 19 virus.

  • The names of all employees who worked in those department(s) and shift(s) on days when the COVID-19 positive employees last worked.

  • The date or dates last worked by the employees testing positive for the COVID-19 virus.

• Send workers home who fail the temperature test and pay them at their regular rate of pay

• Enforce social and physical distancing

• Provide proper and adequate on-the-job personal protective equipment (PPE) including but not limited to gloves, masks, face shields, smocks and other appropriate PPE in order to prevent any transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

• Provide COVID-19 safety training

• Provide rapid and reliable free testing to employees

• Protect workers from retaliation

• Provide mandatory paid quarantine and paid sick leave

• Provide workers' compensation to assume that COVID19 was acquired in the workplace for any of these frontline essential workers

• When an outbreak occurs, close the responsible department for a minimum of 72 hours to sanitize worker area and pay this department’s workers at their regular rate for hours closed

• Install Plexiglass shielding between workstations, especially on the deboning lines where some poultry companies are currently forcing employees to work shoulder to shoulder without proper PPE

• Set a schedule to ensure that all frequently touched surfaces are sanitized on a regular basis during the work day

Our organization believes meatpacking workers must have the above provisions in order to adequately protect themselves from COVID-19. Considering meatpacking plants have shown to be COVID-19 hotspots across the country, mandated safety measures for jobs designated as low to medium risk for COVID-19, meatpacking worker job’s current label, are not enough to protect these frontline workers and their communities. However, the passing of the emergency temporary standard plan which would enact some protective measures is a necessary first step that should have been taken at the start of the pandemic. As the state reopens with the strong possibility for renewed COVID-19 outbreaks, the Virginia Safety and Health Codes Board should include the provisions listed above to comprehensively address health issues related to COVID-19 that meatpacking workers are experiencing now and for the foreseeable future.