I am a member of the Steering Committee for Community Solidarity with the Poultry Workers, a community organization that has organized and advocated with and for poultry workers in the Shenandoah Valley since 2015. Community Solidarity is part of a statewide coalition that includes the Legal Aid Justice Center, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy and Virginia Organizing. Community Solidarity strongly supports, and has been working in support of, the proposed regulation Emergency Temporary Standard/Emergency Regulation 16 VAC-25-220 for workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Poultry workers in the Shenandoah Valley are deeply afraid of the possibility of retaliation from their employers if they exercise their legal rights to organize or even to complain to VOSH about safety and health problems at work. Most poultry workers are either immigrants, many undocumented or refugees, who are easily intimidated. They may not speak the language or adequately understand what their rights are and whether those rights will be effectively enforced by state authority.
The anti-immigrant and refugee policies of the Trump administration have increased the level of fear and anxiety among these workers that the government will not protect them if they speak out in any way or attempt to organize. The result is a culture of fear. Most workers suffer in silence.
So far only two poultry workers in the Shenandoah Valley have had the extraordinary courage to speak out publicly about the failure of the poultry companies to take adequate measures to protect their workers from COVID-19. Other workers were willing to file formal complaints from most of the plants in the area, through the Legal Aid Justice Center as their representative, because their identities were protected. VOSH responded to their complaints by sending letters to the poultry companies instructing them to address the problem and to reply in a letter documenting how they had done this. To our knowledge, no actual inspections by VOSH of the poultry companies to verify that these companies are, in fact, adequately addressing these problems occurred. Without mandatory standards that is all VOSH could do. We must empower VOSH so they can do their job. This is why we urgently need mandatory, enforceable standards so that actual inspections and sanctions when needed can take place. We cannot rely on the claims made by poultry companies. We must have independent and expert verification. This is just common sense.
The history of illness, injury and death suffered by workers since the advent of the industrial revolution in the United States leaves no room for believing that industries driven by the motive of private profit will adequately regulate themselves. Public interest groups like Human Rights Watch, Oxfam America, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Nebraska Apple Seed and government agencies like the General Accounting Office, the National Institute of Safety and Health and OSHA have documented in detail the fact that the poultry industry is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat Furthermore, the GAO, NIOSH and OSHA have documented the systematic efforts of the meat and poultry companies to under-report these injuries and illnesses. https://www.nelp.org/blog/poultry-processing-industry-underreporting-workplace-injuries-fouls-bls-workplace-injury-data/
I wish to God I could be more optimistic about the poultry companies self-regulating during COVID-19. But the facts revealed by investigators and the painful stories of worker after worker collected by these researchers, as well as the stories we personally have heard from workers, do not permit any such optimism. This is the reason we have regulatory institutions like VOSH.
If it is necessary to have such enforceable safety and health regulations during normal periods, is it not glaringly obvious that they are even more necessary during the worst pandemic since the Great Flu of 1918? Is it not obvious that highly vulnerable and nearly powerless workers, entirely lacking in union representation, many with immigration status problems and language and cultural barriers, absolutely require the protection of the state from inadequate implementation of safety measures by their employers? Is it not our moral and spiritual obligation to provide that protection? Does not the best in our spiritual traditions demand as a moral imperative that we welcome the stranger and protect the vulnerable and powerless among us?
We are in the midst of a historic multiracial movement to finally bring an end to systematic racism in our society. Protecting the many people of color that, not only work in the poultry plants, but in so many other areas of work at risk for COVID-19 in Virginia, would be wholly in the spirit of this historical movement against the most devastating sickness that has afflicted America since it’s beginnings in the early 17th century: systematic racism.
“If anyone of us gets sick we all get sick.” These words of an immigrant, Latinx poultry worker in Arkansas express the reality for poultry workers but it is also the reality for their and our communities. Counties with meat packing plants are twice as likely to have significant outbreaks of COVID-19 as other counties. https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19s-impact-on-meatpacking-workers-and-industry/
Basic science dictates that in a dangerous pandemic potential hot spots like meat and poultry processing plants must be watched closely by health authorities like VOSH. Whistle blower protections can empower workers to identify problems that need to be investigated before they cause outbreaks that can spread to the larger community and quickly become far more difficult to control. This is not just a matter of the health and safety of poultry workers, it is also about the health and safety of the communities in which they live.
That is why, on June 18, 2020, the Harrisonburg City Council voted unanimously in favor of the following resolution which I urge you to read in full at the url below:
“BE IT RESOLVED that the Harrisonburg City Council urges the Virginia Safety and Health Codes Board to approve the emergency regulations and standards related to the coronavirus developed by the Commissioner in order to protect all workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.”