COVID-19 is ravaging the upper Midwest, where meat processing plants have become viral flash points and nodes of community infection. In Iowa alone, major outbreaks have hit Columbus Junction, Waterloo, Perry, and Marshalltown, all places with significant meatpacking operations. The western Iowa packing town of Sioux City is experiencing one of the highest infection rates in the entire country, topping the list in recent weeks and sitting at number two as of this morning.

Mitigation efforts in the plants have been uneven and haphazard. Job sites shuttered after outbreaks are now reopening. Iowa’s narrow interpretation of eligibility for unemployment insurance is leaving workers few options but to return to the line. And President Trump’s executive order keeping packing plants up and running offers only unenforceable platitudes about worker health and safety. As one worker at Waterloo’s Tyson plant confided to Iowa’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in mid-April, “I was afraid I would die if I kept going to work.”

It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, Trump’s invocation of the Defense Production Act reminds us that — when that act was passed on the eve of the Korean War in 1950 — the nation’s packing plants were very different places. In the middle of the century, thanks to the organizing efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), line workers in Iowa and around the Midwest earned decent wages and wielded substantial say on the shop floor. Today’s deadly conditions do not reflect the innate danger or character of meat processing work, but rather the loss of that union presence. The assault on organized labor, to put it bluntly, has turned meatpacking workers into sacrificial lambs.