Conditions in US Meatpacking Plants Today Aren’t Much Better Than They Were in The Jungle
Decades after Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking, radical labor organizing transformed the industry into a bastion of worker power. Now, a century later, after decades of union-busting and the coronavirus decimating workers throughout the industry, the meatpacking industry is back to The Jungle.
Chicago’s Union Stock Yards, which inspired Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. (Library of Congress)
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.
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