They have been ultimately provided a selection of nations wherein to settle, amongst them Canada, Australia, and Norway. They picked america, having heard that this was a spot the place a hard-working immigrant may all the time discover a job. They landed in Denver in the summertime of 2012, figuring out nobody and talking no English. Aye acquired a job working nights on the slaughterhouse in Greeley, an hour’s drive north. She carpooled with different Karen immigrants, leaving for the plant within the early afternoon and returning at 4 within the morning.
The work was grueling and relentless. Aye got here dwelling with an aching again, swollen fingers, and bruises on her legs. She additionally returned soaked—not solely due to the misting chemical substances and spray jets, however as a result of lavatory breaks have been so rare that she generally urinated in her garments.
She began at $12 an hour, which appeared like some huge cash.
Because the pandemic emerged, San Twin’s concern of shedding her mom was compounded by the truth that she was pregnant.
“My mom was the one household that I had,” Twin informed me as we sat on the ground of her dwelling in Denver in December 2021. She was practically thirty, and about to open her personal restaurant.
Her son Felix, then twenty months outdated, sat quietly in her lap, gazing on the older girl within the framed photograph on the lounge wall. Aye wore glasses and was draped in a white lace scarf, her steely resolve giving technique to a heat smile. Right here was the grandmother that Felix would by no means meet.
“I mentioned, ‘Please don’t work within the plant anymore,’” Twin informed me. “She mentioned, ‘I’ve to pay the payments. I’m robust. I’ll be okay.’”
Aye was among the many practically 300 staff on the Greeley slaughterhouse who examined optimistic for COVID-19 in the course of the first a number of months of the pandemic, and one in all a minimum of 5 individuals who died. And the Greeley plant was merely one facility inside an infinite business consumed by the virus. Throughout america, 59,000 meatpacking staff contracted COVID-19 over the course of 2020, with 269 folks dying.
That so many unusual staff discovered themselves in hurt’s means within the midst of a pandemic was no mere misfortune. It was a direct outgrowth of the enterprise plans pursued by their company bosses. The biggest agribusiness conglomerates had positioned the imperatives of their shareholders above the welfare of their workers.
Worse, they manufactured fears of a meat scarcity to achieve the complicity of the American authorities. They fomented public alarm over potential disruption to the meals provide as a technique to justify the final word sacrifice of their staff—all within the service of boosting their earnings.
On April 18, 2020, a physician at a hospital within the Texas panhandle emailed JBS to warn the corporate that its slaughterhouse within the close by city of Cactus was the supply of an intensifying wave of COVID-19.
“100% of all COVID-19 sufferers we’ve within the hospital are both direct workers or members of the family of your workers,” the physician wrote. “We consider there’s a main outbreak of COVID-19 an infection in your Cactus facility.” He added: “Your workers will get sick and will die if this manufacturing unit continues to be open.”
However the plant remained in operation. Ten days later, President Trump intervened to make sure that it could keep that means. He cited the Protection Manufacturing Act—a regulation relationship again to the Korean Warfare—in signing an govt order barring the shutdown of meatpacking crops as a risk to nationwide safety. “Such closures threaten the continued functioning of the nationwide meat and poultry provide chain, undermining crucial infrastructure in the course of the nationwide emergency,” Trump’s order declared. “Given the excessive quantity of meat and poultry processed by many amenities, any pointless closures can rapidly have a big impact on the meals provide chain.”
