Keeping Our Workers Safe
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is calling on President Trump to take several specific health and safety measures in support of his recently signed executive order to keep the country’s meat processing plants in operation.
The President invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure that beef, pork, poultry, and egg production is able to continue during the pandemic. The UFCW is demanding that workers’ health be protected through access to PPE, regular testing, enforced distancing procedures, and paid sick leave. Several plants have closed recently due to worker illness and various health issues related to the COVID outbreak. Thousands of workers have been infected and several have died — “at least 20 meatpacking workers,” as of April 28, according to a UFCW press release.
Simply put, we cannot have a secure food supply without the safety of these workers. We urge the Administration to immediately enact clear and enforceable safety standards that compel all meatpacking companies to provide the highest level of protective equipment through access to the federal stockpile of PPE, ensure daily testing is available for workers and their communities, enforce physical distancing at all plants, and provide full paid sick leave for any workers who are infected. Additionally, to protect the food supply and ensure these safety standards for workers are enforced, these plants must be constantly monitored by federal inspectors and workers must have access to representation to ensure their rights are not violated.
http://www.ufcw.org/press/
According to an NPR report, President Trump told reporters that ” he is working on a plan ‘to solve any liability problems’ for meat processors. No details on what that means, though the emphasis on “liability problems” would suggest his concern is more for corporate inconvenience than worker safety.
Catholic Social Teaching has a longstanding tradition of upholding the rights and the dignity of workers, even where our national policies have not. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum stated that “the first concern of all is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.” (RN 42)
When these men of greed are running the government charged with protecting its people, however, it’s up to all of us. We must stand in solidarity with our essential workers and insist on their good health and well being. We’re all in this together, and it’s vital we look after each other.
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