72,000 Food Workers Have Contracted COVID-19. OSHA Is Ignoring Them.

“It’s seriously disappointing and dangerous the way the head of the Labor Department has been running OSHA.”

Dr. Niki Davis joins a protest in Salt Lake City on July 30, 2020, to lobby Gov. Gary Herbert to close meatpacking plants in the state. The protest was organized by members of the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which contends meatpacking plants have contributed to too many coronavirus cases in Utah and across the US.Rick Bowmer/AP

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

This story was originally published by the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN).
Produced with FERN, non-profit reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health.

While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been heavily criticized for its handling of workplace COVID-19 outbreaks, California and a handful of other states have implemented more rigorous workplace safety regulations that experts say better protect food and farm workers from the virus.

Regulators in California and Oregon have fined agricultural employers more than $400,000—twice as much as the fines handed out so far by federal OSHA—for workplace violations linked to the pandemic. About half the states, like California and Oregon, have their own OSHA offices, and half are regulated under federal OSHA.

Labor and workplace safety experts say that federal OSHA’s enforcement should more closely resemble those states’ use of fines, stiffer regulations, and new legislation that boosts employers’ requirements to protect workers as the pandemic enters its eighth month.

“At the federal level, it’s seriously disappointing and dangerous the way the head of the Labor Department has been running OSHA,” says Mara Ortenburger, director of communications and research at Worksafe, a California-based organization that promotes safety rights in the workplace. “In contrast, in California, despite being understaffed, we are in much better shape.”

Federal OSHA has been criticized for months for investigating few worker complaints during the pandemic. The agency has levied only small fines against just a few employers in the agriculture sector, despite thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths among workers. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network’s COVID-19 database, more than 1,400 food and farm facilities have had confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 72,000 workers have contracted the virus. At least 327 have died.

In California, Ortenburger says, advocates and regulators have worked quickly to address a host of new questions employers have faced during the pandemic, especially those in sectors, like agriculture, that have seen a high number of outbreaks. 

“If a worker at a plant gets sick from COVID, employers were asking, is that on us to report?” she says. “What if they got sick at home?”

In response, the state strengthened Cal/OSHA recording and reporting requirements, mandating that employers report all serious injuries, illnesses, or deaths occurring at work, according to the agency’s website.

California legislators also passed a law, set to go into effect Jan. 1, that will require employers to notify all workers of any potential workplace exposure to COVID-19. It would also allow Cal/OSHA to shut down a worksite that exposes workers to the disease, and issue citations for serious violations without advance notice. And it would require employers to notify local public health agencies of all workplace outbreaks.

Cal/OSHA has already levied nearly $400,000 in fines against food and farm employers for workplace safety violations linked to COVID-19. In October, five were fined—Olson Meat Company ($9,000), DL Poultry Inc. ($36,000), Overhill Farms Inc. ($110,000), Pitman Family Farms ($18,000), and Duncan Family Farms ($5,060)—for not flagging and correcting unhealthy conditions or work practices related to COVID-19.

Data from FERN’s map of California outbreaks shows a total of 3,825 confirmed cases on farms, 1,339 at meatpacking facilities, and 1,242 at food processing plants in the state.

Oregon OSHA has also taken tougher measures to penalize employers during the pandemic than its federal counterpart. It fined National Frozen Foods in Albany $2,000 for failing to implement physical distancing to protect workers from spreading the coronavirus, according to the agency’s site. It also published a draft mandatory workplace health rule on Oct. 23 that would clarify reporting requirements for employers.

Federal OSHA has taken comparatively little action in response to COVID-19 outbreaks at food and farm facilities. In September, the agency cited Smithfield Foods with a $13,494 proposed penalty for failing to protect employees at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota, plant from exposure to the coronavirus. Nearly 1,300 workers contracted the virus at that meatpacking plant in a spring outbreak, and four died.

On Oct. 23, OSHA announced two more minor actions: Conagra was hit with a $2,121 fine linked to a 42-case outbreak at its plant in Marshall, Missouri, and JBS was fined $13,494 over a 348-case outbreak at its plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Labor advocates say the fines were too small to have any real impact on what are multibillion-dollar companies.

Some states with the highest case counts among workers in the food and farm sector, including South Dakota, Colorado, and Florida, are under federal OSHA enforcement, meaning they are subject to the agency’s enforcement decisions.

Federal OSHA has also not heeded pleas from workers’ advocates and Democratic lawmakers for an emergency temporary workplace standard, which would create enforceable safety guidelines for employers during the pandemic. Some states, like Virginia and Michigan, have passed workplace standards that are stronger than the federal voluntary guidelines.

Mark Lauritsen, director of the food processing and meatpacking division of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, told FERN that he wanted to see federal action in the form of an enforceable emergency standard for meatpacking workers. “I don’t want guidelines,” he said. “I want standards. It has to be in every facility in the United States.”

Peter Dooley, safety and health senior project coordinator at the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a Massachusetts-based organization, said that federal OSHA’s lack of enforcement has put food workers at very high risk since the beginning of the pandemic. “The whole industry has really been very ill-prepared to protect workers,” he said.

Throughout the pandemic, workers in food and farm settings have reported unsafe working conditions, including limited access to personal protective equipment, inability to obtain paid time off, and lack of access to testing. Federal OSHA has completed few inspections in response to worker complaints. 

OSHA also recently stopped issuing news releases announcing workplace violations and citations, per a Sept. 24 memo from Deputy Secretary Patrick Pizzella instructing OSHA to instead share a weekly summary of proposed penalties.

That lack of information could itself make workplaces more dangerous, experts say. Researcher Matthew S. Johnson, an assistant professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, published a study on June 18 demonstrating a 73 percent improvement in compliance by other facilities after company names are revealed in OSHA press releases.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate