Consider This from NPR - The Cost Of Being "Essential"

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

From NPR's Embedded: The workers who produce pork, chicken, and beef in plants around the country have been deemed "essential" by the government and their employers. Now, the factories where they work have become some of the largest clusters for the coronavirus in the country. The workers, many of whom are immigrants, say their bosses have not done enough to protect them. Regular episodes return tomorrow. This episode was recorded and published as part of this podcast's former 'Coronavirus Daily' format.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Monday, May 25th. Good morning. Thank you very much for participating. It's March 24th, about 10 days after cities around the U.S. started shutting down because of COVID-19. Workers are getting furloughed, businesses are closing, and about 500 people in the U.S. have already died.

But Ken Sullivan, the CEO of the world's biggest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, is on a conference call telling investors that everything at the company is fine. We are operating all our plants at 100 percent. So there's been no impact so far from COVID-19. What Sullivan is saying here is that despite all the warnings at that point, that people in close contact with others could spread a potentially deadly disease, the business of putting people in plants to process pork is going forward because the government considers pork production essential. We have been asked to continue to run our operations

at full speed. One investment analyst asks if Sullivan is worried that people won't show up to work. He says he's not. I think they are grateful to have jobs and a paycheck when so many in the U.S. are afraid of losing their job or already have. The risk is that employees get scared and therefore do not want to operate the plants. Still, he says he is not worried. So far, that has not been an issue. I don't really expect it to be an issue. But it turns out that same day, maybe even at the exact same moment, Ken Sullivan was on that conference call. News was spreading through a Smithfield factory in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from manager to manager and down the line of workers. The virus is here. Someone in the plant has tested positive.

What happened next at this Smithfield factory eventually made national news, because that one positive case, of course, turned into more cases. Then the situation got out of control in a way that seemed totally avoidable. And this massive facility that had been deemed essential was forced to make some major changes, which led us to ask, what or who is essential, really? This is a story we first told on the other podcast I host, NPR's Embedded, and it's a story we're bringing you here today. Tomorrow, we'll return with a regular episode. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. So before we get started, we should say Ken Sullivan did not agree to talk to us. In a press release, the company did confirm there was a positive test the day before that conference call. And the reporter who has been looking into all of this for us is Dan Charles.

He covers the food and agriculture industry for NPR, and he's going to take it from here. Here's Dan. Right around the time that Ken Sullivan was telling investors on that conference call that basically everything was fine, workers at the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota were starting to think, it's not fine. My mother would come home every day and she would tell me about how there were rumors that there were more people who are sick, that she was really worried about what was happening. This is Sarah Tellehuh. Her mom works at the plant along with 3,700 other people. Most of them, like Sarah's mom, are immigrants. The company has warned employees not to talk to the media and she's scared of jeopardizing her job. So Sarah's been talking on her mom's behalf. She didn't really know how to be safe or what steps to take when it came to protecting herself. They didn't have any protective gear.

They didn't have any masks. They didn't have anything that could protect them from getting sick at work. And this is Nancy Reynosa. Years ago, she worked at the plant. Now she's a real estate agent and runs a local news service for Spanish speakers. Nancy says she got a call from a friend at the plant who was worried. Because he had seen that a lot of people had been leaving or not coming to work, and that there was some rumors that there were several people sick in the company, and they were afraid. At first I said, you know what, I'm sure your company is doing everything they can to protect you.

That was my first instinct and that's what I told this person. Your company is doing what they can to protect you. But workers we spoke to said they weren't getting much information from the company. There was never a general announcement about how many people had gotten sick, how many were in quarantine, where they worked. Workers didn't know that the state health department was telling the plant's managers day by day which employees had gone to a clinic, tested positive. They just knew some people weren't showing up for work anymore. And what they did hear from the company, they say, felt like mixed messages. On the one hand, they saw signs on the walls of the plant saying, if you feel sick, stay home, take sick leave.

But at the same time, about a week after the first employee tested positive, the company also announced what it called a responsibility bonus. $500 for any employee who didn't miss a single day of work from April 1 to the 1st of May. Now, the policy did say if you have symptoms for COVID-19, you can call in sick and you'll still get the bonus. But a lot of people at the plant did not understand that. I assume that people was coming to work to get that 500 bonus, even if they are sick. This is a worker we're calling A, which is one of his initials. It's not his real voice. Like a lot of workers at the plant, he's scared to talk to the press and risk losing his job. This is a voiceover of exactly what he told us on tape. Everybody knew the first rule for stopping the virus at this point, stay six feet away. But in the plant,

A says, that was basically impossible. Workers stand facing each other on both sides of what people in the industry sometimes describe as an assembly line in reverse. They're cutting whole hog carcasses into pieces with knives. You stand very close to other employees. If I'm getting infected, know that it's easy that the other guy is going to get it right away. The ones that are facing each other, how far apart are they? It's really close. In some departments, it's like even not one arm length, even less than one arm length.

I see. So if you reached out your arm, you would touch the other person? Sure. He says at the start of the pandemic, the company didn't provide face coverings. Now, to be fair, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not recommending widespread use of masks at that time. But some workers took matters into their own hands. For example, A took an airline sleep mask, the kind people use to cover their eyes, and he wore it over his nose and mouth. Some department, the managers, they didn't allow employees to have a face mask. They didn't allow employees to have a face mask? Right.

Because why? They say it is out of company policy. I don't know. Nancy Reynosa, who runs that local Spanish-language news service, says employees were also facing pressure to come into work, despite the danger. A friend of mine told his boss that he was going to quit because he felt afraid for his family. And he said the words from his boss were that he was failing the American people by leaving.

Failing the American people? Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah. It's outrageous. This is the same Nancy Reynosa who, at the start of this story, told another friend that she thought Smithfield was doing everything it could to protect its workers. As you can probably hear, Nancy no longer thought that. More and more, she worried about her friends at the plant, like Augustine Rodriguez, who she

describes as a quiet man in his 60s. Rodriguez told Reynosa he'd started feeling sick in late March, but he didn't think it was COVID-19 and he didn't stop going to work. I mean, I had myself told him, I don't want you going anywhere. I need you to stay put. If you need to buy groceries, call me. I'll take them to you. He just thought, I'm a macho man. I can do this. I can work. At some point, he just felt too sick to go to work. A few days later, he was in the hospital on a ventilator. Almost two weeks after the first worker tested positive for the coronavirus, Smithfield was starting to ramp up protections. The week of April 6th, they put a tent outside the facility to take employees' temperatures before they came in. The local of April 6th, they put a tent outside the facility to take employees'

temperatures before they came in. The local paper, the Argus Leader, reported that dozens of people had high temperatures and were sent home. They started distributing face shields and installing partitions to separate workers. But as Dan Charles found, that did not stop the virus. On the 8th of April, two weeks after the first Smithfield worker was reported sick with the coronavirus, a reporter named Kelly Volk from KELOLAND-TV was covering a state health department press conference about the virus. And she asked the secretary of the Department of Health, Kim Malsom-Ryston, a question that Smithfield workers have been wondering about for two weeks. Can you say how many COVID cases are connected to the facility?

That number has changed every day. And as of yesterday, there were over 80 cases connected to individuals working there. More than 80. It was about a fifth of all the cases in South Dakota. I said, I can't sit idly by. That is Paul Tenhaken, the mayor of Sioux Falls. 42 years old, Republican. He's only been mayor for two years. I have to take some action, and in this case, some public action to try and get this resolved. Tenhaken made a call to one of the top guys at the Smithfield plant. He says the conversation got tense. The

Smithfield managers felt like he was grandstanding, trying to paint them as villains. And so I had to make sure they knew, listen, this is just doing the right thing. And I'm in an incredibly difficult spot right now with the safety of my community. So the plant managers assured Tenhaken that they were dealing with it. We've got a plan, they said. We're going to shut the plant down for three days, do a big cleanup. For Tenhaken, this seemed like a good sign. The company was willing to close temporarily to protect worker safety. That may not sound like a big deal for an Arby's or something to close for three days, but this is 3,700 jobs, the third largest

pork plant in the country. That's a big deal. And that you felt like, okay, maybe they got it under control. I did, yeah. The worker we're calling A, though, he did not feel comforted by this news. I was laughing. You know, you're not going to clean all those eight floor or ten floor by three days. You're not going to isolate who is sick. You're not going to do anything by those three days. Sarah Tellehoon, whose mom works at the plant, says she and some of her friends whose parents work there were scared and angry. But their parents didn't want to make waves or challenge the company. Every time we have a conversation with them, they say, don't worry about it. It's going to be okay.

But Sarah wasn't so sure. Local activists like Nancy Reynosa felt the same way. They decided they needed to take action, plan a protest. They didn't think a three-day pause was enough to protect the workers. They wanted a 14-day shutdown, long enough to get people tested, figure out how to make the plant safer. Thursday evening, the 9th of April, they all met up at Falls Park along the river. It had to be a socially distant protest, so they stayed in their cars, drove to the plant. They circled the parking lots and the towering buildings with the name Smithfield on top, filled with people working the evening shift.

It brought tears to my eyes to see it was over 100 cars, and it was about a mile long protest. And then we started to get phone calls from workers inside. And they were saying, thank you. We see you guys. Thank you. They were inside the plant and they were calling out. They were looking out the windows and they were saying, thank you. Everybody here is saying, It felt good. But Smithfield didn't react. The plan was still a three-day shutdown, starting on Saturday, the 11th of April. As the weekend approached, though, Mayor Tenhaken started hearing that the shutdown wasn't really a shutdown. It was more like a slowdown for cleaning.

Workers were calling him, saying they were supposed to report for duty. He says he felt frustrated. And then on the morning of the 11th, he heard the news that 238 people connected to the plant had now tested positive for the coronavirus. It had tripled in just a few days. For Tenhaken, that number was the breaking point. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us on a Saturday. I really appreciate it. Before calling this press conference, Mayor Tenhaken had called Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, and they had agreed on a plan. We did send a joint letter to the leadership at Smithfield Foods probably about an hour ago,

calling for a 14-day pause of their operations. The following day, Sunday, Smithfield announced it was suspending operations at its Sioux Falls plant indefinitely. And new this morning, one of the country's biggest pork processing plants has to close down because of the coronavirus. The workers will get up to 80 hours of paid time off while the plant is closed. But Ken Sullivan, the CEO of Smithfield, made it clear he did not think that this was the right thing to do. We believe it is our obligation to help feed the country, now more than ever, he said in a statement that the company released. We have a stark choice as a nation. We are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.

It was the same thing he'd said on that conference call with investors. Meatpacking plants are essential. The people who make their living raising hogs certainly think so. Sullivan's decision had consequences. Suddenly, farmers had no place to send their full-grown pigs and no room for the new piglets that are born every day. They let Mayor Tenhaken know they were not happy. I had a guy reach out to my office and he says, you know, Mayor, you need to get that place open because I just had a euthanized 3,000 pigs and you can do the math on what that would cost. Over the past month, a bunch of other meatpacking plants also have been forced to suspend operations. Tyson plants in Iowa and Indiana,

JBS plants in Colorado and Minnesota, a Cargill plant in Nebraska. Thousands of workers have gotten sick in these plants. More than two dozen have died. One of those deaths was Nancy Reynosa's friend, Augustin Rodriguez, the man who got sick but tried to keep working. He was 64 years old. His widow, Angelita, told the local newspaper, the Argus Leader, I lost him because of that horrible place. A second Smithfield worker, Craig Franken, died the following Sunday at age 61. It's been weeks since the Smithfield plant closed. It's now starting to reopen just a little bit at a time with some changes that

are supposed to make it safer. The company and the state health department organized free drive-through coronavirus testing for all Smithfield employees at a high school parking lot in Sioux Falls. Thousands of people turned out. But testing now, once, doesn't guarantee that workers won't get infected later. Smithfield is also facing demands that it change the way work gets done inside that plant. Like have workers stand six feet apart, never face each other. Smithfield isn't promising to do all that, not everywhere in the plant. It would really slow down the work. But it is doing some things, like installing more plexiglass shields to separate workers on the production line and in break rooms. The company says it did everything it could, as fast as it could, based on the government's latest guidance. Many workers and union representatives say that's not true.

They say the company dragged its feet and could do a lot more. We reached one manager at the plant. He asked not to be quoted by name. He says the top people at the plant took the virus really seriously. But there were some mid-level managers who did not seem interested in passing along warnings to employees or installing protective equipment. He heard some of them talk about the virus as fake news or just like the flu or a conspiracy to bring Trump down. And some workers say there's one more thing. They say the company and government officials just were not as concerned about them because they're mostly immigrants and not white. They got that feeling, for instance, when South Dakota's

governor, Christine Noem, went on Fox News and declared, without any evidence, this. We believe that 99 percent of what's going on today wasn't happening inside the facility. It was more at home, where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus. Those comments made Nancy Reynosa furious. She felt like it was based on a bigoted stereotype about immigrants, that they're all crowded into small apartments and that's why they got sick. So it was their fault, not Smithfield's. Sarah Telehun, who says she was basically raised by a whole community of Ethiopian Smithfield workers,

says there's always been a complicated relationship between immigrants and the plant. The jobs are tough, but they also pay $16, $18 an hour. It was enough for Sarah's mom to buy a house. Sarah's now in college. I love the life that I live. And I know a lot of that is tied back to the fact that my mother works at Smithfield. So Sarah and her mom and everybody else whose life depends on this plant will have to decide now. Am I willing to risk going back?

And also, can I afford not to? Sarah told us it feels like making a decision with a gun to your head, choosing between your health and paying the bills. In the coming weeks and months, millions of other people will be asking that same question. School teachers, students, waiters, and cooks in restaurants. They'll have to figure out what it will take for them to feel safe. As more and more people are tested for the coronavirus,

the number of positive cases linked to the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls keeps going up. As of May 7th, the South Dakota Department of Health says there are nearly 1,100 positive cases among Smithfield workers and their close contacts, like family members. As we mentioned so far, two of those employees have died. This episode was reported by Dan Charles and Tom Driesbach. It was produced by Tom. Editing from Lisa Pollack, Chris Bender of NME. The voiceover of the man we called A came from Nyasha Hatendi.

Some of the music was by Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks for listening to the Coronavirus Daily from NPR. We will be back with usual episodes tomorrow. I'm Kelly McEvers.