If you want to learn strategies for getting active in your community to help exploited workers establish justice check out this radical article from The GroundUp publication!
During the Covid-19 pandemic it’s important to maintain distance from strangers and avoid physical contact with persons who have contracted the disease. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple if you’re considered an essential worker, especially within the poultry and meat packing industries. In these industries, social justice is scarce. Many of these businesses employ the most vulnerable workers; such as immigrants and refugees in order to exploit their rights. However, this is quite interesting as people like Ronald Cameron (the owner of Mountaire Farms chicken processing facilities), have donated millions of dollars to support trump. Of course, trump has been deeply anti-immigrant and has gone as far as to construct a border wall with Mexico. Surprisingly, Cameron's behavior evades true hypocrisy. The trumpian capitalist agenda while anti-immigration is not against meta-peasantry simply because that merely requires the third party in the financial arrangement, the country where these workers depart from to agree on a policy level to let their workers leave for employment (an exhale of unemployment as it relates to for example, Mexican federal government stress) and then an inhale of those migrant workers back into the country who await the time they can return (for example H-2A agricultural workers may stay in the u.s. for three years and then they must return to their country for an uninterrupted period of three months).
Owners and CEOs who have wealth and capital if they can get away with it will pay their employees less than minimum wage. To make things even worse, the concerns of decreased meat production during the pandemic lead to a push to increase the production line speed in several processing facilities. As the birds move at a fast rate, the workers have to be dangerously close to one another in order to keep up with the increase in speed. This is clearly a breeding ground for the virus, which thrives in close human contact.
Shockingly, more than half of the plants that were authorized to accelerate their production pace had Covid-19 outbreaks occurring within their facilities. Profit was at the forefront of the decision of these businesses, the safety of workers a secondary concern at best. Further, deception was in abundance at the Mountaire facilities. There was no transparency about just how seriously the worker population had been impacted by the virus. This allowed for widespread transmission of the disease to unknowing and helpless employees and left them in the dark about co-workers who died from the virus. If trump was interested in protecting workers he would move towards increasing regulations in the meat packing and processing industries but he has absolutely no concern for the working class or the peasant class unless it were to somehow increase his capital or campaign spending.