."They nonetheless lobbied aggressively — successfully enlisting [the U.S. Agriculture Department] as a close collaborator in their efforts — to keep workers on the job in unsafe conditions, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless to mandate otherwise and to be protected against legal liability for the harms that would result."The investigation was done by a select subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and indicts Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef.
The report is based on a review of 151,000 pages of documents, over a dozen survey calls with meatpacking workers union representatives, former Agriculture Department and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials, and authorities on both the state and local levels., in April of 2020, the chairman of Tyson's board John H. Tyson wrote a full-page newspaper ad claiming that"the food supply chain is breaking." However, the report found U.S.
The investigation also levied allegations at key players in the meat industry, particularly the leaders of Smithfield and Tyson, who were in close contact with the White House in the days before the executive order was signed. Afterward, it declared meat processing plants were a critical infrastructure for their role in the nation's food supply.