WORKERS at a Chinese-owned pork-processing plant in South Dakota “weren’t given any PPE” even though 634 employees got coronavirus, reports say.
Around 17 percent of the 3,700 employees at the Sioux Falls Smithfield Foods plant contracted COVID-19 after staff expressed concern about the possibility of infection.
The massive plant, which accounts for five percent of the US pork supply, has stopped processing meat as a result of the outbreak.
Taneeza Islam, founder of the South Dakota Dream Coalition, told NPR that “firsthand employee accounts” indicate “they were not provided any protective gear.”
“They were not given any hand sanitizer,” Islam revealed. “There was no social distancing occurring on the lines from at least before March 26, to when some measures like taking temperatures outside of the plant before employees had to come in, took place on Monday, April 6.”
The Virginia-based Smithfield was purchased by WH Group, a Chinese meat processing company, in 2013 for $4.72 billion.
The news comes after 518 employees and 120 of their family members received the damning diagnosis.
Islam said workers claim to have been “inches apart” – but the company insisted only a “small number of employees” at their Cudahy and the Martin City plants tested positive.
“The first death of a Smithfield employee that just occurred has really shaken the community and employees as a whole,” Islam said.
“There’s a strong sentiment that if proper mitigation efforts, proper PPE, proper social distancing, proper sanitizing, that it wouldn’t have been this bad. We all understand that we can’t eradicate the virus, but we could have curtailed [it].”
Smithfield’s plants in Cudahy, Wisconsin and Martin City, Missouri all closed on Wednesday, after the Sioux Falls facility was closed indefinitely.
But Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs, Keira Lombardo, claimed the company took 17 steps to protect its workers.
These emergency measures included the addition of sanitizing stations, more cleaning and the installations of plexiglass barriers.
Lombardo said: “We are doing everything in our power to help protect our team members from COVID-19 in the workplace.
“We have been working to get these measures implemented for many many weeks, all day, every day. But we do not have a magic wand.”
“The closure of our Martin City plant is part of the domino effect underway in our industry,” said Smithfield president and CEO Kenneth M. Sullivan.
“It highlights the interdependence and interconnectivity of our food supply chain. Our country is blessed with abundant livestock supplies, but our processing facilities are the bottleneck of our food chain.
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“This is why our government has named food and agriculture critical infrastructure sectors and called on us to maintain operations and normal work schedules.
“For the security of our nation, I cannot understate how critical it is for our industry to continue to operate unabated.”
The FDA said there’s no evidence of food or food packaging transmitting the disease.
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