This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
People died because of this callousness. People need to be held to account for it.
The Trumpsters are wallowing in deaths, ours not theirs.
wow. What horrible people. Real scum. Good on the families for pursuing the lawsuit that brought all this info out.
Maybe some of these meat packing plants will get the union bug soon.
Hopefully the Iowa plaintiffs have good lawyers. If so, they will pay. That’s one of the reasons we have a tort system. Lawyers sometimes have to be the enforcers of public safety.
from the article:
Because they didn’t have time to wait for the Green Bay Sweep the following January.
I don’t eat pork.
But I hear that politicians love to cram pork into legislation…
Pork butt anyone?
Bacon??
Same thing, different county.
https://twitter.com/thewalrus/status/1525194061375758336?s=20&t=cwuoxhlV7Zvh8OrfqzVZ8Q
Unable to question Champagne about reopening the economy, Rempel Garner pressed Ng to say when Canada’s first lockdown would be over. “The best way for businesses to get support is to get back to work and reopen. So when can the Canadian economy expect to reopen safely?” she asked. During her six-minute intervention, Rempel Garner cut Ng off repeatedly and asked for a government plan to both “flatten the curve and reopen the economy.”
That same day, Canada surpassed 2,000 official COVID-19 deaths. Millions of Canadians were at work, many of them toiling in large congregant settings. With work came the risk of severe illness, death, or long COVID-19. A few hours after the industry-committee meeting, Global News published a story about the death of a forty-eight-year-old Markham woman who worked at an Estée Lauder cosmetics-manufacturing facility located in Ng’s constituency.
At the time, Estée Lauder did not say if there had been other COVID-19 cases at the facility and told Global News that manufacturing was continuing as it was exempt from the closure of nonessential workplaces. In its 2021 year-end financial report, the global cosmetics giant announced that it had made $16.22 billion in net revenue, an increase of 13 percent compared with 2019/20 and more than in any of the past seven years.
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics tracked the occupations of all working-age people who died from COVID-19 regardless of whether they were infected in a workplace outbreak. It found that workers in “elementary occupations” (plant workers, general construction workers, custodians, etc.) were overrepresented by far in the death totals. This data was key to demonstrating that certain jobs were more risky than others during the global pandemic. Canada, by contrast, didn’t collect any similar data. All we have is information from workplace insurance boards, media reports that note the deceased person’s place of work, and anecdotes.
Flooding the GOP with corporate contributions has consequences.
Breathtaking vileness. It’s not surprising, exactly, given what is publicly known about the both the meat packing industry and the prior administration, but shocking nonetheless.
Step 1 is an OSHA with teeth -and a clean out at the USDA. No industry should be shocked that government regulators show up at their facility unannounced.
But robust federal safety regulations can still be neutered by executive order, so a union is also in order. Maybe that should be step 1. The meat packing industry has long flouted even our anemic labor refs because they rely on undocumented workers who risk deportation if they protest ill treatment
Here in Tucson I see very few folks wearing masks in any situation.
In grocery stores,
at an outside farmer’s market
a hardware store. Even in a medical clinic I witnessed a young fellow walk in unmasked. The receptionist handed him a mask and asked that he put it on…
It’s as though folks do not care anymore. Apparently they refuse to believe the danger. That the virus is still here and making folks sick. That is… until they themselves get ill.
The virus is still here, still circulating and mutating.
I wear a mask in public. I care about me and I care about whoever I come in contact with away from those in my “bubble”
Maybe if the virus were day glow purple and we could see it…that would make a difference.
Workers are just cogs –not people– with these villans. I wonder if these companies took out Dead Peasant Insurance on their employees placed in harm’s way. Because some people are like that.
It’s hard to know what’s happening in all of Toronto but in my neighbourhood, which is very diverse, people have been pretty good. Masks aren’t mandatory but in certain settings; restaurants and grocery stores, most are wearing them. I do so in more situations, especially crowded places.
As you say, this isn’t over
What truly shocks me are the sheer number of Republican voters who refuse the vaccine and are willing to die for the Party.
I cannot comprehend those who would be willing to sacrifice their life based on the lies spread by Fox News.
Since we are enroute to overpopulation and undereducation, I am willing to sacrifice all their lives. Just not yours or mine.
At least now we know when America was great:
“…one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish.”
-Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906
This wasn’t just a one-off by meatpacking execs and Trump kakistocrats. It’s what the entire GOP-industrial complex works very hard to do every day.
Suddenly, when it was their own kids that might be crowded into classrooms then, then they started to care a little.
while Tyson was slow to adopt safety measures to protect U.S. workers, it moved swiftly to do so at its plants in China, with extensive protocols, including a mask requirement and reduced production
Chinese workers have a right to life.
American capitalists have a right to blood money.
People always die because of the callous and entitled greed of the murderers in the white entitled oligarchy. No one is held to account. It’s called capitalism, with more than a hint of white, male supremacy.