| Administrations get the corporate mascots they deserve.
For the George W. Bush administration, it was Halliburton, the multinational oil and gas service company that Dick Cheney led before becoming Bush’s running mate. In popular discourse, Halliburton’s shadow hung over many of the administration’s most controversial decisions, particularly the Iraq War, which enriched the company through billions in military contracts.
The Trump administration still has at least another six months to go, but if we’re taking early predictions for the enduring corporate symbol of its value system, I’d pick almost any major player in the poultry and broader meatpacking industry. Though the administration has done countless favors for the fossil fuel industry, it has an especially bizarre relationship with the executives at Tyson, Cargill, Koch Foods, and other companies that make their money telling chronically exploited workers to grow chickens, slaughter them, and pack their parts into Styrofoam.
As explained by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker this week, poultry workers face astonishing rates of severe injury on the job. And since only a minority of poultry workers are unionized, the industry has a habit of “replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees.” Hence the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on multiple poultry plants in August 2019—which was striking, as Adrian Carrasquillo argued in TNR at the time, not just for breaking up families literally overnight but also for coming just days after a white supremacist shooting targeting the Latino community in El Paso, Texas. The Trump administration has long supported further deregulating the industry, for example allowing faster “line speeds,” which are associated with higher rates of (gruesome) worker injuries.
Covid-19 has exacerbated the dangers. In April, a Tyson facility in Iowa linked to more than 200 coronavirus cases was shut down for safety reasons. Meatpacking plants were becoming virus hot spots, with workers dying. Tyson promptly took out a full-page ad in several newspapers declaring that “the food supply chain is breaking,” and Trump signed an executive order declaring meatpackers essential workers, a move that meant workers would have to choose between showing up and almost certainly getting Covid, or losing their jobs. TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote about the murderousness of this decision at the time, while also noting that such plants have long been environmental hazards. In May, the administration went even further to buoy the meat industry, as Geoff Dembicki noted, with agricultural bailouts designed to preserve a supply chain that disproportionately benefits these large companies, many of them top-tier polluters.
The human and environmental toll of the meat industry, and the Trump administration’s policies exacerbating this misery, have been ongoing concerns at TNR. Mayer’s New Yorker piece is a critical addition to the conversation, detailing the suffering of workers at Mountaire Corporation as well as its owner’s political activities and spectacular wealth. (In 2016, he spent some $3 million supporting Trump’s candidacy through various channels.) The whole article is worth your time.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor | 