26 Working People
Brown and Black Meat and Poultry Processing Workers in the U.S. South
Keona K. Ervin
In late spring of 2022, just as the COVID-19 global pandemic began to grip the United States, meatpacking facilities across the country captured great attention. With over 500,000 workers in nearly 4,000 plants across the United States, a figure drawn from a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meat slaughtering and processing plants soon became COVID hotspots (Waltenburg et al., 2020).1 The virus swept through vulnerable workers and their communities. Workers at meat and poultry processing plants, the overwhelming majority of whom were Latinx and Black, were ...
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