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In April, in the Canadian province of Alberta, an outbreak at a single Cargill meat packing plant[1] accounted for one quarter of all COVID-19 cases in the enti

• mschuster91 6y ago
  Looks exactly the same situation as we had in Germany with meatpacking: poor people exploited in gruesome work conditions and inadequately housed. That and farming slave labor is what drove superspread corona events over the last months.
  • norwegianwhale 6y ago
    Meat factories pay very well for someone with no skills. I for one I am grateful for being given the opportunity to work in meatpacking industry for a summer.
    • ethbr0 6y ago
      Point. It's easy to assume that the alternative to bad_job is better_job, when in fact it's no_job. It's good to fight for better working conditions for all, but not without remembering the lowest-end of the wage ladder. (Which isn't to be interpreted as an argument against minimum wage increases, but rather that there needs to be an on-ramp for those who didn't grow up with privilege)
    • tehjoker 6y ago
      This is precisely why instead of forcing people to work under dangerous conditions we should be paying people to stay home and accepting slow-downs in production.
      • nostromo 6y ago
        We definitely don't want a slow down in food production.
        • lotsofpulp 6y ago
          But we do want people getting paid low wages to continue working for low wages even though their risks are higher because they made choices or were born into circumstances that led them to not have work from home jobs.
        • mschuster91 6y ago
          No one will die from not having meat for every single meal. Especially the climate could actually benefit from reducing meat intake, given that especially cattle are a large impact on co2 - not to mention all the rainforest in South America being razed for beef lots and beef feed material.
• nickff 6y ago
  Is there a lot of evidence that Cargill has particularly poor conditions? I ask because meatpacking necessarily creates optimal conditions for spread of droplet or airborne viruses. It has to be cold, to prevent spoilage, air circulation must be limited to reduce refrigeration energy consumption, and it has to be a relatively confined space to reduce convection and radiated energy. The meat-packing plants were well-designed given their constraints, but this coronavirus was unanticipated, and creating production facilities with more protections against this will take a lot of time and money. These new facilities would also use much more energy (roughly proportional to the increase in area required), so you have to ask whether those costs would be worth incurring to help with the next (hypothetical) outbreak. It's too late to build new facilities for this one.