The meatpacking industry's corporate exceptionalism: racialized logics of food chain worker disposability during the COVID-19 crisis

Building on theories of biopower and necropolitics, we detail how the meatpacking industry expanded corporate exceptionalism amidst the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis argues that the industry utilized three strategies to assert exceptionalism and secure increased production and profitability despite significant risks for meatpacking workers. First, the industry constructed COVID-19 as an urgent threat to the nation's meat supply, casting themselves as a critical economic linchpin. Second, the industry aligned themselves with heroic portrayals of meatpacking workers, deflecting criticism of their handling of the crisis. Third, the industry promoted images of themselves as competent stewards, meriting unfettered autonomy to manage workers' health risks. Detailing these strategies sheds light on how corporate exceptionalism functions within late capitalist food systems to further racialized logics of worker disposability. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Food, Culture & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Meatpacking working conditions and the spread of COVID-19

This paper explores how working conditions in meatpacking plants contributed to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Data from the Occupational Information Network was used to construct a set of industry-level working condition variables and compare meatpacking to the sample of other manufacturing industries in our comparison group. This novel approach showed that proximity to others in the meatpacking industry is likely the main factor influencing the spread of COVID-19, more than three standard deviations higher in meatpacking than our comparison sample of other manufacturing industries. Subsequently, we performed a county-level analysis on COVID-19 spread, comparing rural counties with a large share of meatpacking workers to nonmetropolitan counties that were similarly dependent on other single manufacturing industries, using the time frame of mid-March to the end of 2020. In mid-April 2020, COVID-19 cases in meatpacking-dependent rural counties rose to more than 12 times compared to rural counties dependent on other single manufacturing industries. This difference disappeared completely by mid-July and held steady throughout the year. We demonstrate that our results are robust to a battery of robustness checks ruling out the set of plausible alternative hypotheses, including examining data on COVID-19 spread among meatpacking workers directly.

How blood met plastics, plant and animal extracts: Material encounters between medicine and industry in the twentieth century.

Twentieth-century medicine saw the remarkable rise of complex machines and infrastructures to process blood for medical purposes, such as transfusion, dialysis, and cardiac surgery. Instead of attributing these developments to technological ingenuity, this article argues for the primacy of material encounters as a promising focal point of medical historiography. In fact, blood's special properties consistently clashed with most materials used in medical practice, provoking a series of material exchanges. Drawing on a combination of epistemological and network approaches, three exemplary cases are presented to examine blood's encounters with plastics, plant and animal extracts: William M. Bayliss's (1860-1926) injections of dissolved gum acacia to expand diminished blood volume; Charles H. Best's (1899-1978) production of the anticoagulant heparin from animal organs; and the preservation of fragile blood cells by silicone coatings inside of John H. Gibbon Jr.'s (1903-1973) heart-lung machine. The case studies demonstrate how the complementarity of blood and these materials produced hybridizations between medicine and a range of industrial branches, from colonial forestry and meatpacking to commercial chemistry. In this light, the paper concludes by discussing the dependencies of today's healthcare environments on globally distributed, capitalistically appropriated resources in the face of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Twitter Analytics to Inform Provisional Guidance for COVID-19 Challenges in the Meatpacking Industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic raised considerable challenges to obtain reliable guidance to help occupational health practitioners, workers, and stakeholders building up efficient prevention strategies at the workplace, between the constant increase of publications in the domain, the time required to run high-quality research and systematic reviews, and the urgent need to identify areas for prevention at the workplace. Social Media and Twitter, in particular, have already been used in research and constitute a useful source of information to identify community needs and topics of interest for prevention in the meatpacking industry. In this commentary, we introduce the methods and tools we used to screen relevant posts on Twitter. Twitter analytics is a way to capture real-time concerns of the community and help ensure compliance with the notion of social accountability. As such research has limitations in terms of exhaustiveness and level of evidence, it should be considered as provisional guidance to direct both actions at the workplace and further conventional research projects.