Meatpacking working conditions and the spread of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

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.