Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims to be on the side of farmers and food safety, but that apparently doesn’t apply to factory workers who process our country’s meat supply.
Rollins announced this week that the Department of Agriculture was extending waivers to poultry and pork processing plants to allow them to increase the production line speed.
The press release refers to these safety measures as “burdens” on the pork and poultry industries that have added “unnecessary costs for American producers.”
But in case increasing the speed at which their employees need to work causes more injuries, Rollins included a new provision siding with the meat barons as well.
“Additionally, [the Food Safety and Inspection Service] will no longer require plants to submit redundant worker safety data, as extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries,” the press release says.
Meatpacking unions are already pointing out the obvious dangers of this new waiver, both to the workers and to the American people later consuming the meat.
Cattle graze on a ranch in Lufkin, Texas, on April 18, 2023.
“Increased line speeds will hurt workers—it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite—and increased production speeds will jeopardize the health and safety of every American that eats chicken,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said in a statement.
“We rely on the thousands of workers to safely produce the food on our tables every single day, they can’t do that safely at these speeds—we learned that lesson the hard way just five short years ago—let’s not irreparably injure workers to learn what we already know,” he continued.
The USDA released a statement to Daily Kos after publication, saying in part that “the inspection and safety requirements that must be met for all poultry products, including chicken, coming from USDA inspected facilities, regardless of line speed, remains unchanged.”
Rollins’ move is eerily similar to the one President Donald Trump made during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, when companies were shutting down to stop the spread of the deadly virus.
However, as history played out, the wealthy meat corporations like Tyson didn’t like the idea of stalling profits for the sake of saving lives, so they did what companies do best: lobbied the president to sign an executive order.
Ultimately, Trump sided with the companies. Not only did he allow the companies to stay open, but he also signed a waiver allowing companies to increase the speed at which they could push employees to work at.
This led to an increase in reported injuries, and eventually, plants had to be shut down due to the virus spreading throughout the workforce. ProPublica later released an investigative report finding that this move contributed to about 6% to 8% of the early COVID-19 outbreaks.
An empty shelf of free-range eggs is seen at a Safeway on Jan. 27, 2025, in Seattle.
Rollins has been notably out of touch since Trump appointed her to his Cabinet of loyal followers.
The Republican farm girl cut a $1 billion farm-to-table plan that supplied food to schools and impoverished people, calling it a “COVID-era program” that didn’t hit its target audience. And during a recent Fox News interview, she compared the children’s program to a “not necessary” contract for “food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco.”
The food-justice program she is seemingly referring to is the nonprofit Agroecology Commons, which trains new farmers and teaches them about securing land and gaining access to local markets. Which, if you follow Rollins’ interviews, is specifically something she wants to accomplish.
To add insult to injury, as the American people just want to eat some damn eggs, Rollins seems to think the best suggestion is for us all to start farming our own chickens.
"I think the silver lining for all this is how do we, in our backyards—we've got chickens too in our backyard—how do we solve something like this?” she said on Fox News. “And people are sort of looking around and thinking, 'Wow maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard, and it's awesome.'"
Editor's note: This story has been updated with a partial statement from the USDA, which Daily Kos received after publication.
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