In January 2015, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began requiring all covered employers to self-report all worker injuries severe enough to cause an amputation, the loss of an eye, or an overnight stay in the hospital. This requirement covers employers in 29 states under federal OSHA jurisdiction. (Employers in the other 21 states and Puerto Rico with State OSHA Plan agencies must report severe injuries to their state agency.)1

Updated data released by federal OSHA reveal that employers from the covered 29 states reported 74,025 severe injuries to the federal agency between January 1, 2015, and May 31, 2022. That amounts to a stunning 27 workers a day, on average, suffering among the most severe work injuries in just over half the states.

Top companies reporting severe injuries to OSHA

Out of tens of thousands of companies reporting, the United States Postal Service (USPS)—with 516,636 employees—had the highest number of reported severe injuries (1,142) between January 1, 2015, and May 31, 2022. Others in the top four include: Walmart—with 2.3 million employees—reported 571 severe injuries; United Parcel Service (UPS)—with 444,000 employees—reported 505 severe injuries; and FedEx—with 219,000 employees—reported 285 severe injuries.

Meat and poultry companies continue to be among the most dangerous

The data also reveal that meatpacking and poultry companies, with substantially fewer employees than the other top reporters, continue to be among the most dangerous industries. Tyson Foods—with 120,000 employees—had the fifth-highest number of severe injuries (279). JBS/Pilgrim’s Pride—with an even smaller workforce (78,000)—reported the 8th-highest number of severe injuries (185). Cargill—with 48,0502 employees—reported the 20th-highest number of severe injuries (86), and Smithfield—with 63,000 employees—reported the 22nd-highest number of severe injuries (80).

By comparison, other manufacturing companies, such as Ford Motor Company (90,000 employees), reported 41 severe injuries. Tyson Foods, with 33% more workers than Ford, had six times the number of reported severe injuries. JBS/Pilgrim’s Pride, with slightly fewer workers than Ford, reported four times the number of severe injuries.

Other companies with high numbers of reported severe injuries include Publix, Lowe’s, Walt Disney, Kroger, Coca-Cola, and Amazon. See chart below for the top 23 companies reporting severe injuries.

Packers Sanitation Services Inc.

An earlier analysis of severe injuries reported to OSHA in the first 21 months of the reporting requirement (January 2015–September 2016) found that a very small company, Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI), had among the highest numbers of severe injuries reported (24). PSSI, a subcontractor to hundreds of meat and poultry plants, hires workers to clean and sanitize the plants during the overnight shift.

However, in the following six years, PSSI has reported only an additional 22 severe injuries, for a total of 46 reports over 7.5 years. All of the other top reporters (the top 17) from the earlier analysis reported at least three to four times these numbers over the past 7.5 years. This raises some concerns about the accuracy of the data, especially in light of recent developments. In February 2023, PSSI paid a $1.5 million fine to the Department of Labor for employing over 100 children illegally in meat plants such as JBS, Tysons, and Cargill. That investigation began when a 13-year-old was discovered by a middle school nurse to have chemical burns, blisters, and open wounds on her hands from the chemicals she worked with in a JBS plant for PSSI. However, the company maintained they had no reports of such an injury.  

Table 1

Policy recommendations

The severe work injuries reported to OSHA, and included in this analysis, do not include all serious work-related injuries or illnesses. They do not include serious injuries that may result in treatment in an emergency room with no accompanying overnight stay in the hospital, serious injuries that do not result in an amputation or hospitalization but may result in broken bones and gashes causing lost time, injuries resulting in surgery with no overnight stay in the hospital, or serious health-related illnesses that do not result in an immediate stay in the hospital. However, the employer reports of severe injuries, though a limited subset of all injuries, are an indicator of safety risks and hazards present in companies and industries that needs to be addressed.

OSHA should use the data from the reports of severe injuries to better allocate the agency’s inspection resources. With limited resources, OSHA conducted only 24,333 inspections in FY 2022. Covering many millions of workplaces, it would take OSHA over 160 years at this rate to get into every workplace once. OSHA must therefore use all available data to better target inspections to the most dangerous workplaces and industries.

OSHA should make sure that the agency’s Special Emphasis Enforcement Programs include the industries with companies with high numbers of reported amputations/hospitalizations. OSHA must also use this data to open inspections following reports of amputations to ensure that inspections are targeted to the most dangerous workplaces. Further, OSHA should publish the severe injury data from the 21 state OSHA plans, which are not publicly available.

Notes

1. This analysis does not include employer reports of severe injuries in the following 21 states (and PR) because these states/territories are State OSHA Plan agencies and employers report to the state agency, not the federal agency, and the states do not make the data publicly available at www.osha.gov: AK, WA, OR, CA, HI, NV, UT, AZ, NM, WY, MN, IA, IN, MI, KY, TN, SC, NC, VA, MD, and VT.

2. This number is the figure for Cargill employees in North America, not just the United States. It was derived from two reports: https://www.cargill.com/doc/1432215917376/2022-cargill-annual-report.pdf; and https://www.statista.com/statistics/274780/number-of-cargill-employees-by-region/

Food insufficiency among families with children poses a short- and long-term moral and economic threat to the United States. Even brief disruptions in access to food can have lasting consequences. Not having enough to eat often disrupts children’s cognitive and emotional development and education. This was the case for a child who disclosed that the reason she was fidgeting and not paying attention in class was that she did not have enough food to eat. There may be lifelong ramifications of not having enough to eat in childhood, including increased likelihood of poor health outcomes and avoidable medical expenditures across the lifespan.

Fortunately, Congress can help. Several studies indicate that advance Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments, expanded under the American Rescue Plan Act, were associated with reduced poverty and food insufficiency in households with children.

Advance Child Tax Credit payments

The American Rescue Plan Act included provisions for six months of advance CTC payments. The advance CTC payments were distributed as monthly cash payments of up to $300 per child to families with children under age 17 from July 2021 to December 2021. Caregivers earning less than $200,000 as a single adult or less than $400,000 as a married couple were eligible for the benefit, meaning nearly all households with children qualified.

Advance CTC payments and child health 

In prior work using HPS data, we found that the advance CTC was associated with a 26% decrease in food insufficiency in households with children relative to households without children. Our findings were consistent with those of other researchers, who found that the advance CTC was associated with a 25% decline in poverty and improved dietary quality for children. 

In a new pre-print using HPS data, we find expiration of the advance CTC was associated with a 12% increase in food insufficiency in households with children relative to households without children by February—and rates of food insufficiency continued to climb since February. Our findings are consistent with other analyses indicating increased child poverty following expiration of the advance CTC.

While HPS data are not directly comparable to data collected prior to the pandemic, rates of food insufficiency in March–April 2022 were about three to four times pre-pandemic levels. The HPS may underestimate food insufficiency because people without a phone or email are not included in the survey. The HPS was found to overestimate vaccination coverage but to have state estimates highly correlated with state Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine administration data. The HPS has a low response rate—typical of internet surveys—and may have limited generalizability, though the sample is useful for evaluating trends and comparing subgroups. What trend data show are increases in food insufficiency in households with children.

Other analyses indicate families with low incomes overwhelmingly used advance CTC payments on basic needs for children, including food, rent, utilities, clothing, and educational costs. There is also no evidence suggesting a reduction in employment among parents in families receiving CTC payments.

The advance CTC payments may also help address another top concern for policymakers: rising teen opioid addiction and overdose deaths. Childhood stress and poverty are associated with overdose and would be reduced with continued CTC expansion.

An opportunity for Congress to make a difference for children

As Congress turns its attention to the next reconciliation package, there is an opportunity to reinstate the expanded CTC monthly payments. Amid continued inflation, rising food insufficiency in households with children, and the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to affect work, health, and the economy, continuation of the advance CTC payments could help children avoid food insufficiency, with immediate and lifelong personal and societal benefits. 

Analyses of the most recent wave of HPS data show that food insufficiency is concentrated in the lowest-income households with children. Implementing an expanded CTC without exclusions due to work or immigration status will best reach children in families with the greatest need, to the benefit of all children and society. While some policymakers have considered work requirements to receive CTC benefits, such requirements carry an administrative burden for states and families that often prevents those who most need benefits from receiving them and results in negative outcomes.

Two former Treasury Secretaries agree: Continued CTC expansion is an important investment in the nation and its children.

The repeal permits local governments to bargain collectively with their employees upon the approval of a collective bargaining ordinance or resolution. Since the repeal took effect in May 2021, multiple Virginia localities have seen remarkable organizing efforts by and for public-sector workers to pass strong collective bargaining ordinances.

Alongside these efforts, we at The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (TCI) have provided timely and accessible research on how collective bargaining helps close disparities in pay and benefits for public employees in specific communities.

Here is a snapshot of these efforts within the last year.

Why collective bargaining matters for local government workers and communities in Virginia

Collective bargaining is critical for economic equity and improved public services in Virginia. Local public employees in Virginia experience one of the largest pay penalties in the country. These workers are typically paid 29.9% less than their private-sector peers with similar levels of education, age, and hours worked. Pension and health care benefits do not make up for these pay penalties. In Virginia specifically, the estimated total compensation penalty for local employees compared to their private-sector peers is 28.0%.

Collective bargaining is critical for economic equity between the public and private sector. Public-sector collective bargaining tends to boost pay by 5% to 8%,and the fair and clear standards provided by unionization particularly help Black and Latinx workers. Women would also particularly benefit from collective bargaining, as they make up the majority of local government workers (especially in Virginia). TCI’s ongoing research continues to find that public-sector workers across the Commonwealth stand to benefit from collective bargaining.

The positive impact of unions is not just limited to pay and benefits. Collective bargaining gives workers the power to formally express their ideas for how to improve their workflow and workplaces, which leads to reduced turnover, better working conditions, and improved public services.

Victorious collective bargaining campaigns

Local government workers in the City of Alexandria and Arlington County saw victorious collective bargaining campaigns in 2021. The organizing behind these efforts was primarily driven by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF).

County employees working with IAFF and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) also secured collective bargaining rights for county workers in Fairfax County and Loudoun County. TCI found that 1 in 5 Loudoun County employees and 1 in 7 Fairfax County employees are paid less than the amount needed to support themselves in the county in which they worked.

Staff at Richmond Public Schools worked to get the Richmond City school board to pass a strong collective bargaining ordinance for teachers and school staff. The Virginia Education Association (VEA) and effective grassroots teacher organizing efforts were the primary forces behind this victory.

Ongoing efforts to organize

Employees of the City of Richmond are organizing to improve the collective bargaining ordinances being heard at the city council. A variety of unions, including SEIU, are involved in the Richmond organizing efforts. TCI produced research demonstrating the need for the passage of a collective bargaining ordinance in Virginia’s capital city. We found that 1 in 8 general Richmond city workers who work full time and year round do not make enough to support themselves, and 4 out of 5 do not make enough to support a family. Our report also indicated that the problem of low pay occurs across many departments.

Additionally, local public-sector workers in the City of Virginia Beach and the City of Newport News are organizing to pass collective bargaining in their respective localities with the assistance of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). TCI analyzed current public-sector pay in these communities and showed that 4 in 10 Virginia Beach employees and 1 in 6 Newport News employees are paid less than the amount needed to support themselves in the city in which they work. When accounting for the respective salaries needed to support an adult with two children, the proportion of public employees who cannot afford an acceptable standard of living increases to 9 in 10 in Virginia Beach and 5 in 6 in Newport News.

Meanwhile, employees of the City of Norfolk are working with AFSCME to secure their own collective bargaining rights. Prince William County has also seen a significant push at the county and school level through campaigns led by workers in partnership with SEIU and VEA.

Staff at Fairfax County Public Schools, City of Norfolk Public Schools, and City of Hampton Public Schools have also begun their own respective campaigns with the help of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Albemarle County Schools staff are working on their collective bargaining campaign with the assistance of VEA.

Setbacks to collective bargaining campaigns

In September 2021, city council members of the City of Portsmouth reversed course on a previous unanimous vote to consider collective bargaining for the city’s firefighters and emergency dispatchers.

Virginia’s 2021 election results changed which party controls the governor’s office and the House of Delegates. Various legislative efforts to roll back collective bargaining for public-sector employees have taken place in the 2022 Virginia General Assembly, where Republicans now control the House and Democrats continue to control the Senate. But these efforts have largely failed, with opposition led by worker advocates in the Stronger Communities, A Better Bargain coalition.

Looking forward

In the last year, Virginia has seen over 15 active local campaigns to ensure collective bargaining for public employees—several of which have already secured victories. Meanwhile, additional policy changes are needed to move toward a strong, statewide law that recognizes the right of every worker to collectively bargain, rather than the current limited state law that creates a patchwork of different rights in different localities and bans state employee collective bargaining. The fight to give every employee in Virginia a voice on the job has only begun.

Mel Borja is a Worker Power Policy Analyst at The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis.

About The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis

The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (TCI) advances racial and economic justice in Virginia by advocating for public policies that are designed in partnership with people most impacted, and shaped by credible, accessible fiscal and policy research.

TCI is a member of EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN), a network of state and local organizations improving workers’ lives through research and advocacy.

Household Pulse Survey (HPS) data reveal stark inequities in COVID-19-related outcomes by income. Among working-aged Americans, those with 2019 household incomes less than $25,000 were 3.5 times as likely to report missing an entire week of work mainly due to their own or loved ones’ COVID-19 symptoms, relative to those earning $100,000 or more (Figure). The United States does not collect national COVID-19 surveillance data by income or occupation, so the HPS data are among the best sources for evaluating disparities, although the survey response rate is low.

When low-income workers miss work due to COVID-19, they not only face the risk of severe illness—their families also report not being able to afford enough food to eat. After the expiration of the federal sick leave program, few low-income workers have access to paid sick leave to support them in self-isolating while infectious, reducing viral spread in the community, and leading a healthy recovery. Only 35% of low-wage workers have paid sick leave while 95% of high-wage workers do.

Inequities shaped by policy choices

Since the early months of the pandemic, low-income, front-line workers have faced elevated risk of exposure to and death from the airborne virus.

Two years into the pandemic, the lowest-income workers have had the least access to vaccines and boosters (Figure 1). Roughly 4 in 10 working-age Americans have either never been fully vaccinated (Figure 2) or have not gotten a recommended booster (Figure 3). The U.S. federal government spoke of the importance of vaccines and boosters but did not take adequate steps to create access for low-income workers. Workers who were boosted were least likely to miss work due to COVID-19 symptoms, while two doses were less protective (Figures 4 and 5).

The United States has large vaccine inequities, no federal workplace safety standard in place to protect workers, and fewer than 10 of 50 U.S. states had mask mandates during the Omicron surge. In contrast, other high-income countries responded quickly to the Omicron variant with widespread vaccine delivery. Of the 27 European countries, 23 implemented universal mask policies.

Other countries have consistently provided free rapid tests and high-quality masks to contain the virus. As the U.S. federal government recently implemented a one-time free test and mask program at the end of the Omicron surge, there remains a need for clear plans to provide these materials on an ongoing basis, including at the start of future surges.

Additional surges are likely due to new variants, seasonality, and waning immunity. The United States can act now to reduce the toll of COVID-19 on low-income workers and their families, on employers, and on society, much as other high-income countries have done. Each of the following policies and approaches are well-aligned with the pandemic plan that President Biden released when he entered office.

Clear communications and data

The first principles of public health crisis communications are for high-level leaders to “be first” and “be right,” and to clearly communicate threats without minimizing or exaggerating. The Biden administration can be forthright that the recurring death and disruption of COVID-19 surges are serious concerns that warrant immediate policy interventions.

To inform an equitable policy response, the government needs comprehensive data on all Americans and communities most at risk. Policymakers, the Supreme Court, and researchers may use COVID-19 surveillance data on occupations with high exposure to COVID-19 to help provide further information about the virus and how to respond most effectively.

Vaccine mandates

Vaccine mandates are key to increasing the reach of vaccination as a tool for both reducing severe disease and limiting hospital overflows and economic and societal disruption. The Biden administration can work closely with governors and mayors to implement vaccine mandates for all workers and workplaces.

Data-driven mask policies

COVID-19 spreads through the air, and mask policies that help people mask together are one of the most effective policies for reducing the spread of COVID-19. Data-driven mask policies are linked to local transmission rates and can turn off when cases are low and can turn on when cases begin to surge. New variants are likely, and having mask policies that automatically turn on could be especially important for more lethal or vaccine-evading variants.

High-quality masks and tests for low-income workers

President Biden’s January 2021 pandemic plan included using the Defense Production Act to scale up manufacture of high-quality masks and rapid tests to make them widely available, with a focus on front-line workers. However, this plan has yet to go into effect. Businesses and local governments would also benefit from access to high-quality masks and tests to help workers stay healthy, happy, and safe at work.

Improved workplace protections

Workplace transmission remains an important driver of the pandemic. While the Supreme Court blocked the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)’s emergency temporary standard requiring unvaccinated workers to be masked and tested weekly, the majority of justices noted that OSHA could issue a worker protection standard targeted to higher risk workplaces. OSHA should do this, requiring improved protections from exposure to airborne viruses in workplaces where the risks are highest.

Paid leave

As low-income workers face repeated infections and absences from work that often lead to food insufficiency, paid leave is more important than ever. Congress can help reduce food insufficiency among workers and their families by incorporating paid leave into Build Back Better legislation in a way that ensures the lowest-income workers are covered. Paid leave will also reduce onward transmission of COVID-19 to colleagues and customers by allowing infected workers to isolate at home.

The way forward

Disasters and diseases often exacerbate inequities. Leadership on good policies can reduce the toll for everyone and especially the most vulnerable. In the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, policies that center equity can reduce harms for low-income workers, their families, their businesses, and ultimately the whole of our society.

Alabama prisons are decrepit, dangerous, and massively overcrowded to such an extent that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued the state over the unconstitutional conditions. Raiding funds designed to help people and communities recover from pandemic-related economic distress will do nothing to make Alabama more humane and inclusive, particularly when Black Alabamians are three times more likely to be incarcerated than white Alabamians due to discriminatory practices in policing and incarceration.

The state has a better path to build a more sensible criminal justice system and avert a potential federal takeover. New buildings to house the same old problems won’t get us there. Real change will require meaningful changes to sentencing and reentry policies.

Sentencing reform is vital to build a more humane criminal justice system in Alabama

Alabama’s sentencing scheme still relies on outdated ideas about punishment and limits availability of services shown to improve reentry. One example is the state’s Habitual Felony Offender Act (HFOA), which increases sentences for even minor offenses. Like other mandatory minimum laws, it is a relic of earlier racially motivated “tough on crime” practices and leads to higher rates of incarceration throughout the South.

The state legislature made minor improvements to the HFOA in 2015 but refused to make them retroactive. That failure has left hundreds of Alabamians still serving sentences for convictions that today would result in less time under current presumptive sentencing guidelines.

Those of us at Alabama Arise support full repeal of the broken HFOA. Until then, the state—at minimum—should ensure people aren’t serving wildly different sentences for the same conviction.

Those efforts have proved to be an uphill battle for reform advocates. During September’s special session, lawmakers failed to pass a bill to allow some people to petition for resentencing under current standards. Legislators also have failed in recent years to expand medical release and releases for elderly people who have aged out of reasonable likelihood of recidivism. Efforts to expand and improve diversion programs have stalled as well.

All these policies would save Alabama money in the long run. They also would demonstrate respect for the humanity of incarcerated people. But legislators have chosen not to act.

This persistent refusal to engage in meaningful reform could severely cost Alabama. Failure to take even small steps to reduce overcrowding and improve atrocious conditions may spur DOJ to conduct a wholesale takeover of the state’s prison system. If that happens, the legislature will have only its own inaction to blame.

How federal aid should help Alabamians

The consequences of prioritizing bad spending go beyond federal intervention in the broken prison system. ARPA relief funds represent an opportunity to move Alabama forward in many areas that would increase opportunity and stability for people across the state.

Provide health care to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Alabamians

More than 220,000 Alabamians live in a Medicaid coverage gap. They make too much to qualify for Medicaid under the state’s bare-bones eligibility limits but too little to qualify for subsidized coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Another 120,000 Alabamians have stretched their finances to pay for coverage they can’t truly afford.

Federal ARPA funds would allow Alabama to expand Medicaid. Alabama could use these dollars to meet other critical spending priorities. This would free up state funds to pay for the startup of an expanded Medicaid program to cover adults left out of coverage.

Update infrastructure and invest in equity

Alabama should use ARPA funds to update and expand infrastructure and support services. Economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has placed a disproportionately heavy burden on women, Black Alabamians, and communities with few resources upon which to fall back. Investments in child care, expanded early childhood education, and long-term postpartum health coverage would deliver major improvements in quality of life for people hit hardest during the pandemic.

Federal relief should be used both to lessen the pandemic’s immediate harm and to break the pattern of long-term, intentional disinvestment in the Black Belt and other areas. Community-based organizations offer valuable connections and expertise to guide investment to where it is needed. The state should ensure these groups have the capacity and pathways to provide input on best uses for relief money.

Finish implementing solutions on housing and public transportation

ARPA funds also represent an opportunity to take steps forward where lack of political will has hindered full implementation of state solutions. Within the past decade, the legislature created both the Public Transportation Trust Fund and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (AHTF). But it has failed to provide a single dollar for either.

Transportation investment would improve quality of life for everyone. Robust public transit creates long-term, high-wage jobs and enables people to travel to work reliably and inexpensively. It is a vital public good that helps the elderly and people with disabilities fully participate in public life.

Housing investment would help alleviate the state’s severe affordable housing shortage. State AHTF funding would increase community resilience by allowing struggling families to spend less of their incomes to keep a roof over their heads. It also could help speed up rental assistance and prevent evictions during future recessions.

Increase transparency and modernize technology

Alabama’s technological infrastructure has lagging contemporary standards. Early in the pandemic, this resulted in major delays of unemployment insurance payments. The patchwork of IT systems at all levels of state government has contributed to public confusion and delays. Technology investments would reduce duplication of effort and increase access to public information.

A new path forward

ARPA funds provide a generational opportunity to begin remedying policy shortcomings that have held back progress and perpetuated inequality in many states. For example, advocates in other Southern states such as Oklahoma and West Virginia are developing proposals to use the unprecedented number of resources to address the over-policing and incarceration of Black and Brown communities. For Alabama, now is an opportunity to undo some of the damage of the state’s history of racist policy choices. This chance is too valuable to waste by doubling down on past failures like overly punitive criminal justice policy.

The legislature’s recent misuse of $400 million is inexcusable, but this bad decision has not blocked the path forward. The remaining ARPA funds are a chance to invest in adequate resources and transparent, responsive government. Our state must seize this opportunity to improve life significantly for every Alabamian.

Key takeaways:

• Congress and both recent presidential administrations excluded undocumented immigrants from key sources of pandemic aid: unemployment insurance and stimulus checks.
• In April, New York became the first state in the nation to give undocumented immigrants aid that approaches what others got in unemployment insurance, benefiting an estimated 92,000 people. And New York will give undocumented workers who don’t qualify for the higher level of compensation what others got in stimulus payments, benefitting an additional 199,000 people.
• It hurts all of us if any of us are left out of programs intended to get us through the recession and through a health care crisis. New York’s program could readily be replicated in other states.

This April, New York committed an unprecedented $2.1 billion of the state budget to make up for the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from federal aid during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over a year ago, the pandemic hit New York early and brutally hard. Hospitals were full, and there were heart-wrenching backlogs in burying the dead as its limit. It quickly became clear that immigrants and people of color were disproportionately among those falling sick and dying. At the same time, the notion of “essential workers” took hold, and New Yorkers applauded the people keeping life going for the rest of us, knowing that many were immigrants, including large numbers who were undocumented. The unemployment rate spiked to 16% and was even higher for people of color and immigrants.

Yet, the first round of desperately needed federal aid very specifically excluded many immigrants. Future rounds of aid under both the Trump and Biden administrations continued to exclude undocumented individuals from expanded unemployment insurance and stimulus checks.

The exclusion of undocumented immigrants, and in some cases their families, came as a slap in the face to community groups and immigrant advocates. Make the Road New York—an immigrant-led workers’ rights advocacy group—conducted a survey that showed overwhelming job loss and loss of life among the communities they serve. In the end, 90 members of Make the Road alone passed away because of COVID-19.

“They don’t see my desperation,” Angeles Solis, lead organizer for Make the Road, said her members were saying about New York’s elected officials. “Let’s take this fight to the streets.”

Out of this sense of outrage came the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition, which quickly gained over 200 member organizations and moved forward powerfully under the leadership of Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, and other groups with deep roots in immigrant communities and communities of color.

The coalition led an escalating campaign with rallies, a protest outside the governor’s office, a day when two New York City bridges were shut down, and a moving hunger strike that lasted for 23 days. The Fiscal Policy Institute’s (FPI) Immigration Research Initiative was a part of the coalition.

To help state lawmakers understand the need for the program, we at FPI stressed early on how federal aid was excluding immigrants, and provided initial estimates of the cost and benefits of creating an Excluded Worker Fund to help those left behind—addressing the needs of both undocumented immigrants and people leaving incarceration during the pandemic. When the state was facing a $15 billion budget gap, FPI’s chief economist Jonas Shaende and I wrote about how the Excluded Worker Fund could be paid for with a tax on the income from wealth—a Mark-to-Market tax.

When the New York Assembly and Senate each put $2.1 billion in their budget proposals, we kept the pressure on by bringing media attention to the fact that the real need was even higher, helping ensure that negotiations didn’t whittle that number down. When there was a pause between campaign actions, we helped keep the issue in the news by showing the recession’s devastating impact on people of color and immigrants. And, when the deal was finalized, we showed how many workers would benefit, and what the boost would be to local economies.

The Excluded Worker Fund is a landmark program.

Under New York’s program, undocumented immigrants who qualify for Tier 1 benefits will get a flat rate of $15,600. That’s less than the average of $34,000 that other New York workers got in unemployment insurance (UI) if they were unemployed for all of the past year, but it is the first program in the nation to provide undocumented immigrants with financial support approaching what other workers get in UI.

We project that about 92,000 people across the state will qualify for those Tier 1 benefits. And, we expect another 199,000 undocumented immigrants to get Tier 2 benefits, which are $3,200—the equivalent of what other people got in stimulus payments. In all, we expect 290,000 workers to benefit from the fund.

Table 1

In addition to the direct benefit to families, there is a clear ripple effect across local economies. As Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research said recently, giving money to unemployed undocumented workers—and to undocumented workers in general—is about as well-targeted a program as you could imagine for creating maximum economic stimulus during this recession. The funding will go disproportionately to lower-income communities and areas that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, and undocumented workers will put the money quickly back into circulation by buying food and necessities for their families.

There has been opposition, of course. One common counterargument is the false and harmful belief that undocumented immigrants don’t pay taxes.

Everyone pays taxes. When you walk into a store, you pay sales tax. If you own a home, you pay property tax. If you rent a home—as many undocumented immigrants do—your rent helps the landlord pay property tax. And, although this country has not made it easy recently, about half of undocumented immigrants also file income tax returns using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs.

With help from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, we estimate that undocumented immigrants pay about $1.1 billion each year in state and local taxes in New York. In fact, in our upside-down tax system, undocumented immigrants—like all low-wage New Yorkers—pay a higher effective tax rate than the top 1% of taxpayers.

Finally, about half of undocumented immigrants work on formal payrolls—using incorrect Social Security numbers—and as a result, they have payroll taxes withheld. Most payroll taxes go to the federal government, which are not included in the analysis above.

Parallel to payroll taxes are unemployment insurance taxes that employers pay for workers on their payroll. These funds paid on behalf of undocumented immigrants amount to $1.4 billion since the last recession, yet these workers were not eligible for the funds.

It hurts all of us if any of us are left out of programs intended to get us through the recession and a health care crisis. New York’s program could readily be replicated in other states—policymakers simply need the will and the humanity to recognize that undocumented immigrants are essential members of our communities.

David Dyssegaard Kallick is the Director of the Immigration Research Initiative at the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, a member of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN).

But in reality, the franchisees can barely survive, the company keeps the tips, the training is bogus, and the promised job is nonexistent.

Some public enforcement agencies (and even private lawyers) have recently attacked corporate misconduct of this sort by enforcing laws traditionally used to protect consumers in order to address unfair and deceptive labor market practices that target working people, often immigrants and people of color. More enforcement agencies and lawyers should follow their lead. Public enforcement agencies that focus on enforcing consumer protections, including federal agencies, attorneys general, and state and local consumer offices, should take an expansive view of their mission, and take action to protect worker-consumers in their often-complex relations with large corporations that use abusive and predatory practices.

A few recent cases provide examples of how this can be done.

Earlier this month, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson used consumer fraud laws to sue National Maintenance Contractors, a janitorial company that, according to the complaint, exploited immigrant workers by selling them franchises that seemed to offer the opportunity to become business owners, but in fact left workers making subminimum wages and paying grossly excessive fees.

Last year, District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine recovered $2.5 million from DoorDash, including $1.5 million to be distributed to workers. His office had filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against the company based on misrepresentations to consumers about how their tips would be used. DoorDash effectively used consumer tips to satisfy its own promised payments to workers, a practice that was deceptive and misleading to customers, who intended tips to increase worker pay.

Along similar lines, in 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced an eye-popping $61.7 million settlement involving Amazon Flex for its handling of tips meant for delivery drivers. The enforcement theory in this case was also that Amazon was engaging in “unfair or deceptive” practices, this time directed at workers, because of the assurances that Amazon had made to workers that they would receive all their tips.

In the above cases, there was also an argument that the workers were misclassified as “independent contractors” or franchisees, and should have been employees entitled to minimum wage, overtime, and of course, all of their tips. (In fact, enforcement agencies have brought employment law challenges against platform companies: the attorneys general of California and Massachusetts sued Uber and Lyft, the San Francisco and Los Angeles district attorneys sued the platform housecleaning company Handy, and the San Diego City Attorney sued grocery delivery company Instacart.) While use of consumer laws to protect workers does not address misclassification directly, it does allow public enforcement agencies to obtain relatively swift relief for basic consumer protection violations that cause workers substantial harm: DoorDash and Amazon deceived workers and consumers about tips, and National Maintenance Contractors preyed on workers who were also prospective franchise purchasers by convincing them to buy a predatory product.

Another example relates to noncompete agreements. In 2017, the Illinois Attorney General sued a check-cashing company based on its inappropriate use of provisions preventing employees from getting a job with a competitor. These “noncompete” agreements, increasingly used in a wide range of workplaces, have been shown to restrain workers’ job mobility and suppress wages, and many states are now passing laws to prevent their abuse. The Illinois AG’s lawsuit opposed these noncompetes on several grounds, including under consumer fraud laws at the core of the AG office’s enforcement authority. The complaint asserts that by requiring legally unenforceable noncompetes of low-wage workers, who believe the contracts are valid, the company’s conduct violated consumer laws because it was deceptive. (And also, according to the lawsuit, “immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous.”) In other words, the employer engaged in unfair and deceptive acts in the marketplace.

This enforcement strategy has several benefits. In many instances, by using consumer protection laws that prohibit “unfair and deceptive acts and practices,” agencies that don’t have explicit authority to enforce labor standards protections nonetheless have a powerful hook to attack corporate efforts to undermine worker power. The FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction to enforce minimum wage laws against Amazon for misclassifying its Flex drivers, but it can protect workers under its general authority to go after corporate fraud.

Using consumer laws to protect workers can also allow for immediate relief for workers by temporarily sidestepping more complex questions that may arise when enforcing more traditional labor standards laws. Moreover, this approach directs public enforcement resources to emerging challenges affecting workers that fall outside of traditional labor agencies’ authority.

In these extremely challenging times for workers, with stagnant wages, routine retaliation for union organizing, inadequate enforcement resources, and the terrifying threat of workplace exposure to COVID-19, our country’s workers need all the champions they can get. And consumer agencies would be neglecting an important part of their work if they take a rigid and overly narrow understanding of who their agencies exist to protect. Consumer protection agencies should take action to address a range of complex practices at the intersection of the consumer and labor markets.

Examples of additional potential cases abound. Jobseekers enroll in training to be security guards or long-haul truckers based on the promise of a solid job, and end up deep in debt, sometimes with no job to speak of. Temp agencies suggest that they’re an on-ramp to full-time employment, when in reality, almost no one gets a full-time job, likely in part because of conversion fees—hidden from workers—that job placements must pay in order to hire a temp worker as a regular employee. Students enter so-called “income share agreements” with finance companies under which the company pays the students’ tuition in exchange for a share of their income going forward. And employers increasingly offer (either directly or through third parties) short-term loans or “early wage access” programs that can operate like payday loans to allow workers access to quick cash but that come with high fees and effective interest rates.

In cities like New York, with sky-high unemployment rates following the onset of COVID-19, online job placement agencies and training schools have become a common scam. Construction workers dished out hundreds of dollars for online Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) training courses, offered by employment agencies, that promised a job at the end of the program—illegal under NYC law because such agencies cannot charge jobseekers for classes, trainings, or other services. Other jobseekers attended eyebrow microblading schools offered online, which are useless for a job that requires a Department of Health license.

In some jurisdictions, policymakers should update consumer protection laws to ensure that they reach arrangements where a business provides credit to its workers to purchase training or tools of the trade. Some consumer protections don’t apply to business-to-business transactions and have thus been presumed to exclude transactions between misclassified workers and the companies that employ them. For example, New York City’s consumer protection law covers goods, services, credit, and debts “primarily for personal, household, or family purposes.” Treating car loans from Uber to its drivers as business-to-business transactions exempt from consumer protection laws would leave drivers in limbo, without the protection of employment or consumer laws. Statutes should also explicitly protect limited English proficient worker-consumers, who are often the target of deceptive advertising and abusive contracts with usurious interest rates.

Finally, all consumer agencies—even those without jurisdiction or resources to aggressively enforce consumer protection laws when worker-consumers are harmed—can play a role in preventing these scams, through robust and multilingual public education and strategic use of outreach and media. This may involve agencies stepping out of their traditional roles to get the job done. For example, to enforce New York state’s safe business reopening guidelines, New York City recently deployed multijurisdictional teams of consumer protection inspectors, as well as teams from the departments of buildings and health, to respond to consumer and worker complaints.

Use of consumer laws to protect workers is a necessary addition, not an alternative, to aggressive and well-resourced enforcement of worker protection laws and organizing to increase workers’ power. But in our constantly evolving labor market, and in the face of post-pandemic life uncertainty, we must ensure that our legal system catches up. Workers, consumers, and the public must demand creative and expansive uses of the laws in the books to fight these multifaceted abuses of corporate power.

Work-sharing provides a way for many businesses to cope with a drop in consumer demand without having to lay off staff. Under work-sharing, workers’ hours are reduced and they receive partial unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to make up a portion of their lost wages. For example, if a business anticipated having to lay off five workers, they might instead cut in half the hours of 10 staff—achieving the same reduction in total work hours—and those 10 workers would all receive partial unemployment benefits from the state to make up some of their lost income.

By keeping workers on the job, work-sharing mitigates the impact of joblessness and reduces unemployment peaks in downturns. Now that coronavirus vaccines appear to be on the horizon, maintaining a connection between more workers and their employers for the first part of next year makes even more sense. As the pandemic is brought under control and regular consumer demand picks up, companies with work-sharing programs won’t have to go through a process of recruiting, hiring, and training new staff; they will be able to quickly ramp back up simply by restoring participants in work-sharing to full time.

Although work-sharing has not historically been widely used in the United States, Figure A shows that it is fairly common in other parts of the world. In Belgium, the country with the highest take-up rate, work-sharing participants equaled about 5.6% of employment in 2009, a huge cushioning of Belgian families and businesses from the impact of the Great Recession. For comparison, if the U.S. had the same take-up rate of work-sharing as Belgium, roughly 2 million jobs might have been preserved in 2009.i Figure A also shows that in 10 other countries, work sharing equaled 1% to 4% of employment in 2009—five to 20 times larger than usage in the U.S.

Figure A

Because of its benefits for businesses and workers, the March CARES Act included a 100% federal subsidy for work-sharing in states that already have work-sharing programs (some 27 states) and a 50% subsidy for states to establish such programs. As a result of these subsidies, when customer demand declined and some businesses needed to operate below full capacity to allow employees to social distance, use of work-sharing picked up after March. In July, U.S. Department of Labor data showed the number of U.S. employers with approved work-sharing programs rose to 14,770, over six times the 2,405 employers who had programs in February. Employee work-share claims spiked in this time as well. As Figure B shows, the number of employee continuing claims filed for work-sharing UI rose from less than 70,000 in February to about 1.7 million in July.

Figure B

The use of work-sharing varies by state—but, notably, in a nonpartisan way. Table 1 shows how substantial work-sharing UI is relative to regular UI. (Specifically, the table shows continuing claims for work-sharing UI as a share of all UI continuing claims.) The table is ordered from top to bottom by states’ 2020 shares, starting with Washington’s work-sharing continuing claims equal to almost one-tenth of all UI continuing claims. Of the eight states that have used work-sharing the most to reduce unemployment in 2020, half are “blue” states and half are “red” states. Two of the biggest “red” states—Texas and Florida—also use work-sharing and could capitalize on an extension to use it more.

Also enticing to the politically pragmatic, several states often considered “battleground states” have work-sharing programs but rank in the middle or near the bottom of the list for work-sharing UI claims as a share of all UI claims. Extending the CARES Act subsidy would allow states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania to expand work-sharing and would likely boost their manufacturing sectors, since manufacturers are often the biggest users of work-sharing programs. The incoming Biden administration could also give the Great Lakes states a multi-state peer learning grant to expand work-sharing across the region, including in manufacturing.

Table 1

Another reason to extend work-sharing: It’s cheap. It would cost less than $250 million to include work-sharing in the recent bipartisan proposal to extend the CARES Act’s UI provisions.ii

In closing, work-sharing has already made an important contribution to reducing unemployment in the COVID-19 recession. Failing to extend the work-sharing subsidies could sever hundreds of thousands of additional workers from their employers—right when we may be within sight of an end to the pandemic. This would be a form of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

(Acknowledgment: the authors gratefully acknowledge the great work of Mary Madsen, first author of Keystone Research Center’s October work-sharing brief and now back at graduate school while working part-time at KRC.)

Steve Herzenberg is the Executive Director of the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Pa. Claire Kovach is a Senior Research Analyst at the Keystone Research Center.

i. Average total nonfarm employment in the U.S. in 2009 was 131.29 million. If work-sharing as a share of employment rose from 0.2% to 5.6% (Belgium’s rate), that equals 7.09 million. However, because participants in work-sharing are still partially employed, the resulting increase in employment is not a one-to-one increase in the number of jobs. For the first 10 months of 2020, full-time equivalent (FTE) weeks of work-sharing was equal to an average of 27% of all work-sharing claims. Thus, 27% of 7.09 million would be 1.91 million full-time jobs.

ii. The math behind this estimate: In October, there were 198,543 full-time equivalent weeks of UI work-sharing claims, according to the US DOL’s ETA 5159 data on work-sharing. Assuming claims stay at this level—they will more likely decline—and that average unemployment benefits for an FTE week of work-sharing benefits equal $300 (which is the average cost of regular UI benefits); the cost for a 4-month extension of benefits would be $238.2 million.

By doing this, CFPB leadership could realize the full Dodd-Frank Act mandate to listen and be responsive to traditionally underserved communities and consumers.

The agency needs to center the voices of marginalized communities as a necessary adjunct to promoting accountability under the statute. The recognition that racial and economic justice are linked and that the pandemic is amplifying and embedding existing racial disparities, demand that we move beyond the generalities of the statutory language. Poor, rural, and immigrant communities, across racial differences, are all both underserved and poorly served by financial institutions. Black people in particular have always been excluded from the financial mainstream in this country.

I am the founder of the Consumer Rights Regulatory Engagement and Advocacy Project (CRREA Project), and in our series on how the CFPB develops policy, and the inclusion of marginalized communities’ perspectives in that policy development, we’ve talked about the vision as set forth in Dodd-Frank, the reality of how the statutory structure was implemented, and changes to the organizational chart under the Trump administration.

Here are our recommendations for how the agency can focus on racial and economic equity:

Name it: Identify who is served by the CFPB’s mission

As a first step to rededicating itself to its statutory mission, the CFPB should take a public stance acknowledging the centrality of consumers and traditionally underserved consumers. We should put behind us the fight over the name of the CFPB, and whether “consumer” or “bureau” should come first. Regardless of how often the statute put which one first, Congress was clearly focused on a certain set of concerns in the creation of the CFPB: consumer concerns and particularly those of traditionally underserved communities and consumers. Consumer interests always come first in the Dodd-Frank Act, and so they should in how the CFPB understands its work and presents it to the public, whether through the website, the logo, or consumer education materials.

The CFPB’s current strategic plan runs through 2022. In developing the new strategic plan, the CFPB will have the opportunity to revisit its mission and vision statements, as well as the overall goals for its work, including specific measurable goals to be reported on annually. The CFPB should seize this opportunity to center consumers, and a recognition of the CFPB’s special responsibility to traditionally underserved communities, in its work.

Lay the foundation: Regularize public-facing research on consumer financial products and services and traditionally underserved communities

The Office of Research is the first of the statutorily mandated Dodd-Frank Act offices. Its mandate includes research and reports on risks to consumers, access to credit for traditionally underserved communities, and the experiences of traditionally underserved consumers. It has both world-class economists and access to data sets covering all consumer financial markets, in many cases with only a month’s lag time. The CFPB also has the authority, in section 1022(c)(4) of the Dodd-Frank Act, to collect additional information from financial institutions.

Those resources should be focused on foundational work on the role of consumer financial products and services in traditionally underserved communities. When is disclosure effective and for what risks? How do consumers view tradeoffs in access to credit versus risk? How can we untangle when the benefits of credit to traditionally underserved communities outweigh the costs of credit? For example, the subprime lending boom of the early 2000s promoted access to credit and led directly to both the foreclosure crisis and the loss of more than a generation of wealth accumulation for Blacks and Latinx. Credit can open doors and it can close them.

The Office of Research has done significant work in all of these areas and more. The CFPB should follow the precepts of the bipartisan Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and adopt a public “learning agenda.” A public research agenda, coupled with a regular cadence of reports on issues of importance to traditionally underserved communities, could bring public accountability to this aspect of the CFPB’s statutory mandate. For example, researchers look to the CFPB for its annual release of the HMDA data and accompanying reports analyzing that year’s data. Changes to the user interface for accessing the data have brought congressional scrutiny. The CFPB could also expand its discussion in its semiannual report to Congress of the “significant problems faced by consumers in shopping for or obtaining consumer financial products or services.” That discussion could explicitly center the experiences of marginalized communities in accessing credit on fair and nondiscriminatory terms.

Build it: Create a structure that reflects the statute and makes visible traditionally underserved communities

The Trump-era CFPB organizational chart has moved four of the Dodd-Frank-mandated offices and special units off the public-facing organizational chart. The offices of Community Affairs, Financial Education, Servicemember Affairs, and Older Americans are now all housed inside the Consumer Education Office, itself housed inside the new Consumer Education and External Affairs Division. Offices important enough for Congress to name are important enough to be visible on the public-facing organizational chart. The public should know who leads those offices.

Any new leadership of the CFPB will have to consider the location of the Office of Fair Lending. The move of the Fair Lending Office from its initial home in the same division with Supervision and Enforcement to the Director’s Front Office was meant to refocus the Fair Lending Office’s work on “advocacy, coordination, and education” instead of supervision and enforcement. We at CRREA Project believe that leaving the Office of Fair Lending in the Director’s Office could be used to signal its crosscutting importance to the work of the CFPB, if coupled with the necessary formal and transparent decision rights and processes.

For example, the CFPB could publicly commit to a formal role for the Office of Fair Lending in priority-setting across the agency. The CFPB could update its written procedures related to decision-making to embark on specific actions that would normally rise to the Director for final decision, such as authorizing specific enforcement actions. Establishing formal and transparent decision rights and processes would provide accountability to Congress and the public. Such actions could provide reassurance that fair lending was a central consideration in supervisory and enforcement actions without disclosing confidential internal CFPB deliberations.

Other steps could include explicit roles for outreach connected to rulemakings to facilitate input from marginalized communities or a designated role for the statutory offices in providing input into policymaking. Clarifying the role of the Community Advisory Board would assist both the CAB and staff in understanding the purpose and nature of their interactions. Other agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency have, from time to time, published detailed guidance for staff and guidance for rulewriters about the agency’s policy decision processes. This kind of work is foundational to consistent management across administrations and could contribute to the development of a culture and identity for the CFPB that lasts for generations.

Conclusion

Accountability to the underserved and poorly served consumers and communities the statute repeatedly calls out is critical. Public-facing documents, like the strategic plan, a research agenda, or an organizational chart, afford one level of accountability. They explain what the agency intends to do and offer a point of engagement for the public. Future leadership should go further and embrace the statute’s emphasis on consumers and traditionally underserved consumers and communities to apply an explicit racial and economic equity lens to decision-making across the agency. Doing so would build a CFPB robust and resilient enough to serve the public well for the years to come.

One of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the country, the slaughter and processing of the meat we eat relies heavily upon rural workers—disproportionately immigrants, refugees, and people of color—who have few better options. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), which has tracked the spread of the coronavirus in this industry since April, as of September 22 at least 42,708 people in 496 meat and poultry plants have been infected with COVID-19, and at least 203 have died.

These figures and the lives they represent highlight how race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class status intersect to shape individual and collective life chances. They also illustrate the ways in which population health outcomes are shaped by labor policies and practices.

As the media work to highlight the impact of COVID-19 among meat and poultry workers, reporters have sought reliable data to deepen our understanding of this industry. Their first and most basic question: Who are the people who labor in this node of America’s food chain? What is the racial and ethnic composition of the workforce? Where are they from? Which languages do they speak? What do we know about their immigration status?

Some of the existing ethnographic data—including from our own research—provides vital insight into the rich textures of workers’ lives on the line and at home, but unfortunately often can’t answer these questions at the macro level. Here, we set out to explore how existing demographic data—most of which comes from government surveys—might help provide a broader scaffolding for answering these questions on a national scale and by state.

While data from the U.S. Census Bureau continues to be the best source of demographic data available, some of what we found was not consistent with what we have learned in ethnographic research about the profiles of meat and poultry workers. This blog post explains why that might be the case and urges caution, particularly when relying on state-level breakdowns of those data.

National data

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which is based on data reported directly by employers to unemployment insurance agencies, provides the best available estimate of the total number of workers nationwide in animal slaughtering and processing by state. It reports the five-year average, as of 2018, as 498,848 people (230,733 in poultry and 268,115 in red meat). The QCEW estimates shown in Table 1 list the top five meatpacking and poultry states, by number of workers, and serve to corroborate what is widely known—that the poultry industry has flourished in the states of the Deep South, while meatpacking is concentrated principally in the Midwest and Plains states.1

Table 1

The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects the names and locations of animal slaughter and processing plants by state and zip code. Overlaying this data with available public health data about viral outbreaks has allowed FERN and other investigative outlets to map out the strong correlation between this industry and rural COVID-19 hot spots.

But missing from these important analyses are data on the social demographics of the people who work in these dangerous industrial sectors. What is known about the age, race, gender, country of origin, language, and citizenship status of the poultry and meatpacking workers in these areas? Reliable estimates of these demographic characteristics could aid public health efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 in areas where these plants are located.

The best existing data source to answer these questions is the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey of the U.S. population administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, with a sample size of approximately 3.5 million addresses. The ACS data allow us to tabulate the characteristics of meat- and poultry-processing workers at the national level.2

Nationally, the ACS data confirm some of what the best ethnographic information has shown to be true: As Table 2 indicates, the meat- and poultry-processing workforce is predominantly male and overwhelmingly made up of people of color, with a large percentage of immigrants and refugees. Among these, a majority come from Latin America, with smaller numbers from Asian and African countries. The vast majority of immigrant workers are noncitizens; however, these data do not indicate the percentage of the workforce that is undocumented.

Table 2

Comparing the meat and poultry industries

When we compare the makeup of the workforce in the top five meatpacking states to that of the top five poultry states, we see some significant differences that correspond with our ethnographic and historical knowledge of the distinctions between these industries. We do this in Table 3, where the data show that a greater share of meatpacking workers are male compared with poultry workers, and a much higher percentage are foreign-born—double the share of poultry workers. The immigrant workers in both groups hail mostly from Latin America. The immigrant workers in meatpacking are somewhat more likely to be naturalized citizens than their counterparts in poultry. Meanwhile, the poultry workforce includes more women than the meatpacking workforce, along with a much higher percentage of Black workers.

These distinctions in the present moment build upon a past in which the historically more urban meatpacking industry has relied heavily on immigrant men of diverse backgrounds for over a century, a trend that continued as the industry shifted production to more rural areas. Meanwhile, in much of the rural South, poultry processing operated predominantly on the backs of local African American women and men (and poor white women) until the industry’s more recent turn to immigrant labor.

Notably, as Table 3 also shows, meatpacking workers in the top five meatpacking states earn nearly a third more than poultry workers in the top five poultry processing states. They are also less than half as likely to live in a household that subsists below the poverty line. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the vibrant history of unionization in hog and beef processing, a tradition the poultry industry sought to skirt by establishing itself in the rural, “right-to-work,” Jim Crow South.3

Table 3

State-level estimates: A note of caution

In addition to looking at the ACS data nationally and comparatively across the top poultry- and meat-processing states, we sought a more granular approach. Reliable information about the characteristics of workers by state and county would allow a deeper understanding of who may be suffering disproportionately in COVID-19 animal-processing hot spots such as Waterloo, Iowa, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, or Carthage, Mississippi. This information could help state health departments and local agencies better mobilize and serve these communities.

Unfortunately, when we conduct our analysis by state, we notice sharp divergences between ACS data and what our detailed ethnographic research has found. To illustrate, Table 4 shows the results from Mississippi, a state Angela Stuesse knows well as a result of her nearly two decades of research with poultry workers there.

Table 4

Mississippi is home to a higher percentage of African American workers than most other meat and poultry states, and the ACS data reflect this historical fact. However, the number of workers from Latin America there has increased dramatically since the 1990s, thanks to the industry’s efforts to actively recruit and hire new immigrants as part of a strategy to keep worker organizing at bay.

The state’s newcomers hail principally from Mexico and Guatemala, but also—because of recruitment efforts in Miami, Florida—from countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Given this recent history, in today’s Mississippi, the census categories of Latinx, foreign-born, and noncitizen are nearly synonymous among animal-processing workers.

Stuesse’s ethnographic research with poultry workers, labor organizers, and industry executives indicates that in some Mississippi plants, immigrants now outnumber U.S.-born workers. In others they are the predominant labor force on the night shift, or in particular departments, such as on the debone lines. And more than a quarter century after the industry began recruiting them in earnest, Latinx Mississippians are tightly woven into the social fabric of poultry communities.

But Table 4 shows a different story, one that diverges from Stuesse’s lived reality as a qualitative researcher embedded in Mississippi’s poultry communities over a period of six years. It reports that only 9.5% of the state’s animal slaughter and processing workers are Latinx, and only 8.4% are foreign-born. These data simply do not jibe with what we know, ethnographically, to be true—that a much higher percentage of new Latinx immigrants work in Mississippi’s meat and poultry plants than is accounted for in these figures. For these reasons, our confidence in the available ACS estimates of workers’ characteristics at the state level is low.

We suspect these surprising estimates of immigrant workers shown in Table 4 from the ACS Mississippi data are primarily due to undercounting of the undocumented population, despite the Pew Research Center’s estimate that approximately 90% of the unauthorized population is captured in Census Bureau surveys.4 The size of the five-year sample of animal slaughtering and processing workers in Mississippi is 540, which is large enough to provide a relatively precise estimate of the share of these workers who are foreign-born. However, among those 540, only 34 reported being born outside the United States.

It is well known that the Census Bureau faces significant challenges when trying to sample undocumented communities, not least of which is that the precarity of living and working without authorization makes participation potentially risky. Unauthorized immigrants were already fearful of interfacing with governmental authorities and agencies, but widespread fears—stoked by the Trump administration—that the decennial census could be weaponized against them have likely intensified this reticence. Reluctance to interact with government agencies may be even stronger in states such as Mississippi where the political environment is often hostile toward immigrants, who make up a small minority of the population.

Conclusions and caveats

The ACS comprises the most complete national data set on the demographics of workers in animal slaughter and processing. It is vital that this data be as accurate as possible. We present and summarize these data—both nationally and comparatively by top poultry and meatpacking states—because we see value in making the best extant data more readily available to policymakers, scholars, the media, and the broader public.

However, as our discussion of Mississippi’s workforce reveals, we have serious concerns about the granular validity of the ACS estimates. Specifically, ethnographic research suggests that the ACS likely significantly undercounts people in undocumented poultry and meatpacking communities, suppressing the numbers of Latinx and other foreign-born and noncitizen workers represented in the data. We therefore qualify our presentation of the extant demographic data on workers in this industry.

Although we firmly acknowledge the importance and value of the ACS and the decennial census, we must urge the public and policymakers to use caution when using ACS data to support claims about the makeup of the poultry and meatpacking workforce. Due to what we suspect is a substantial undercounting of foreign-born—and especially undocumented—workers, we are concerned that local, state, and federal lawmakers may rely on data that offer an incomplete picture of the industry, at best.

We call for a concerted effort to collect more and better data on workers in this essential industry, similar to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), a targeted data collection effort focused on the nation’s non-H-2A crop production workers. We also urge the policymakers who dictate the terms of national census data collection—and the agencies carrying out these directives—to reflect on the shortcomings of the data and make sincere and well-resourced efforts to better reach undocumented and immigrant communities in future census counts, and in ways that encourage their safe participation.

America’s food chain workers have long lived with the economic, social, and health effects of neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia. These intersecting ills have set the table for the COVID-19 pandemic to dramatically and disproportionately infect meat and poultry workers across the country and around the world. We hope our contribution can help provide a clearer picture of our nation’s animal slaughter and processing workers so that their stories may be more accurately told and policies enacted to better support them, advancing possibilities for worker justice across the United States.

Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and author of the award-winning book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.

Nathan T. Dollar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of migration, labor, and population health. He also serves as chair of the governing board for the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program.

Notes

1. Contrary to how it has been used in recent media coverage of COVID-19 hot spots in beef, hog, and poultry plants, the term “meatpacking” traditionally includes the slaughter, processing, packaging, and distribution of cattle, hogs, sheep, and other livestock, but generally excludes poultry.

2. Because we are interested in information on a small population we use the 2018 five-year (2014–2018) ACS data, accessed via the Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database . ACS is the only existing data source with a large enough sample size to provide relatively reliable estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of workers in the animal slaughtering and processing industry. Unfortunately, the NAICS codes in the ACS data do not allow us to distinguish between workers in poultry versus those in meat processing.

3. It is worth noting that the meatpacking industry learned from poultry processors and by the 1980s had also sought to decrease union density and labor costs, restructuring and moving into the rural Corn Belt and High Plains states. While unionization dropped in hog and beef processing as a result, organizing is again on the rise, and the importance of union protections in the COVID-19 moment cannot be understated.

4. These Pew Center estimates of the undercount refer primarily to Mexican immigrants and may be substantially larger for subgroups.