OmniTrax took over operations of the South Branch Valley Railroad on Dec. 1. The company told legislators a month into its 40 year lease with that state, that it plans to continue the operations of Potomac Eagle, a scenic passenger train.
OmniTrax took over operations of the South Branch Valley Railroad on Dec. 1. The company told legislators a month into its 40 year lease with that state, that it plans to continue the operations of Potomac Eagle, a scenic passenger train.
In 2019, OmniTrax acquired the Winchester & Western Railroad operations, making the South Branch Valley Railroad its second operation acquisition in the state. However this will be the first scenic tourism train in the company’s entire operating portfolio.
Stacey Posey, vice president of operations for OmniTrax’s central region, said the company will not only retain the Potomac Eagle scenic passenger train but that it has ongoing discussions to expand the operations. He said state officials told him that it was important that the Potomac Eagle be protected, and even though he has no experience running a tourism train, he is committed to maintaining the Potomac Eagle.
“I was in Chicago for eight years and we would run 120 trains a day, I think I can run two or three trains a day on the South Branch and not mess with that (the Potomac Eagle) train at all,” Posey said. “It will run on time, it will continue to run and we will continue to support the Potomac Eagle as they grow.
The Potomac Eagle operates during the summer and autumn, and usually has around 44,000 passengers a year.
OmniTrax has an agreement with the state for a 50/50 rail maintenance cost split with the state. However, as utilization of the South Branch Valley Railroad increases, so will OmniTrax’s percentage cost share.
It’s the uncertainty that gets to Darlene Davis. The uncertainty of when she’ll see her 87-year-old mother in person again. The uncertainty of her co-workers’ health. The uncertainty that comes with the novel coronavirus.
When a co-worker of hers at the JBS Swift meatpacking plant in Louisville died from COVID-19, she said that uncertainty turned into fear for many of the 1,200 employees at the plant. The Louisville Metro Health Department was made aware of the death on April 4.
“Everyone was upset because we were close with them, and they was just scared, not knowing the unknown and then having someone that you work so closely with to pass away,” said Davis, the chief union steward at the JBS Swift plant for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227. “And right away we wasn’t told about his passing or anything like that. But it was very scary.”
That was the first of two coronavirus deaths so far among the at least 481 meatpacking workers sick with the virus in Kentucky. At least 49 deaths have been reported among these workers across the country according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Davis said ever since coronavirus cases began to appear among her co-workers, JBS USA hasn’t done enough to protect them from the virus and hasn’t shared with workers information about positive cases in the plant.
The ReSource spoke with some workers at four poultry and meatpacking plants in the region where coronavirus outbreaks have infected workers. They described the close conditions inside the facilities, their doubts about the safeguards in place, and one worker who has been infected with coronavirus spoke about his fear for his family’s health.
As meatpacking plants are mandated to remain open because of an executive order signed by President Trump, unionized meatpacking workers say they’re potentially being put in harm’s way to keep the nationwide supply of meat flowing because some plants aren’t doing enough to protect them from the pandemic.
Tight Quarters
The Louisville Metro Health Department was notified of a coronavirus death at the JBS facility on April 4 and had received two complaints from workers at the plant following the death, alleging JBS USA wasn’t telling workers about the rise of positive cases in the plant and wasn’t implementing social distancing among workers. A complaint on April 13 alleged that following news that a worker died, other workers who had expressed safety concerns were told they would be fired if they didn’t come into work.
A subsequent inspection by the health department found while some measures were in place to stop coronavirus spread including an outdoor tent for work breaks, there was still not enough social distancing between workers. The plant has had at least 57 workers test positive for the virus as of May 8, along with that one death.
Worker safety advocates have raised past concerns about the tight quarters meatpacking workers operate in, but it’s not just a concern for Davis. It’s a matter of lives at stake.
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Darlene Davis, a union leader at a JBS USA plant in Louisville.
“There are a lot of people and our plants and hallways are congested. We may have 15 to 20 people putting up their equipment in a small hallway before entering the break room,” Davis said. “We have a rising positive case of COVID-19 in our plant, and the company is not sharing this information with our members … I care about each and every one of my members. I try to keep in touch with the ones that are out, checking on them to see how they’re doing if I can. Because I don’t know if they’re gonna come back.”
A spokesperson for JBS said the company is testing worker temperatures, requiring face coverings, and is not punishing workers for absences due to health.
“Reckless Move”
Jason Wilson said meatpacking workers at his Tyson Foods processing plant in Robards, Kentucky, demanded transparency from the start.
“When we had our first case at Tyson in Robards, the company was wanting to keep it a secret, not tell anybody,” said Wilson, the chief union steward for UFCW Local 227 at his west Kentucky plant. “And the union actually told the members, and it [the information] spread like wildfire at that point. And the members got united and more unionized than I’ve ever seen in my life at this plant.”
Wilson said his union members, representing approximately 1,300 employees, have gotten daily updates on coronavirus cases at their plant because of prompt demands. But there are other things that worry Wilson.
The plant in Robards, with at least 95 cases as of Tuesday, was one of 14 meatpacking plants across the country to resume operations this past week following the federal executive order to keep plants operating.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in a release said reopening the plants without providing daily testing and the highest level of protections was a “reckless move” that would put lives at risk.
A Tyson Foods spokesperson previously said the closure of the Robards plant, from April 30 through May 3, allowed for “additional cleaning and sanitation efforts.”
Wilson said plexiglass barriers have been installed surrounding the fronts and sides of each production line worker, and workers are given basic surgical masks. Yet he also said social distancing still isn’t practiced, and his union isn’t yet convinced these barriers are sufficient.
He said about 150 people work tightly together along the labor-intensive ‘de-bone’ production line, which usually has employees remove chicken bones with a knife from breasts, thighs, and legs.
“When we go to the production floor, we’re within 18 inches of the next person.” Wilson said. “At the end of the day, yeah, we social distance in the hallways. But when we go to the production floor, will it be enough?”
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Jason Wilson, a union leader at a Tyson Foods processing plant in Henderson County, speaking from his home.
Wilson’s wife also works at the plant, and so do many immigrants and people who are trying to make ends meet. It’s a diverse workforce reflected at many plants in Kentucky and across the country. At the JBS plant in Louisville, at least five languages are spoken among employees including Karen, native to people from Tibet.
These people who make up much of the workforce at these plants are not only falling sick to this virus, but fear they are bringing it back home to their families.
Recovering
Jose Andres works at a west Kentucky poultry processing plant with by far the most coronavirus cases among workers in the state. When the Resource spoke with Andres on April 27, he and his family were just recovering from a weeks-long ordeal with the virus.
“By week one, we came outside and walked in our yard, like one lap and we were exhausted,” Andres said. “This virus does drain you. But thankfully, we were not as critical as most people. We didn’t have to be hospitalized.”
He said his wife, who has an autoimmune disease, was hit harder by the virus. Andres, originally from Guatemala, has grown up in Ohio County, Kentucky, through the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM.
His job as a production supervisor at the Perdue Farms poultry processing plant in Ohio County provides his family a stable living, while his wife stays home with their eight-month-old daughter. Andres’ positive case may have been one of the first coronavirus cases at the plant.
He said his fever, edging above 100 degrees, started on Easter Sunday, April 12. The fever wouldn’t break after taking some Tylenol, still persisting by the time he was scheduled to go back to work on Tuesday. He said he went straight to the plant’s Wellness Center, where he was prescribed antibiotics. That didn’t work either.
“And that’s when they told me to go get tested for the virus,” Andres said. “And by that time I had lost my [sense of] taste, my smell, and just body aches … they tested me for strep [throat], flu and of course the virus. And those first two tests came back negative, and that kind of just made me worried that I had the virus.”
Andres said he received a positive test result on April 18. Green River District Health Department officials said they were made aware of the first case at the Perdue Farms plant on April 13.
“By that time, my wife was showing the same symptoms that I had. And we have an eight-month -old baby. So that’s just what came rushing into my head was my daughter. You forget about yourself for a moment and then I was worried about her. And my wife has two boys,” Andres said.
At the time of the interview, Andres said he believed leadership at the Perdue Farms plant was doing the best job they could to protect workers given the circumstances of the virus, including checking worker temperatures and providing masks. A Perdue Farms spokesperson said those measures, along with barriers installed in workplaces and sanitizing the plant every 24 hours, are efforts to keep the 1,300 plant employees safe.
But since Andres’ case, the plant has seen hundreds of cases amongst its employees — 282 as of Tuesday, according to state health officials — and one employee has died. The Kentucky Department for Public Health had all employees at the plant tested for the coronavirus last week, an effort that identified almost 100 additional cases.
State health officials are working with Perdue Farms to update the company’s internal infection control plan with state coronavirus guidance, including recommended social distancing and changing how employees carpool to work.
Yet it remains unclear what can be done by local and state health officials at these plants if coronavirus outbreaks linger or resurface.
Following Trump’s executive order to keep meatpacking plants operating, U.S. Department of Labor guidance said local and state authorities may not be able to force meatpacking plants to close.
In Kentucky, workplace safety regulations are managed by a state agency, the Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health Program (OSH). However, the agency indicates it does not have authority to regulate these facilities.
“Kentucky OSH is seeking a collaborative relationship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in ensuring the health and safety of meat and poultry processing workers during the pandemic, while respecting the authority of federal officials under the President’s DPA order and U.S. Department of Labor guidance,” said Majorie Arnold, Chief of Staff for the Kentucky Labor Cabinet.
Small Sacrifices
For some union meatpacking workers in the region, relationships with plant leadership have been less strained. Belinda Arms is the chief union steward for UFCW Local 227 and a chemical operator at the Tyson Foods processing plant in Corydon, Indiana.
“I have to say that our plant has really stepped up to the plate for once they have done a great job, they’ve been totally transparent. Anytime that we have a new case, the HR manager, she will call me,” Arms said.
With at least nine coronavirus cases at the plant, Arms said the good working relationship she had with plant management before the pandemic has carried over in the past few months.
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Belinda Arms, who works at a Tyson Foods plant in southern Indiana.
UFCW Local 227 spokesperson Caitlin Blair said even within the same company, standards of protection and working relationships from plant to plant can vary. Worker safety advocates have called on the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create an enforceable standard for all plants to follow so that some plants don’t lag behind others in protection.
So far, OSHA has only issued optional guidance for meatpacking plants.
“I think that the difference in experience, not just from different companies, but also within the same company, is really a perfect example why we need state leaders to step up and make these guidelines, the CDC guidelines mandatory for everybody, and enforceable so that every plant can experience the same level of protection,” Blair said.
Even with fears of the coronavirus, many of these workers go into these plants because they rely on the paycheck it provides. For Darlene Davis, his husband is out of work with a broken leg, unable to contribute an income.
With Mother’s Day this past weekend, Davis didn’t consider visiting her elderly mother who is living with another family because of coronavirus fears.
“Because of her age and this virus is going on, me going into the plant every day, I wouldn’t want to take that back to her,” Davis said. “I had one friend tell me that because of this going on, when he comes home, his wife is in one area of the house and he stays in another area so that they won’t spread the virus just in case.”
During normal times, Davis would gather with her mother and other family to have dinner and sit on the front porch as the weather warmed up. But with the uncertainty of the pandemic, Davis is having to make that sacrifice.
In a virtual press conference Friday, Gov. Jim Justice said members of the National Guard would be sent to Moorefield to respond to testing needs at Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken processing plant that’s the largest employer in the county.
Testing at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant of about 940 workers in Moorefield will occur on every shift, Hardy County sheriff’s office spokesman David Maher said in a news release. The office is handling media requests for the health department.
“We appreciate the ongoing cooperation of Pilgrim’s Pride and the many folks in our community that work in the processing plant,” said Hardy County Health Department administrator William Ours in a prepared statement. “We have a shared goal of keeping everyone healthy and ensuring the ongoing safe operation of our food processing facilities.”
Pilgrim’s Pride spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said in a statement that workers at the plant will have a “choice” to be tested.
“The health and safety of our team members remains our highest priority. We have implemented a wide of [sic] range of measures at our facility to combat coronavirus,” Richardson said. “Today, every Pilgrim’s facility temperature checks 100 percent of the workforce before they enter a facility. We also provide and require face masks to be worn at all times on company property.”
She also said the company will not punish workers for not coming into work for health reasons.
The sheriff’s office spokesman, David Maher, said he thinks there “were a few cases related to the plant” but he did not elaborate, and Pilgrim’s won’t say either.
Richardson said some Pilgrim’s Pride employees across the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19, but that “out of respect for the families, we are not releasing further information.”
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hardy County jumped from three on April 27 to 16 as of Monday morning, according to DHHR’s coronavirus tracker and the Hardy County Health Department’s Facebook page.
Meat processing plant workers are an especially vulnerable population during this crisis. Thousands of workers have tested positive for the coronavirus at meat processing plants across the country leading to the closure of some plants and prompting meat shortages.
Gov. Jim Justice requested the tests at the Moorefield plant, which remains open.
“We’re going to do some extensive testing there and try to nip that in the bud and stop it as fast as we possibly can in order to be able to keep that plant moving,” Justice said Friday.
Additionally, the National Guard will also be helping the local Hardy County Health Department with contact tracing and recommendations for self-isolation.
At least 54 people in West Virginia have died from the virus and 1,366 have tested positive, according to DHHR on Monday morning.
For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, the virus can cause severe illness or death. For most people, it causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in two to three weeks.
For more than a decade, more than 100 migrant and refugee families from countries like Myanmar (formerly Burma), Vietnam, Ethiopia, Guatemala and others have come to Moorefield, West Virginia.
They’ve done so to work at Pilgrim’s Pride – a large poultry plant that is Hardy County’s biggest employer with 1,700 workers.
For the past six months, 100 Days in Appalachia reporter Anna Patrick has been working on two stories exploring Moorefield’s growing migrant and refugee population.
Her stories take a deep dive into Moorefield’s poultry industry and discusses what a typical workday is like for employees at Pilgrim’s Pride.
When Sheena Van Meter graduated from Moorefield High School in 2000, her class was mainly comprised of the children of families that had long-planted roots in West Virginia’s eastern Potomac Highlands. Some were African American. Most were white. And for the Moorefield resident, the closest exposure she had to other cultures, before leaving for college, came in the form of an occasional foreign-exchange student.
Since Van Meter returned to her alma mater in 2011, first as a behavioral specialist, then as a principal, and, now, as superintendent of Hardy County Schools, she’s witnessed the makeup of Moorefield’s classrooms change dramatically in a short amount of time. It has become a place where cultures collide, where Spanish, Burmese and English are spoken together on playgrounds, where refugee children try to regain new footing in a foreign land and where longtime residents, both students and their teachers, try to make space for change.
Hardy County’s Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Stauderman says they don’t really have a choice. “And she’s right,” Van Meter said. “We’re trying to do everything we can with the limited funding that we have.”
Over the last 10 years, Hardy County has become the most diverse school system in West Virginia. It has the highest percentage of English Learners (or “EL”), a term Hardy County Schools uses for students whose first language is not English. Of the approximately 2,300 students currently enrolled in Hardy County, 15 percent are considered English Learners. Every EL student in the county, except for one, attends Moorefield’s schools, which has become one of the strongest and rare examples of cohesion and integration between varying ethnic groups within a community that has been slow and sometimes non-reactive in embracing its newcomers.
Families are immigrating to Moorefield, some under refugee status, from around the world, coming from countries like Myanmar (formerly Burma), Vietnam, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guatemala and others. Today, 18 different languages are spoken in Hardy County Schools.
This swift change is not because Moorefield has found a new, successful campaign for combating West Virginia’s declining and aging population. It hasn’t declared itself an asylum city. But instead, it sits at the center of West Virginia’s poultry industry. And in Moorefield, you don’t have to look far to explain how a town of less than 2,500 has become one of the most diverse places per capita in the state.
Just follow the 18-wheelers driving past the high school, hauling live chickens down Moorefield’s Main Street. They’ll lead you to the answer.
Depending on the way the wind’s blowing, it can be hard to forget there’s a chicken plant in the center of town.
Built along a bend in the South Branch of the Potomac River, Pilgrim’s Pride houses three plants situated together within Moorefield’s city limits: a fresh plant, where chickens are killed and made into various cuts of meat; a prepared foods plant that turns the meat into value-added products like chicken nuggets; and a rendering plant that uses the leftover parts to make pet food and other things. Depending on the weather that day and what’s happening at the plant, the air throughout town often contains an odor that’s hard to miss, a putrid-like mixture that can make the olfactory system think of waste or death. This reporter also noticed a warm, salty seasoning smell around the prepared foods plant, similar to putting your nose in a bowl of $1 chicken-flavored ramen.
“Everybody complains about the smell,” said Amy Fabbri, an adult English as a Second Language Teacher in Moorefield. “And the response is always, ‘It’s the smell of money.’”
If the smell doesn’t grab you, the large tractor-trailer trucks driving down Main Street, passing Moorefield’s library and shrinking downtown district, might do the trick. Or the hundreds of workers exiting doors on a shift’s change. Many cross the street in droves, walking to their cars in adjacent gravel lots. Most of the migrant workers in particular take off down the sidewalks, as many don’t own cars. At least, not yet.
Credit Justin Hayhurst / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
Gravel lots surround Pilgrim’s Pride property, welcoming employees who travel from surrounding counties to work at the chicken processing plant. While at the same time, many of the company’s migrant workers, who live in Moorefield, walk to work.
Pilgrim’s size and hold in the community would be similar to a coal mine in West Virginia’s Raleigh or McDowell County, back when coal was king, said Chris Claudio. He grew up in Moorefield and lives there today. More than 1,700 people work at the Pilgrim’s location. It’s the largest employer in the county and trumps the second largest, American Woodmark Corporation, by around 1,000 workers, according to Hardy County’s Development Authority. And for the 125 migrant and refugee families that have enrolled their children in Hardy County Schools, it’s the employer name almost all write on forms.
“In coal mining communities, everyone is connected to the industry, whether you do it yourself or you have a family member or a friend [that does],” Claudio said. “That’s definitely the case in Moorefield.”
Pilgrim’s plant in Moorefield has become fully integrated, meaning Pilgrim’s Pride maintains ownership over the entire process from chicken to egg and back again. It’s known as vertical integration, a common practice in the chicken industry, where the company even supplies the local, contract farmers with specific birds to raise and the proper feed to give them. Pilgrim’s is a supplier to giant companies including KFC, Sysco and Popeye’s. To meet demand, the plant kills an average of 450,000 chickens per day over the course of two shifts. That totals up to 2.2 million birds per week, according to a factsheet provided by the company.
It’s a system in endless demand of workers. For the first half of this year, a large, wooden sign sat directly across the street from Pilgrim’s plant, positioned to catch motorists’ attention driving south along Main Street. In large bold letters it read: “Pilgrim’s: Now hiring. Apply within.”
They’re always hiring.
Poultry worker turnover ranges from 40 percent to as high as 100 percent annually, according to a 2012 report published in the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law. If you ask local officials why Pilgrim’s has begun recruiting and hiring high volumes of migrant workers over the last 10 to 15 years, they’ll tell you it’s a basic supply and demand equation.
“It’s not that there aren’t enough people to work,” said Mallie Combs, economic development director of Hardy County. “It’s that there aren’t enough people who want to do those jobs.”
“I think that’s an easy answer,” said Dr. Angela Stuesse, an anthropologist who has spent years studying poultry plants’ recruitment of Latin American immigrants in Mississippi. “… to say, ‘Oh, people don’t want to do the work.”
“Instead of asking, ‘Why is the work so poor that nobody wants to do it?’”
When Chris Claudio attended Moorefield schools, if Pilgrim’s Pride wasn’t in the foreground — on hot days the smell from the plant seemed to travel further, he said — then it was always in the background. The company’s logo was printed on pencils he used in class. Students would show up wearing company T-shirts their parents had received. And for lunch, it didn’t matter the day, there was always a chicken option in the food line.
Students leaving Moorefield High know if they don’t make it out of town, they always have the plant to fall back on, Claudio said.
“It’s not comparable to a coal miner’s wage, but a decent wage without education,” Claudio said. The average yearly wage for a worker in meat, poultry or fish trimming is $27,790, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For many of Claudio’s peers, when they roll the Pilgrim’s hiring dice, they just hope they aren’t placed on a fresh plant line.
In the fresh plant, where chickens are slaughtered and turned into cuts of meat, workers stand for eight hours or more in freezing conditions — low temperatures are maintained to better preserve the birds — repeating the same motions over and over again. Many are wielding knives and trying to keep up with the high-speed of the line to slice, gut or trim chickens swinging past on mechanized hooks, which can easily lead to accidents.
“Poultry workers often endure debilitating pain in their hands, gnarled fingers, chemical burns, and respiratory problems,” according to a 2013 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The slaughtering of chickens has become more and more mechanized, which means that the human labor required to support that process has become less-skilled, monotonous motions repeated again and again. That’s the kind of job most of the migrant workers receive when they start out at Pilgrim’s in Moorefield. The majority are immediately placed on night-shift, the least desirable shift, in the freezing cold fresh plant.
But hiring migrant workers to complete these unskilled, repetitive and grueling tasks isn’t unique to Moorefield. For more than 20 years, poultry companies across the nation have intentionally diversified their workforce, Stuesse said.
In the chicken plants of Mississippi, which Steusse wrote about in her 2016 book “Scratching Out a Living,” Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to work alongside African American employees at the plant. African Americans at the Mississippi plants had “amassed enough power to start forming unions and negotiating their wages,” Stuesse said, “and it was at that moment that the industry was also expanding to more shifts, and so reaching out for workers from different places met both of those needs.”
The plants at Moorefield, both the fresh plant and the prepared foods, are considered non-union facilities. One of the ways poultry companies try to keep costs low, Stuesse said, is to pay workers less.
Credit Justin Hayhurst / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
Located along Main Street in Moorefield, it’s impossible to miss the massive size, and sometimes smell, of Pilgrim’s presence in a town of less than 2,500 people.
“One way to pay workers less is to make sure they are not organized and able to collectively bargain with their employer to set the terms of their labor and working conditions,” she added.
How do poultry companies ensure that workers aren’t organized?
They hire migrants and refugees, Stuesse said, and, in doing so, can flip the construct of a working-class, racially homogenous rural town on its head.
In response to its hiring practices, Pilgrim’s Pride said it considers the diversity of its team to be one of its greatest strengths.
“Labor challenges exist across our industry,” the company said in a prepared statement, “and we are focused on recruiting the right candidates who will thrive in our culture and want to spend their careers with us.”
Whether or not Moorefield’s immigrants and refugees are thriving in their new, poultry home, well, that’s a question for them.
Part Two of Remaking Moorefield, will explore how this small, West Virginia town is responding to its new, diverse neighbors. And what local folks, if any, are doing to bring people together.
Federal regulators have cited Pilgrim’s Pride for safety violations at the company’s poultry processing plant in Moorefield.
The U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday that the violations stem from three worker injuries in April, May and June. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that the injuries were caused by preventable violations.
The Department Labor says one employee suffered a fractured arm after contacting an unguarded machine shaft while operating a conveyor system. Another employee fell while refilling a machine with an inadequate step for employee access.
The third worker was caught in a blender while removing poultry from the machine. Three fingers were amputated.
A Pilgrim’s Pride spokesman didn’t immediately return telephone and email messages on Tuesday.
