Some blame meatpacking workers, not plants, for virus spread

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — As coronavirus hotspots erupted at major U.S. meatpacking plants, experts criticized extremely tight working conditions that made the factories natural high risk contagion locations. But some Midwestern politicians have pointed the finger at the workers' living conditions, suggesting crowded homes bear some blame.

The comments — including a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice's remark that an outbreak didn't seem to have come from “regular folks” — outraged workers and advocates who slammed them as elitist and critical of immigrants, who make up a big share of America's meatpacking workforce.

And the remarks stood in contrast to public U.S. outpourings of gratitude for other essential workers like police officers, health care professionals and grocery store workers.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, generated ire last month when discussing the closure of a Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls that infected 1,000 employees and people who came in contact with the workers, saying “99% of what’s going on today wasn’t happening inside the facility.”

The spread of the virus happened "more at home, where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus because a lot of these folks who work at this plant live in the community, the same building, sometimes in the same apartment,” she said on Fox News.

Noem's comments created a foundation for blaming virus outbreaks on the meatpackers' home lives instead of conditions at plants, where employees often worked shoulder to shoulder with little to no protective gear as U.S. virus cases surged, said Taneeza Islam, who runs the refugee and immigrant support group South Dakota Voices for Peace.

Her group organized a letter to Noem to ask "her to listen to the people who have been directly impacted because she has not done...