Event Coverage Highlight

by Chad Bouchard

When OPC member Alice Driver started reporting on the effects of Covid on the meatpacking industry in her home state of Arkansas in 2020, she had no plans to turn it into a book. She initially secured funding from the National Geographic Society and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project to write a single article in the Arkansas Times newspaper.

“And then as the pandemic progressed, some of the meatpacking workers who I’d started following began to die of Covid,” she said during an OPC discussion about her resulting book, Life and Death of the American Worker, on Jan. 8.

To tell the full story, she felt she had to go back to a deadly chemical accident in 2011 at a Tyson processing plant, an incident the company swiftly covered up, that left many workers with long-term damage to their lungs, and more vulnerable to the virus nearly a decade later.

“It was for me a way to connect the horrors of the Covid time period with earlier issues with safety at Tyson,” she said. “A lot of it has to do with how they’re managing training and translation. Imagine having workers who speak 20 or 30 different languages in one plant. In this case, the chemicals, when mixed, produced a weapons-grade agent that harmed a lot of workers.”

The book was published in September last year and earned “Best Book of 2024” accolades from The New Yorker and The Conversation.

Yaffa Fredrick, Senior Director of Investigations at The Houston Chronicle, moderated. Fredrick served as one of Driver’s first editors at CNN when the two met nearly a decade ago.

Driver said during her interviews about the chemical explosion, she heard workers mention that they had seen “Tyson nurses” for their health complaints. The company denied having any of its own medical staff, but said it contracts a third-party provider to handle health issues at its facilities.

“If workers want to go outside of the on-site system, they have to pay for it themselves, which for many is just something that they can’t do,” she said. “So I had a real breakthrough when I got a ‘Tyson nurse’ who had worked at several Tyson plants to speak to me.”

She said her source, who was initially very reluctant to talk with Driver, told her that when the medical staff was treating workers, “‘we have managers and supervisors from Tyson, who are not medically trained, who are weighing in on what we should be doing,’” Driver quoted the staff member as saying. “‘And the managers receive bonuses if we keep injuries down.’”

Yaffa asked Driver whether Tyson Foods might push back against the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations, given the meatpacking industry’s dependence on undocumented workers.

“I cannot imagine that Tyson or other companies are going to silently watch their labor force be deported,” she said. They know the financial cost of that. So it it’s going to be a point of tension.”

Driver is currently working on a podcast in Spanish related to her book, and hopes that the podcast might eventually be translated into English.

The book is available to purchase here.

Click the window below to watch a playlist of video clips from the program, in which she covers a range of topics including the genesis of her book idea, the history of the meat packing industry, the political and media landscape affecting workers, Tyson Foods’ medical apparatus, and answered questions from the audience about the implications of mass deportations, the upcoming podcast, and more.