(editorial from the Greeley Daily Tribune, September 12 2020)

You know that old saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?”
Maybe in this case it could be modified to say, “If you don’t have anything worthwhile to do, don’t do anything at all.”

The irony is not lost on us that what follows is going to violate the edict in the first line, but there’s nothing nice to say about the actions taken by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, when it chose to levy a $15,615 fine on JBS Friday, months after six Greeley plant workers and a corporate employee died from COVID-19.

The Brazilian meat-processing giant recorded a net revenue of $51.7 billion in 2019. That means the fine is worth .00003% of last year’s profits. It’s the equivalent of fining someone making $50,000 a year — an approximate salary for a meat cutter at the Greeley plant, according to glassdoor.com — one-and-a-half cents. Get out a couple pennies and the bolt cutters, because we’re in big trouble now.

In acknowledging that JBS was at least partially negligent in its handling of the virus — which infected at least 290 employees at the plant and killed plant workers Saul Sanchez, Tibursio Lopez, Eduardo Conchas de la Cruz, Way Ler, Daniel Avila Loma and Tin Aye — OSHA is recognizing that the beef processing giant had at least a modicum of responsibility in the deaths of six people.

But that portion of responsibility was worth about $2,600 per head. That’s cheaper than a full-grown beef cow.

So what’s the point? Why did OSHA bother, four-plus months after the deaths of these people — fathers, grandfathers, mothers, grandmothers, husbands, wives, friends — to proffer such a piddling fine on the massive corporation for which these people worked and where many, if not all of them, caught the virus?

Sincerely, why draw attention to yourself this way? Granted, OSHA released the news late Friday evening — perhaps under the impression that it might not be noticed. But the attention was inevitably drawn, nonetheless. The bitter flames of resentment toward JBS from the mourning families and friends and coworkers and community members of human beings who died, at least in some cases, because they went to work, have been relit. And now, those flames are shining their harsh light on both the company and the feds. And for what?

Not to mention, JBS has disputed the fine. Think about that. That’s like protesting a penny fine because your dog mauled someone after you didn’t secure his leash tightly enough.

“The OSHA citation is entirely without merit,” the company wrote in a statement Friday night. “It attempts to impose a standard that did not exist in March as we fought the pandemic with no guidance. When OSHA finally provided guidance in late April, one month after the beginning of the citation time period, our previously implemented preventive measures largely exceeded any of their recommendations.”

What’s even more crazy is the fact that JBS has a point here. OSHA not only couldn’t get its act together until April in the face of a pandemic all reputable experts saw coming in late 2019, but its guidance that finally came in late April was, if the JBS statement is accurate, less aggressive than what JBS was already doing in March. Tin Aye, who died of COVID-19 in May, was reportedly taken to the hospital and ventilated March 29.

Another old saying, “too little, too late,” isn’t enough here.

Unsurprisingly, the UFCW Local 7 Union, which represents more than 3,000 of the several thousand employees at the Greeley plant, had some harsh words for the OSHA action.

“A $15,000 ‘penalty’ from OSHA is nothing to a large company like JBS. In fact, it only incentivizes the company to continue endangering its employees,” wrote Local 7 president Kim Cordova in a statement. “The government has officially failed our members, the more than 3,000 workers at JBS Greeley, who have protected the food supply chain while our communities quarantined during the pandemic. It is immoral and unethical, but in the current administration, unfortunately not illegal, that OSHA waited seven months to investigate the unsafe working conditions that led to this deadly outbreak. Because of this failure, JBS Greeley is the site of the most meat processing plant worker deaths in the nation due to COVID-19.”

It should be noted here that, while the thick concrete walls of the JBS plant north of downtown largely hide them from the rest of us while they’re working, and while language, background and culture divide many of them from a portion of us, JBS employees are not some group of “other people” in Greeley and the surrounding area. They are an integral part of this community — of OUR community.

JBS employees, more than 4,500 of them, are not just people. They are our people. They are residents of our cities, customers of our businesses, taxpayers to our shared public trust, members of our churches, and the parents and grandparents of our children’s friends at school. Many of them, like you, are readers of this newspaper. Many of them may not have been born here, but neither were many of us. They are us. We are them.

The pitiful federal action in response to the handling of a virus that killed at least seven of us — including the corporate death — and infected, weakened and crippled many, many more of us, is not an affront to just JBS workers. It’s not an affront to just immigrants, or just refugees, or just meat plant workers, or just blue-collar workers.

It’s an affront to Greeley.

https://www.greeleytribune.com/2020/09/12/editorial-osha-embarrasses-itself-re-lights-bitter-fires-with-late-low-fine-of-jbs/