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OSHA Offers Toothless Response to COVID-19 Workplace Deaths
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 Sept. 17, 2020 | HEALTH & SAFETY | How much are the lives of essential workers who are keeping food on the tables of their fellow Americans worth? Not much, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). A recent ruling by the federal agency fined two meatpacking plants in South Dakota and Colorado a measly $29,000 after at least 12 workers there died and some 1,500 were infected with the coronavirus. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) called the penalties “a new low,” and it’s hard to argue otherwise. OSHA could have issued a fine 10 times the size it did, but choose not to because, evidently, the agency felt these were not willful violations by Smithfield and JBS Foods. One only wonders how many would need to die for it to qualify as such… Teamsters
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