Read on Twitter
Since the news is now out that workers were being infected and killed to increase meat exports to China, I wanted to share an audio clip making clear just how little Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan cares about workers. He basically considers them expendable bc unemployment is high.
The clip is from a 03-24-20 earnings call with investors. Transcript is here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-288-hk-earnings-225438469.html
Sullivan, of course, also emailed the Governor of Nebraska expressing "grave concerns" that "reiterating the importance of social distancing" was creating "hysteria" that would keep employees from coming to work. https://www.propublica.org/article/emails-reveal-chaos-as-meatpacking-companies-fought-health-agencies-over-covid-19-outbreaks-in-their-plants
And, as two big stories in the NYT and USA Today have shown, the claim that this was about "protecting the U.S. food supply" as Smithfield and Sullivan repeatedly said, was a lie: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/06/16/meat-shortages-were-unlikely-despite-warnings-trump-meatpackers/3198259001/
As @TedGenoways said recently, the whole system is built on the idea that workers are expendable. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/20/the-jungle-and-the-pandemic-the-meat-industry-coronavirus-and-an-economy-in-crisis/ Still, it was surprising to see Ken Sullivan basically say it out loud. I guess he felt safe talking to his investors.
To companies like Smithfield and Tyson, literally everything is expendable: animals, the environment, workers, consumers, the American food supply chain, public health. The only thing that matters to them, the *only* thing, is maximizing profits.
Here's Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan saying that if you shut down processing plants to protect workers from #covid19 #coronavirus, we "won't have food." This was a lie: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/business/meat-industry-china-pork.html
