How Reaganomics and Nativism Made This Meatpacking Plant a COVID-19 Hotspot
by Jamie Longazel
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
When it comes to worker safety in Northeast Pennsylvania, the old line from Faulkner comes to mind: “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
During the heyday of anthracite coal mining in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, workers were regularly killed in industrial “accidents” stemming from employer neglect. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many who avoided immediate death would ultimately succumb to black lung. And in one especially horrific instance, protesting workers were shot dead in broad daylight by coal barons’ hired guns.
Early last month, the collective trauma of those years was triggered when Cargill announced it would temporarily close its meatpacking plant located just outside the city after a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) leader revealed 164 of their workers were infected with COVID-19. Nearly two weeks later, as confirmed by family members, 64-year-old Rafael Benjamin was the first of those workers to die. He had been with the company for 17 years and was just months away from retirement. Cargill resumed operations the next morning. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Cargill's mere presence in Hazleton is a lesson in how neoliberalism enables corporations to extract maximum amounts of wealth from already-impoverished cities, while local officials mobilize nativism to get citizens to look the other way. In other words, Cargill's operation in Hazleton is an object lesson in how some workers are made vulnerable to be sacrificed at the altar of corporate profits.
In the mid-twentieth century, following the eventual demise of the city’s anthracite coal industry, Hazleton—now home to about 25,000 people—became a manufacturing town. The transition began in 1955, when local leaders, confronting unemployment rates around 25%, established a community development corporation (CDC) called CAN DO. The new organization launched a large, participatory fundraising campaign, collecting funds from community members with initiatives such as the “dime-a-week” campaign, which encouraged working class residents to contribute to the cause of attracting industry.
Following in the footsteps of urban communities who at the time were seeking to establish more local economic control, CAN DO raised enough money to purchase two large swaths of land on which industrial parks, gradually filled with manufacturing firms, would be developed. For a time, the descendants of European immigrants who had toiled in the famously exploitative mines went back to work in decent, stable jobs.
Things went more or less as planned until the 1980s. Before the Reagan administration, CAN DO, like other CDCs, had been reliant on federal community development funds, which Reagan cut almost immediately. The neoliberal theory guiding these cuts suggested that eliminating community development funds would reduce the burden of government, thus providing cities and towns with more economic freedom. In practice, however, they were simply an accelerant in the “economic war among the states.” Letting the market run free meant making municipalities across the country scramble to find the most lucrative incentives they could offer prospective employers—typically in the form of tax breaks. It was a race to the bottom in which industrial recruiters made only offers, not demands; workers and their elected representatives were pitted not against capital, but against other working class communities.
CAN DO got a taste of this in 1984 when they lost the high-profile bidding war to lure GM’s new Saturn manufacturing plant. As I detail in my book, Undocumented Fears, CAN DO recouped from that loss by undergoing a wholesale remodeling of the organization. They realized, in the words of one CAN DO executive, that they’d need to “change their way of thinking in order to compete.” The organization began shedding its grassroots skin, replacing it with crisp, clean neoliberal armor. They brought on marketers, public relations people, and lawyers. They even built a big fancy building in the center of town that, as CAN DO President W. Kevin O’Donnell told reporters in October 1990, would be a “focal point when important people visit the area.” Competition was fierce, however, and deindustrialization was rapidly accelerating. Despite their efforts to get lean and mean, CAN DO was still struggling to attract and retain employers, finding themselves outbid again and again.
This continued until the late 1990s, when Pennsylvania introduced the Keystone Opportunity Zone (KOZ) initiative, offering companies doing business on “blighted” land up to a twelve year moratorium on all taxes. This was a continuation of one of Regan's pet projects: so-called "enterprise zones," which give companies generous tax breaks for operating in designated areas. For years the Reagan Administration made concerted efforts to popularize the idea at the local and state levels.
As soon as enterprise zones came to Pennsylvania, CAN DO got to work. They submitted applications for KOZ status to the state officials in Harrisburg and began selling the idea to the public. Neither proved very challenging. The mere mention of “jobs” seemed to be enough to get people on board; few cared to discuss job quality or worker protections. All told, Hazleton’s Luzerne County ended up with the most KOZ acreage in the state.
And the jobs did follow. Lots of them: temporary, low paying, and dangerous, especially in comparison to what locals had grown accustomed to in the manufacturing sector. Hazleton began attracting warehouses, distribution centers, and the Cargill meat packing plant. KOZ was the clear driver of this: according to Rep. David Argall, Cargill admitted “that without the KOZ designation they would not have even looked at Pennsylvania.”
Before Cargill arrived, the local factory with the most employees had just over 100 workers. When Cargill opened, it employed about 700 workers. Most were Latinx immigrants, largely from New York and New Jersey via the Dominican Republic—a country that at the time was highly reliant on neoliberal “Free Trade Zones,” which opened up international markets in ways that make the rich richer.
Plentiful jobs and lower cost of living than in New York drew these workers to Hazleton. Between 2000-2006, Hazleton’s population went from being 95% white to about 30% Hispanic; current estimates suggest the city’s Hispanic population is nearly 60%. The working class in Hazleton is now largely divided into two groups: the white descendents of coal miners and recent Latinx immigrants, both of whom are suffering under neoliberalism, albeit in slightly different ways.
The stage was set for an opportunistic politician to come in and drive a wedge between these workers with a ruthlessly nativist campaign. Enter Mayor Lou Barletta, a supporter of KOZs who would go on to serve four terms in Congress. He blamed the city’s ongoing struggles on undocumented immigrants, anticipating both Donald Trump's nativist political program and blatant disregard for facts. "I don't need numbers," he boasted after being presented with evidence that immigrants did not increase crime rates, as he had repeatedly claimed while spearheading a local anti-immigrant ordinance. His message was that it was a group of criminal, manipulative, freeloading immigrants from the big city who held Hazleton under siege, echoing the coal barons of the past, who regularly scapegoated immigrant labor as a way to keep workers unorganized. Even now, almost 15 years later, the status quo among oldtimers remains that the Latinx community “ruined” the city.
Meanwhile, CAN DO has continued to lure exploitative industries. In 2008, they gave Amazon a generous tax break to open a warehouse in one of their parks. As the immigration debate raged on, behind the scenes companies like Cargill and Amazon siphoned profits from local residents via excruciating and undercompensated labor and sent all of the money someplace else. It’s like coal mining all over again, except with meat cleavers and box cutters replacing picks and shovels.
After losing his bid for a Senate seat in 2018, Barletta mostly withdrew from the public eye—until March 2020, when COVID-19 hit. Just days after Hazleton’s first confirmed case, he re-emerged with a repurposed version of his immigrant invasion narrative. On March 25, he tweeted: "Those leaving NYC are asked to self-quarantine for 14 days. @GovernorTomWolf must enforce this in PA or limit the transportation coming in. Buses and vans are pouring into PA multiple times a day with NYC residents. He needs to act to protect all Pennsylvanians and our hospitals."
Referring to the small Latinx-owned local bus and van companies that operate between Hazleton and New York City, where many of Hazleton's recent arrivals still spend a big part of their lives, it was clear who Barletta was trying to blame for "pouring into PA" and who he was trying to appease ("our hospitals"). Before long, the notion that Hispanic immigrants were spreading the virus locally became common sense for many longtime Hazletonians. But in the CAN DO industrial parks, things trudged along as usual. Even though Governor Tom Wolfe had ordered non-essential businesses to close, many of CAN DO’s tenants were exempt from that order, classified as “life-sustaining.” All day every day, semi-trucks hop off Interstates 80 and 81 dropping off and picking up loads at the industrial parks’ 30+ distribution centers. CAN DO's homepage at the time of this writing makes just two announcements: one about the availability of a financial relief program for small businesses and another about how, with “an abundance of caution,” they’ve decided to close their downtown office. Not a peep about workers.
Then, on April 7, the inevitable happened: Cargill had to shut down for cleaning after UFCW revealed that 164 of their 900 workers tested positive for COVID-19. The next day, workers alerted the press of up to three dozen COVID-19 cases at the Amazon warehouse (AVP1). That cluster, according to reporting from Bloomberg, was among the most severe of all Amazon warehouses, to the point that workers at other facilities were told to avoid touching packages from AVP1 for 24 hours. Adding insult to injury, just as increasing numbers of immigrant workers were falling ill, a racist social media post by a respiratory therapist at the local hospital circulated within the community. “The Hispanic population ruined this area," the healthcare worker wrote, echoing the talking points that have been well-crafted by the likes of Barletta and Trump. "They brought violence from NYC and their countries and live filthy with windows and doors open so all the critters could come in and out and infest houses with feces.”
Fortunately, the confluence of these conditions has inspired flashes of class consciousness and resistance. Outcry over the healthcare worker’s comments played no small part in getting the hospital to swiftly release a statement condemning the racism; workers and their allies were instrumental in pushing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to launch an investigation into conditions at Amazon; and hundreds have signed a petition demanding that all CAN DO factories with known COVID-19 cases shutter. When my organization, Anthracite Unite, recently hosted a small, virtual community conversation about Cargill, I left with a strong sense that recent events had many community members crystalizing what they’ve suspected all along: that employers see them as dispensable, caring only about their labor power, not their health and well-being.
The ruling class is banking on the notion that desperate people are going to keep showing up for work, even with the risks so high. They’ve been banking on this in Hazleton since coal. Looking back on history, however, we see that we’ve certainly had moments of powerful resistance against this idea. The media may write off places like this as “Trump Country,” but I’d put the history of worker organizing and fighting back in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region up against the history of any big city. Now that we’re again seeing clearly the depths of capital’s cruelty, there is reason to believe that legacy will be revived.
Jamie Longazel is an Associate Professor at John Jay College and a member of PSC-CUNY / New York State United Teachers. A Hazleton native, he is also the author of Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and co-founder of Anthracite Unite, a working class collective building class consciousness and worker solidarity in the Pennsylvania coal region. You can learn more about his work here.