How a Poultry Mogul Is Profiting from the Pandemic
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Meat-packing and poultry-processing jobs have always been dangerous, and COVID-19 has exacerbated the risks. This spring, infection rates climbed so high at Mountaire, one of the largest poultry producers, that it stopped disclosing the numbers. Mountaire’s owner, Ronald Cameron, is one of Trump’s biggest donors. Jane Mayer, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss conditions at the company's plants, and how Cameron is leveraging the coronavirus crisis to strip workers of their protections.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven |
| 0:06.4 | hospitality company that offers intimate world life encounters in extraordinary remote landscapes. |
| 0:12.5 | Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other |
| 0:18.2 | to Namibia, where the expert guides delivered a truly once-in-a-lifetime |
| 0:23.6 | experience. I promise you, whatever you watch and see before you go won't prepare you for the thrill |
| 0:29.4 | of a wilderness adventure. eBay, it's a place to fall in love with new pre-loved vintage and rare |
| 0:36.6 | fashion over and over again. |
| 0:39.0 | Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated. |
| 0:42.5 | Yeah, eBay. Things people love. |
| 0:48.7 | This is the political scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Thursday, July 16th. |
| 0:57.1 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of The New Yorker. Meat and poultry processing plants have |
| 1:03.7 | always had among the most dangerous jobs in the country. Between 2015 and 2018, every other day, on average, a slaughterhouse employee lost a body part or went to the hospital. |
| 1:16.8 | The work has become even riskier with the spread of COVID-19. |
| 1:21.2 | The industries have been secretive about the number of infected workers, but unions claim that the dismal conditions at these plants have |
| 1:28.8 | contributed to the particularly virulent spread of COVID-19 there. |
| 1:34.0 | Mount Air, one of the country's largest poultry producers, stopped releasing statistics about |
| 1:39.4 | infected employees after the number soared at several facilities. According to Nelson Hill, an official |
| 1:46.6 | with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, workers were seeing people disappear |
| 1:52.6 | and they didn't know what the hell was going on. On an NBC news segment on April 27th, |
| 1:58.9 | an employee at a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa talked about the conditions |
| 2:03.3 | there. Employees didn't dare to speak openly for fear of losing their jobs, but they were |
| 2:09.1 | even more terrified of getting sick. They didn't have enough material or masks and things like that |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.