Before Sioux Falls South Dakota became a COVID-19 hot spot, before calls started coming in

about unsafe working conditions at the local meat processing plant, Cooper Caraway, who

leads the regional chapter of the AFL CIO, he was taking other kinds of calls.

Calls that looking back feel like a kind of early warning.

A lot of workers in Sioux Falls are particularly a lot of union members are immigrants and refugees.

And they use our big union hall, our primary union hall in Sioux Falls, called the Sioux Falls

Labor Temple. And they use the labor temple as a meeting place, they have weddings there,

they have all kinds of events there. Usually the labor temple is booked up every single weekend.

So the first calls we were getting were people, you know, worker after worker after worker,

coming in and saying, hey, we were expecting a gathering of 100 people, 150 to 200 people,

we don't think it's safe.

They were canceling over concerns about the coronavirus. This was six weeks ago.

You know, I'm hearing calls, you know, from my family, they're telling me, you know, it's

better to cancel to postpone.

Factory workers had heard from friends and relatives back home. You don't want to get sick with

this virus. Yeah, it was like a wave.

The largest union employer in Cooper's region is called Smithfield Foods.

3,700 people work at this pork processing plant.

And it wasn't long before workers started worrying not just about getting infected at the union

hall. They were worried about getting infected on the job.

So a lot of the concerns that were flowing were, hey, we don't want to get our family sick,

we're asking for protection. They just gave us kind of a hair net to wear instead of a mask,

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