Ethnic minorities have been the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. And now, Latinos experience another hardship as they suffer discrimination after they reportedly contracted COVID-19 in meat processing warehouses and plants.

Over 10,000 meatpacking laborers, many of them, Latin Americans, the United Food and Commercial Workers union said, have contracted the virus in the US, and dozens of them have died.

According to Latino advocates, employees are encountering racism because of fears they have contracted COVID-29 in the workplace. They said, they have received reports "that some workers at a planet were" asked to leave the grocery shops and not allowed to enter.

The Latino workers, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens or Lulac, Domingo Garcia said, were not allowed to get in the stores as they believed to have COVID-19 because they were "working at the local meatpacking plant."

Garcia added they have also heard that in Iowa, people were being rejected service as they are thought to have been positive for COVID-19 seemingly not because they were tested for the illness but "because they were Latino."

Hard-Hit by the Pandemic

Latino workforces have been specifically hard-hit in several areas according to their dependence on employment in big warehouses or meat processing plants which have stated operational even amid the pandemic.

Also, in spite of reports of lack of PPE or personal protective equipment and poor standards in health and safety, these plants and warehouses remained open during the worldwide health crisis.

According to Garcia, four in every five Latin Americans "are considered essential workers." A vast majority are working at grocery stores, food processing, construction, or are farmworkers.

The advocate further explained, they do not have the luxury of having the ability to work from home, and thus, they get so exposed to COVID-19 in ways, he added, "that many American employees are not." 

Moreover, Garcia claimed that some Latino workers lack health insurance. In addition, he also said Lulac is currently probing a lot of cases involving Latino workers who complain about conditions in their workplace and being fired from jobs.

Outbreaks in Plants, a Shocking Report

According to reports, the outbreaks in meat plants and warehouses have been shocking. Last month, an outbreak at a Colorado meat processing plant, specifically, JBS, killed three employees while many of over 8,000 COVID-19 cases in Iowa have been associated with plants which include Tyson Foods, located in Waterloo.

Relatively, Tyson Foods was obliged to have its operations suspended end of last month after nearly 200 COVID-19 contagions were linked to the plant.

In other parts of the country, the anti-Latino sentiment is coming from officials. Specifically in Wisconsin, Patience Roggensack, the Supreme Court chief justice, early this month, was criticized after apparently downplaying COVID-19 outbreak among the meatpacking facility's workers in Brown county, where a large fraction of the employees are immigrants and minorities.

Reggensack's defense was that the surge in COVID-19 cases "was due to the meatpacking" where, he added, "Brown County got the flare."

Wisconsin-based immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera executive director, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, on the other hand, said that the remarks of the chief justice were "'racist' and 'elitist.'"

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