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GREELEY, Colo. — Tin Aye died with out ever laying palms on her new child grandson.
By way of her six a long time of life, she endured a harrowing exodus from her homeland in Myanmar whereas pregnant along with her solely youngster, adopted by 15 years in a refugee camp. She and her daughter, San Twin, managed to forge new lives in the US.
However she couldn’t survive her job inside a slaughterhouse run by the world’s largest meat processing firm, JBS. She died final yr, certainly one of six individuals who succumbed to Covid whereas working at a plant in Greeley, Colo.
In essential methods, a lot has modified for staff contained in the lengthy, low-slung slaughterhouse in Greeley, a metropolis of roughly 100,000 folks on the excessive plains of northern Colorado. In a brand new contract secured final summer season, the union gained substantial raises from JBS, the Brazilian conglomerate that owns the plant. Colorado handed laws mandating paid sick go away, after the state shut the plant for greater than every week final yr. Contained in the slaughterhouse, dividers and partitions have been put in to assist keep social distancing.
However staff complain that most of the modifications have been aimed toward managing perceptions, whereas cussed issues stay: not sufficient distance between folks stationed at some elements of the meeting line, insufficient shares of hand sanitizer, and delicate stress to come back to work even when they’re ailing.
A spokeswoman for JBS, Nikki Richardson, disputed that characterization.
“Our focus all through the worldwide pandemic has been, and continues to be, to guard our group members from the virus and do every thing attainable to maintain it out of our services,” she wrote in an emailed assertion.
The Greeley plant, which paid $2,100 bonuses to staff who acquired the coronavirus pictures, has achieved an 80 % charge of vaccination, Ms. Richardson added. The power has elevated wages greater than 50 % over the previous 5 years.
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