By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Eighty-one percent of evaluated poultry workers were found to be at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, a new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says. This risk is primarily driven by high piece rates, which is the number of animals or pieces of meat handled by each slaughterhouse worker. Nearly half of pork processing workers evaluated were also at high risk for injury.
On January 10, the department released the results of two studies, one on poultry workers and one on processed pork workers, that looked at the impact of line speed and workloads on worker health. The studies showed that piece rate was an important metric in determining workplace safety. While line speed is important, the number of people working on each line combined with line speed provides a more comprehensive risk analysis. Among surveyed poultry workers, 40 percent reported moderate to severe pain in the last year. Most did not report that pain to supervisors.
"These USDA studies reaffirm what we have long known - that poultry and swine slaughter poses serious risk to workers, regardless of line speed. We must take stronger action to protect these workers and ensure the safety of our food supply chain," United Food and Commercial Workers International Union president Marc Perrone wrote in a press release.
According to United Nations FAO estimates, each day 206 million chickens and 4 million pigs are killed for food. The vast majority are raised on factory farms and killed and processed in meatpacking plants, where risks to workers such as amputation and severe falls are common.
The studies' authors recommend lowering piece rates by increasing staffing, adapting workstations for better ergonomic practices and improving medical management within workplaces. According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, poultry and meat companies remain among the most dangerous to work for, in large-part due to injuries from keeping up with fast line speeds.
"Since the first term of Trump's administration the problem of increasing the line speed and the decrease of the workforce have become some of the most important issues workers have been struggling with every day," Magaly Licolli, executive director of Venceremos, an Arkansas-based poultry-worker advocacy group, wrote to Sentient.
"The findings of the reports are alarming, but not surprising to us because we've seen how for the past years, the industry has been putting workers' health and safety at risk for the sake of their own profits," wrote Licolli, who also called on the USDA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to pass standards to prevent increasing line speed.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used federal legislation to declare meatpacking facilities essential, forcing workers to spend hours inside of buildings that would become hotspots for the virus. The Trump administration also granted poultry plants the ability to increase line speed, which some groups, like the Food Integrity Campaign, have been working to reverse through litigation. The studies released last week were a result of these lawsuits and pushback. During the height of the pandemic, as many as 269 meatpacking employees died and 59,000 workers tested positive for the virus.
"Industrial animal agriculture operates on a model of systemic exploitation to increase their profit margins at the expense of the well-being of animals, workers and rural communities. Today's USDA studies on swine and poultry processing workers clearly show the human cost: life-altering injuries, painful work conditions and high risks tied to relentless production speeds and piece-rate pay structures," Jessica Culpepper, executive director of FarmSTAND, a legal advocacy group, wrote to Sentient. "The incoming administration's history of deregulating Big Ag and advancing policies that strip protections from vulnerable workers will only deepen these injustices."
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
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By Anna Gustafson for the Pennsylvania Independent.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Pennsylvania Independent-Public News Service Collaboration
John Kelly has seen it before: the massive influx of people turning to his food pantry in central Scranton for support. The hunger. The families struggling to put food on the table. The parents who have lost their jobs and don’t know how they’re going to make ends meet.
That was just last year, when about 30,000 people received food from Bread Basket of NEPA’s seven food pantries in northeastern Pennsylvania, up from approximately 20,000 in 2023. Kelly said that the increase of 10,000 people came after the expiration of a federal program launched after the onset of COVID to boost food benefits, resulting in a decrease in the amount of financial assistance people received through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.
Now, as the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers look to cut SNAP, which provides financial assistance for buying food to about two million Pennsylvanians and approximately 42 million people nationwide, Kelly expects to see the number of people needing emergency food aid once again skyrocket. This time, however, his pantry is already helping as many people as it can.
If the people needing help from Bread Basket of NEPA jumps by 50% again, which Kelly says is entirely possible with the impending SNAP cuts, the pantries simply wouldn’t have the resources they’d need to continue giving everyone the amount of food they do now.
“What has been talked about in our pantry, and on the board, is decreasing the amount of help we give to people, which none of us want to do,” Kelly said. “Right now, our pantries, people can come twice a month. Our easiest way to solve our overcapacity is to cut that to once a month.”
“We don’t want to do it, but there are stark realities facing us budgetwise,” he continued.
President Donald Trump has long criticized SNAP, which benefits older Americans living on fixed incomes, millions of children, and low-income individuals and families. During his first term, the administration tried to revoke SNAP eligibility for nearly 700,000 people. A federal court prevented that from happening.
Fast forward to now, and the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are looking to pay for Trump’s push for a mass deportation of immigrants and tax cuts for the wealthy by exploring cuts to SNAP benefits, as well as to other safety net programs. These include Medicaid, which provides health coverage for about three million Pennsylvanians, including children, pregnant people and individuals with disabilities; and Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or TANF, which provides financial assistance to low-income families for food, housing, and child care.
Specific details about the cuts have not been cemented, but House Republicans on Feb. 12 released a budget that calls for at least $1.5 trillion in federal spending reductions, which, if implemented, would result in significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.
“The proposals they put forward run from horrible to just unconscionable,” said Marc Stier, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center in Harrisburg, which studies the impact of government policies.
Cuts to public assistance — programs that two-thirds of Americans will use for at least one year during their lifetimes — will result in significant pain, and even death, because people across the state and country will not be able to meet basic needs for food, health care and shelter, Stier said.
“Some people are going to die,” Stier said. “Some people are going to become bankrupt because they have unreimbursed medical expenses. A lot of people are going to suffer.”
‘It’s helping seniors. It’s helping people with disabilities.’
When explaining to people the importance of Medicaid and the danger cuts to the program would pose for millions of people across the country, Kristin Volchansky often tells the story of her own life.
Volchansky, now the advocacy director of Action Together NEPA in northeastern Pennsylvania, was a 21-year-old college student when she was diagnosed with mononucleosis, which left her unable to work while battling years of demoralizing, exhausting and very expensive health problems.
“My particular bout of mono seemed to trigger an immune response after the initial infection, and I became really, really ill and unable to really eat anything that was substantial, to the point that a couple years into the illness, I was pretty much subsisting on Pedialyte, a little bit of baby food and dry toast while they were trying to figure out what is this, what’s going on,” said Volchansky, who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Hellertown in the Lehigh Valley.
After eight years of doctors attempting to figure out what was wrong with her, Volchansky finally received a diagnosis: She had a genetic immune deficiency that leaves her with too few antibodies to fight infections. To treat it, she has to head to the hospital for monthly infusions that cost $30,000 each.
To pay for that, she needed health insurance. Because Volchansky wasn’t able to work for much of her adult life, she couldn’t receive insurance through a job. She was able to get a health plan under the Affordable Care Act, but Volchansky’s parents were paying for that, and it ultimately was too expensive for them as their circumstances changed and they reached retirement.
Then came the insurance that Volchansky credits with changing her life: Medicaid.
Following Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision in 2015 to expand Medicaid to cover more lower-income Pennsylvanians, which was financially feasible because of the Affordable Care Act, Volchansky was able to enroll in Medicaid beginning in 2016. That allowed her to receive her monthly infusions without having to pay anything out of pocket.
“I was, through the course of being on Medicaid, able to gain enough strength and regain my health to be able to do things like volunteer,” Volchansky said.
That volunteer work led to Volchansky being able to hold her first full-time job. Since the fall of 2021, Volchansky, who’s now 41 years old, has worked for Action Together NEPA, where she has helped to organize community meetings about possible federal budget cuts.
“Medicaid allowed me the ability to become not just healthier, but healthier and financially independent and in a job that I love, which is something that we should be lifting up and celebrating, because there’s a lot of people like me who had a time in their life when they needed help, and programs like Medicaid were there for them, and it allowed them to rebound and get back on their feet,” said Volchansky, who no longer has Medicaid and instead has a plan from Pennsylvania’s Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Potential cuts to Medicaid would be disastrous for people who, as she did, rely on the program to stay alive, Volchansky said.
“It is a program that touches a lot of people,” she said. “It is not just what people commonly think of as a program just for people who are in financial need. That is true, and that is vitally important, and, at one time, I was one of those people. But it’s also a program that is helping kids. It’s helping seniors. It’s helping people with disabilities.”
According to an August 2024 analysis by KFF, a nonprofit focused on health policy, Medicaid covers three in eight children in Pennsylvania, five in eight nursing home residents, two in five people with disabilities, and one in six adults aged 19-64.
Hospital closures and local businesses
If the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP go through, Pennsylvania hospitals could close and local businesses, such as farms and grocery stores, could be financially harmed, experts warned.
Should people lose their Medicaid benefits, they may be unable to afford preventive health care and instead be forced to go to the hospital after a health issue has become an emergency, Stier said. An influx of uninsured people could lead to hospital closures in a state already struggling with the shuttering of medical institutions.
“They still have to provide care for people who don’t have insurance in many cases, but, without being reimbursed, they would close,” Stier said. “We will see many more hospital closures if Medicaid is cut. So Medicaid is benefiting people who will never get Medicaid.”
Amanda Gordineer, the director of food equity at Food Dignity, said the commonwealth’s farms and grocery stores could also lose money if SNAP is cut because individuals will no longer be able to purchase food and instead will be accessing emergency aid through pantries and other organizations. Food Dignity is a Luzerne County nonprofit that distributes food from local farms to places that serve marginalized populations, such as health clinics, independent living centers for people with disabilities, and recovery support centers.
“Budget cuts to SNAP are a very serious threat, not only to people in Pennsylvania who need food — and this really could be anyone at any time — but also to our small food retailers, because SNAP really helps to support our local economy,” Gordineer said. “SNAP money is spent very quickly after it is allocated, and that money goes to food businesses like farmers and local grocery stores.”
If people aren’t able to afford food because their SNAP benefits are cut, they may have to choose between paying for groceries or meeting other basic needs such as rent, Gordineer said.
“When we are struggling with resources, we have to make decisions between, are we going to fill our prescription and take our prescription every day, or am I going to afford nutritious food this week?” she said. “Or am I going to fill my oil tank and heat my house this winter? Those basic-need choices are not something that we should ever expect anyone to have to struggle through in one of the richest countries in the world.”
For now, there remain food pantries that people who’ve lost SNAP benefits can turn to — but, as Kelly said, it’s not guaranteed that pantries will be able to meet a huge increase in demand in the wake of budget cuts.
If the pantries are hurt, that would be devastating, said Dan Tomlinson, a retired 71-year-old Scranton resident who receives food at the pantry led by Kelly. Tomlinson started going to the Scranton pantry about six years ago in order to feed not only himself but his two young grandsons, who frequently stay with him.
“It helps, with the pasta and the various things that you get,” said Tomlinson, who worked as a line mechanic in a book distribution center before retiring. “They’re add-ons to a meal. I don’t have to buy a whole lot of canned goods because I get a lot there. Cereals and stuff like that, I get there. A lot of the things that you could stretch a meal out, I get there, and it just helps. And without them, I know there’s going to be a lot of hungry people around.”
Without the pantry, Tomlinson said, he wouldn’t be able to afford items like cereal, fruits and vegetables, and milk.
“I can’t afford to go to the grocery store and get these things, like the cereal,” Tomlinson said. “They’re not giving out Lucky Charms; it’s your standard fiber foods, like Cheerios, Raisin Bran. They’re not brand names, but I couldn’t afford them even if I went to the retail stores, like the real cheap places, like Aldi’s and stuff like that. I can’t afford to go there and get this stuff. So we tune out a lot of things, but the food pantry gives us an opportunity not to give up too much things.”
Anna Gustafson wrote this article for the Pennsylvania Independent.
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New data show fewer than half of rural Gen Z'ers believe they can find a good job in their community, compared to nearly 70% of their urban peers.
Oregon is following the national trend along with a growing rural-urban income gap.
Megan Tuck, program coordinator for the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, grew up in St. Paul, a small town in the Willamette Valley and now lives in Bend. She said she would have liked to stay in her hometown, but there are few opportunities there for work.
"That was the options, I feel like, growing up for me and a lot of my peers was you either move away, live in St. Paul and commute somewhere, or you work on farms, which is still an amazing profession," Tuck explained.
In 1980, the average rural Oregon household earned about 10% less than an urban family. Today, the gap has widened to 25%. Trump administration cuts to the federal workforce would only worsen the situation, as federal jobs make up a larger share of employment in rural Oregon counties and tend to pay more.
Data show rural youth, like Tuck, are more likely to want to stay closer to home than city-dwellers. Tuck pointed out she and a lot of her peers found city life challenging and missed their hometown community, though many initially wanted to leave after high school.
"Then at the same time, I see a lot of my peers and I as we get older, reflecting and realizing we actually want to come back and we actually want to live here," Tuck emphasized.
Tuck noted employment is not the only challenge to come with living rurally. She stressed rental housing options are also limited. Research shows rural Oregonian incomes are on par with rural American incomes, but rents are 16% higher.
Tuck added people in rural communities are afraid of losing their young people but many have no choice but to leave to find living-wage jobs. Regardless of the challenges she and her generation face, Tuck is determined to find a solution.
"How do you transition some rural economies to still keep the character of the community but also create opportunities for young people?" Tuck asked.
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