Lessons learned during the COVID pandemic have proven crucial to one organization responding to Hurricane Helene.

Centro Unido - which serves the Spanish-speaking population in McDowell County - stepped up its services during the pandemic to provide testing, vaccine clinics, and easy-to-understand information.

It also offered financial assistance to help western North Carolina families avoid evictions and utility disconnections.

Centro Unido's Interim Executive Director Laura Zapater said they learned a lot during the COVID response that is useful today.

"It was really helpful in the way that we could quickly organize after Hurricane Helene," said Zapater, "because we knew that our community was going to struggle more than other communities to receive the resources and the support needed."

Zapater said people in the community were lined up at their door as soon as Centro Unido had power again after the hurricane.

The group is still helping with hurricane relief, although she notes the change in presidential administrations has put new strains on their work.

Zapater said during COVID, Centro Unido worked with other Latino organizations to share resources and expand their impact. They established relationships and have worked on collaborative grants.

She said that joint work extended to hurricane relief when organizations in areas like Asheville struggled to get supplies.

"The access was harder there," said Zapater. "They couldn't get supplies as soon as us, because McDowell was more accessible. So, we had different vans and volunteers were like, 'Hey, I'll load the van, I'll take it to them.' So, we were kind of like a hub for other organizations more towards the west."

The Kate B. Reynolds Trust has partnered with and given grants to Centro Unido.

Jason Baisden, senior program officer with the trust, said support for organizations like Centro Unido move away from the traditional "top-down" approach to relief.

"Without the input at the local level, the grassroots level, sometimes you get solutions that aren't optimal," said Baisden. "They could be more optimal when they get the input from community, because those folks are the ones living it. They pretty much know what would help solve these issues."

Reports of the Trump administration considering taxing wealthy Americans to pay for mass deportations and other priorities come on the heels of a new study showing how the move could generate significant revenues without slowing economic growth.

Mary Eschelbach Hansen, associate professor of economics at American University and the report's co-author, said raising tax rates for people who earn more than $609,000 a year to 44% would add 3% to the nation's tax coffers, enough to stave off cuts to popular programs serving low-income Coloradans.

"In current budget proportions, that's about enough to pay for some of the biggest, most important programs like food stamps SNAP, Children's Health Insurance Program, and also Temporary Assistance for Needy Families," Eschelbach Hansen outlined.

While 44% may seem high compared to today's top rate of 37%, it is a lot less than the 92% paid by people who earned more than $400,000 a year under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Republicans have long argued tax cuts create economic benefits for all, and leaders in Congress, including Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the House Speaker, have said they would oppose any tax hikes.

Eschelbach Hansen argued raising the top tax rate would also increase how much of the national income pie most Americans get to keep, compared to how much the wealthiest get, by about 2%. She added years of trickle-down economics have shown only the wealthy benefit from low tax rates.

"If lowering top tax rates was going to trickle down, then you and I would be much richer than we are now," Eschelbach Hansen pointed out. "Because we have had an era of low top tax rates for decades."

Eschelbach Hansen stressed higher personal tax rates have virtually no impact on long-term economic growth, and lower personal tax rates lead to less economic growth, because people tend to take advantage of the lower rate by moving their income.

"Instead of reinvesting it in your business, where it will grow your business and grow the economy, you'll be more likely to just take it as personal income, which is not going to stimulate growth," Eschelbach Hansen explained.


get more stories like this via email

By Whitney Curry Wimbish for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Aster Abrahame injured her back at work a few years ago, the pain was so severe that she struggled to perform her job - processing pork loins at breakneck speeds at a JBS Foods meatpacking plant in Worthington, Minnesota. The company sent her to its doctor, who she says performed no examination or test, prescribed a painkiller and told her to report to work the next day. Abrahame's job is already among the most dangerous in the country. Now the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking steps to remove regulatory protections and permit faster processing lines for pork and poultry companies.

The end goal is to allow meatpacking plants to set their own speeds, a spokesperson for the Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service told Sentient in an email.

"The rule for pork and poultry processing line speed will create [a] new maximum speed option but ultimately the decision for what line speed to utilize will be made by each individual plant," the spokesperson wrote. No new plants may obtain a waiver in the meantime, the spokesperson added, and extensions will only apply to those that have one.

Abrahame spent an excruciating, sleepless night after the company doctor sent her on her way, and in the morning went to her own physician before taking off work for a few weeks. She didn't qualify for workers' compensation and received no pay for the time off. The plant issued a strike against her attendance record, however, and Abrahame went back to work, even though she was still in pain.

"I didn't want to lose my job. After three weeks, I just decided, 'I have to go back to work,'" says Abrahame, 44, who has worked the processing line for 10 years despite the pain that shoots through her chest and shoulder. "I have kids, I have bills." Meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers, like Abrahame, are not only at risk of physical duress and injury, but also experience rates of depression that are four times higher than the national average.

The government's statement that "extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries" is false, labor advocates say - and that the USDA's own data shows otherwise. A recent USDA study found a correlation between the speed at which workers process or butcher meat and their risk for musculoskeletal disorders.

Abrahame says she has seen plenty of injuries that should raise concerns about the Trump administration's deregulatory move here. "I see wrist injuries, shoulder injuries. Some people have back injuries. It's all the company workers - this is how we work here," says Abrahame, who is now a shop steward for her union with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, which represents 17,000 workers in meat packing and processing and other industries in Minnesota.

Removing Limits on Line Speeds

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in March that the Food Safety and Inspection Service will extend waivers allowing pork and poultry producers to process meat at a faster pace than the previous time limits prescribed, and begin immediate rulemaking to codify these higher limits.

Worker advocates and union groups say it's important to understand that the government only regulates the speed at which animals are "eviscerated," a part of the processing where workers remove internal organs from carcasses.

Evisceration work is largely automated these days. Just two percent of employees at modern plants work the evisceration line, according to the National Chicken Council, with eviscerations capped at 140 birds per minute and 1,106 hogs per hour.

The government doesn't regulate the speed at which workers process meat by hand, which constitutes the rest of the processing to prepare meat for sale and runs more slowly.

The two are related, however, Debbie Berkowitz, practitioner fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University tells Sentient.

The evisceration rate "sets the speeds in the rest of the plants to a degree," says Berkowitz, who is also a former chief of staff and senior policy advisor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Berkowitz has extensively studied processing speeds and written about the danger of raising them, as well as about processors' safety.

She and others point to the USDA's research published in January on pork and poultry plants that shows workers at a higher risk for injury when they work faster, as Sentient previously reported. Researchers looked at musculoskeletal injury rates for workers at plants that had waivers to eviscerate animals faster than the regulatory limit. Six pork processors, which eviscerated at speeds greater than 1,106 animals per hour, and 15 large poultry plants whose waivers allowed them to increase evisceration speed by a quarter to 175 birds per minute.

Eighty-one percent of poultry processors and nearly half of pork processors were at high risk for injury, the researchers found. The risk was associated with the rate at which workers handled individual parts per minute, or what the government referred to as "piece rate."

Forty percent of poultry processor workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity work-related pain in the year before; 42 percent of pork processors workers reported severe to "upper extremity pain."

The numbers are "higher than I've ever seen in any kind of industry," Berkowitz says. "They're astronomical."

Researchers found that the relationship between evisceration speed and how fast workers hand-processed meat varied depending on the plant, but worker advocates say the bottom line is that workers are more likely to get hurt when they're forced to work faster.

A permanent rate increase means "Injuries will increase and it's going to be a lot worse," Berkowitz says.

Berkowitz and others say that in addition to sustaining injuries, workers who get hurt on the line fear speaking up because it could cost not only their job, but their ability to stay in the U.S. Meatpacking and poultry producers are disproportionately refugees and noncitizen immigrants, and "this administration has declared a war on immigrant workers even if they've been here a decade," Berkowitz says. "Workers are going to get scared to bring up any complaints at all."

That fear is true in many immigrant communities, and especially heightened for meat processors, says Julia Coburn, director of projects and strategic initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, who said people still talk about major Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, such as the 2008 Postville raid or the raids under the first Trump administration.

"A lot of the trust has been broken-or was never there," Coburn says. "Today we're seeing a lot of fear being heightened by what they're hearing in the news." After Trump's March 1 executive order declaring English the official language of the U.S., for example, Coburn said fear began to spread that it was illegal to speak Spanish in public.

Workers Continue to Push for Protection

Though the government puts a cap on the evisceration rates, workers and advocates said it's unclear what the actual speed particular plants are running. That information is treated as a trade secret, says Ruth Schultz, meatpacking director at Abrahame's union, UFCW Local 663.

Workers in Worthington, Minnesota are negotiating a new contract with JBS, pushing for the plant to post line speed standards for every line in each department, train workers to monitor lines and empower them to alert management when speeds are too high. So far, the company has said no, but the union won't budge. JBS did not respond to Sentient's request for comment.

As it stands now, the contract allows for one "walking steward" per shift to time lines throughout the day by counting the number of pieces of meat processed by thousands of workers, Shultz says. But according to Shultz, workers have seen supervisors turn down the speed of the conveyor belt when the steward walks by, then turn it back up after they're gone. That's one reason the union is committed to the proposal, Schultz says.

"The expectation that's there above all is that workers behave like machines...the ultimate priority is keeping the process running at absolute top speed and everything is secondary, including bodily function," says Coburn. "It's horrifying."


Whitney Curry Wimbish wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email

As today begins National Farmworker Awareness Week, North Carolina boasts the sixth-largest number of farmworkers of any state.

More than 150,000 people in the Tar Heel State are farmworkers or dependents of them.

Quirina Vallejos, executive director of the North Carolina Farmworkers Project, said the issues facing farmworkers include exposure to pesticides, inadequate housing and wage theft. But Vallejos pointed out the most pressing problem remains helping farmworkers know and defend their rights.

"Even if the workers know what their rights are, it's very challenging for them to speak up for themselves, defend their own rights," Vallejos explained. "Because if they're undocumented, they're afraid of being reported to ICE, and I've heard of employers threatening that very thing in order to get people to do what they want."

Farmworkers in North Carolina help harvest numerous crops, including tobacco, cucumbers, apples and bell peppers. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Worker Survey found more than 40% of agricultural workers were not authorized to work in the U.S.

Vallejos argued strong enforcement of existing regulations would best help farmworkers. One sort of policy lawmakers in many states could initiate, Vallejos suggested, would be the passage of laws to protect them from extreme heat.

"Workers are out there sunrise to sunset. That's a long time to be out in the fields and not get any breaks, not have time in the shade," Vallejos contended. "Employers should be required to be educated on emergency response to heat stress and heat-induced illnesses because that would save lives."

Carolina consumers who wish to support farmworkers, Vallejos added, could try to purchase produce from companies with strong labor standards.


get more stories like this via email