Exploiting meat and poultry workers
Meat and poultry companies are taking advantage of the American people by not only exploiting the prices of meat but also exploiting their employees by forcing them to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, which have become even worse amid the coronavirus. Now Congress is debating whether to immunize these corporations from lawsuits.
According to a recent Oxfam report, even before the pandemic hit, poultry workers found themselves under such pressure to keep up with break-neck processing speeds that many resorted to wearing diapers on the production line due to infrequent bathroom breaks. Is it any surprise that these companies failed to take sufficient safety measures to prevent their workers from COVID-19?
We as a society need to demand that meat and poultry companies protect innocent, hardworking people and their communities from falling ill and dying. We must also ask the government to do its job by not letting companies off the hook when their behavior is negligent and instead enforce the laws that require safe and healthy workplaces.
Abby Maxman, Boston
Editor’s note: Maxman is president & CEO of Oxfam America.
A generation’s warning comes back to haunt it
Re: “Proud to be a Boomer,” May 31 letter to the editor
The writer’s letter was delightfully clever throughout. His “facial threads” cracked me up. Thanks. I needed that.
I couldn’t help thinking, though, as I read that letter (several times), how wry it is that the generation which once espoused the slogan “Never trust anyone over 30” is now more than a bit annoyed to find itself on the wrong end of that goad and regularly dismissed with the rejoinder “OK, Boomer.”
It looks like itap twilight time for the Age of Aquarius. So to all of the Boomers who find themselves marginalized, disdained, discounted and discarded, especially in these times of such very troubled waters, I would add one note of encouragement to the letter writer’s parting words: “Keep the faith, Baby!”
J. Sheppard, Denver
Keep the resource officers
Re: “Denver Public Schools: Police may be asked to leave,” June 6 news story
As a retired Denver Public Schools middle school and high school teacher who worked actively to bring police resource officers into DPS in the 1970s and ’80s, I think removing them would be a huge mistake.
I saw firsthand the good that comes from the interaction of police officers and students getting to know each other in a school setting rather than confronting each other on the streets.
When I taught government, having the school resource officer come into my classroom several times during the semester to talk about police procedures and answer student questions about laws was extremely valuable to students.
When kids saw the police resource officer in various places around the school, they had a police friend who could talk to them about a problem. There has been some public discussion about arming teachers to keep kids safe in school, which I think is not a good idea. I suppose that when I was a teacher, as a former Marine Corps sergeant, I could have handled a weapon well enough to handle that kind of “teaching duty.” A police school resource officer is a far better person to be armed in a school setting than a teacher.
John Dellinger, Aurora
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