Defending Perry comes naturally to Jorge Soto. The 2015 graduate of Perry High School was a standout goalie for the Bluejay soccer team, and now he is putting his defensive skills to work as an advocate for the health and safety of laborers at the Tyson Fresh Meats pork plant in Perry.
Soto is not riding out the pandemic in Perry but is locked down in Chicago, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Chicago. But even from a distance, he is aware of the coronavirus outbreak at the Tyson plant in Perry.
“I have many friends and close family members who are either employed or have relatives who are employed through Tyson,” Soto told ThePerryNews.com. “With Perry being a small working-class town of no more than 8,000, it’s quite common to have at least one connection to the Tyson factory.”
Soto’s concern for his friends and family members led him to create the Call to Action: Protect Tyson Workers page on Facebook “after many community leaders approached me to help them get the word out about the situation at Tyson.”
He said he encountered “an influx of concerned residents reaching out and stating their general frustrations and then seemingly having no place to voice such grievances.” He received repeated reports of inadequate anti-virus protection at the factory, raising doubts about the company’s commitment to workers’ health.
“One look into the testing facilities and it’s obvious that they are mismanaged,” Soto said. “They have been poor in advising their workers about the procedures and have even failed to adhere to CDC rules as they are testing their workers. Many of them are not following social distancing protocols. Many aren’t wearing masks, nor are they wearing gloves, which is exactly the kind of lax management that Tyson had as the pandemic was being introduced to society, yet they still carried on like ‘business as usual.'”
Yet Soto’s concerns even “go beyond the poor working conditions that the workers are facing,” he said. “They have been adamantly rejecting a call for transparency. They have even gone so far as to try and block the public from witnessing the events during their coronavirus testing protocols.”
The “Call to Action” on the Facebook page is straightforward: “We are simply asking for Tyson to follow their peers in the meat-packing industry: shut down the plant for two weeks in order for their workers to properly quarantine,” he said.
“We are also asking them to meet us at the negotiating table,” Soto said. “Many plants in Iowa — including many also owned by Tyson — have shut down and given raises to their workers for being correctly identified as ‘essential.’ A question then arises: why is Perry one of the only plants that has insisted on staying open? Is Tyson really worried more about their productivity and the profit margins of the company than the general wellbeing of their workers? Are they too focused on short-term productivity goals and neglecting the long-term consequences of their inactions? There have already been unconfirmed deaths that Tyson is sitting on but won’t release such information.”
Soto’s advocacy has brought him into activist circles that include longtime civil rights and union rights organizer and United Farmworkers Association icon Dolores Huerta. He said Huerta’s example inspired him in his challenge of Tyson Foods Inc.
“The whole reason for pursuing a master’s degree in public policy was because I recognized the need for advocacy for the most vulnerable in our community,” he said, defending his goal with Perry Pride.
