A family feud among the owners of a German slaughterhouse company at centre of a coronavirus outbreak that has infected hundreds of foreign workers is shedding light on the working conditions in the country’s meat industry.
Robert Toennies, one of the owners of the Toennies Group, a leading name in Germany’s meat industry, called yesterday on his uncle to resign for managing the company in a manner that paved the way for the employees, many of them from Eastern Europe, to become infected with the coronavirus.
“The fact that the number of infections in abattoirs is far above average is certainly due to the system of work contracts: It forces many workers into unacceptable living conditions, which are associated with a high risk of infection and offer little protection if an infection occurs,” Robert Toennies wrote in an open letter.
Toennies and his uncle, Clemens Toennies, have long been at odds about work contracts with fewer protections for employees.
German Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner waded in on the debate, saying: “Hundreds of infections in one business – these conditions are unacceptable.”
She said the outbreak would be thoroughly investigated and lead to wider changes to labour conditions.
As of Wednesday, at least 657 workers at a slaughterhouse in the Westphalia region belonging to the Toennies Group had tested positive since the beginning of the week.
Local authorities promptly placed around 7,000 people under quarantine, including all those who had worked at the site.
“If there are unfavourable working and living conditions, an individual or a very small number of people who are initially infected can lead to a very high number of secondary infections,” said Isabella Eckerle, the head of the Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases at the University of Geneva.
Production in the slaughterhouse was temporarily suspended, while schools and day care centres in the area were closed, prompting a group of parents and teachers to mount a protest outside company headquarters yesterday.
“Education is clearly less important than eating a piece of meat,” said protest participant Melanie Beforth, adding that it was not the workers who were to blame for the outbreak, but the company policies.
Volker Brueggenjuergen of Caritas, the largest welfare association in Germany, said his organisation had been “criticising the work and living conditions at Toennies for years ... the system at Toennies is endangering social cohesion”.
Earlier in the week, an official at the company blamed the outbreak on the fact that some of the workers had returned to their home countries in Eastern Europe over a long weekend, but Eckerle – the infectious diseases expert – cast doubt on that claim.
“The incubation period is an average of five days, so a weekend visit can hardly explain such a large number of people [getting infected],” she said.
Eckerle said the physical exertion of manual labour meant that workers would have been ejecting a larger-than-usual number of coronavirus particles and that damp hands and clothing may have been promoting smear infections.
“It would be important to clarify the extent to which masks were worn at work and whether constantly adhering to rules such as maintaining distance and hand hygiene is even possible,” she said.
The German meat-packing industry, in which slaughterhouses are frequently staffed by people from Eastern Europe living in packed quarters, has the been the scene of previous outbreaks.