Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) recently announced the Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers Act of 2021, which would add stronger protections for workers, as well as create a “fair market.”
The legislation would prohibit small processing plants that received a grant from being sold to meat and poultry packers with over 10 percent of market share for 10 years.
The bill also says it will strengthen the Packers and Stockyards Act to crack down on meatpacker monopolies and restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling requirements. In addition, the bill would ban large packers from owning and feeding cattle more than seven days before slaughter and require plants owned by large packers to purchase at least 50 percent of cattle on the cash market and slaughter them within seven days.
Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America called the bill “the long-awaited silver bullet.” The group previously expressed their opposition to the Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act, which has been endorsed by other industry groups.
