TurboTax’s Trickery

How TurboTax has been tricking low-income tax filers into paying for online tax filing that’s supposed to be free — PLUS: meat processing is already a dangerous job… but it’s about to get a lot worse. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Just after marking Tax Day, the for-profit tax prep industry is about to see one of its longtime dreams come true. A controversial bill moving through Congress would quietly and permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, have poured millions into a years-long lobbying campaign to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the IRS created its own program — the likes of which a slew of other developed countries have in place — it would of course jeopardize the industry’s profits, which naturally is the reason they so desperately want to see this bill, called the Taxpayer First Act, signed into law.

In exchange, companies like Intuit have an agreement with the IRS for a so-called “Free File” product that allows low-income people to file their taxes online for free. But as the debate over the controversy-laden Taxpayer First Act heats up, a series of investigative reporting by ProPublica has uncovered that Intuit and other companies have engaged in a series of intentionally deceptive and misleading practices to minimize the number of people who find or successfully use it to file for free. To discuss the ongoing series and to dig into the larger debate around Free File, Rebecca sits down with Justin Elliott, a writer with ProPublica and the lead reporter of the series.

“About three and a half seconds. That’s how long inspectors currently have to check a pig carcass for lesions, hair, infected organs, or fecal matter before it’s sent whirring to workers, who slice up the roughly 250-pound animals in a freezing room, side by side, for eight to 10 hours a day, churning out more than 1,000 pigs an hour. If a new pork inspection rule recently highlighted by the Washington Post passes next month, the lines will run even faster and plant employees will have to take responsibility for this visual inspection, putting workers and eaters at risk.” So writes our second guest this week: Claire Kelloway, a reporter and researcher at the Open Markets Institute in a TalkPoverty article entitled “Meat Processing Is A Dangerous Job. It’s About to Get A Lot Worse,” which she joins the show to discuss.

***Finally, as a bonus to round out this week’s show, as we kick off Mental Health Awareness Month, and with all eyes on 2020… far too rarely do we talk about the importance of people with disabilities and particularly intellectual and mental health disabilities, running for and holding elected office — and the stigma that stands in the way for many. So Off-Kilter brings back a conversation Rebecca had last year with Reyma McCoy McDeid, then an autistic candidate for Iowa’s 38th Congressional District and the Executive Director of Central Iowa Center for Independent Living — whose campaign drew significant and well-deserved attention because of McDeid’s powerful activism to break down this stigma and other barriers to people with intellectual and mental health disabilities running for office.

This week’s guests:

• Justin Elliot, reporter at ProPublica
• Claire Kelloway, reporter and researcher, Open Markets Institute
• Reyma McCoy McDeid, former candidate for Iowa’s 38th Congressional District

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out ProPublica’s ongoing series on the debate over free tax filing — and how TurboTax has been intentionally hiding Free File from low-income tax filers to trick them into paying (here, here, here, and here).
• Here’s what you need to know if you think you got tricked into paying (you may be able to get a refund!) — help spread the word!
• For more from Claire, check out her TalkPoverty article, “Meat Processing is a Dangerous Job. It’s About to Get Even Worse.”
• For more on the long history of dangerous working conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, check out Arvand Dilavar’s “America’s Most Famous Novel About Bad Meat Is Actually About Immigrant Labor Abuses.”

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas, this week on Off Kilter, meat packing already is one of the most dangerous jobs there is, but if a new proposed rule from the Trump administration takes effect, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Later in this week’s show I speak with Claire Kelloway, a reporter and researcher at the Open Markets Institute, who’s reported extensively about the dangerous working conditions of the meat processing industry in the United States. She authored a recent Talk Poverty article on the proposed rule. But first just after marking tax day, the for-profit tax industry is about to see one of it’s long time dreams come true. A controversial bill moving through congress would quietly and permanently bar the IRS from creating a free, electronic tax filing system. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax have poured millions into a years long lobbying campaign to block the IRS from creating just such a system. If the IRS were to create its’ own program, the likes of which a slew of developed countries already have in place, it would of course jeopardize the industry’s profits which naturally is the reason they so desperately want to see this bill, known as the Taxpayer First Act, signed into law.

In exchange, companies like Intuit have an agreement with the IRS for a so called free file product that allows low income people to file their taxes online for free. But as the debate over the controversy laden Taxpayer First Act heats up a series of investigative reporting by ProPublica has uncovered the Intuit and other companies are engaged in a series of intentionally deceptive and misleading practices to minimize the number of people who find or successfully use the program to file for free. To hear more about what’s been uncovered in that ongoing series and to dig into the larger debate over this legislation, I’m thrilled to speak with Justin Elliot, he’s a reporter with ProPublica and the lead reporter on the series. Justin thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

JUSTIN ELLIOT: Yeah, good to be here.

VALLAS: So before we get into what’s at issue in this ongoing debate and aa a lot of the controversy around this legislation what is free file and who is eligible for it?

ELLIOT: So it’s actually the name of a program that started back in the early 2000s and it has two main parts. So the IRS entered into this deal with the tax prep software industry, so companies like Intuit which makes Turbo Tax, which is the biggest and H and R Block, there are others. And the deal says that the companies will offer a free version of their product, the software where you came prepare and then file your taxes electronically to lower income Americans and in exchange the IRS pledges to never create their own free online tax prep and filing system. And so it’s a non-compete provision is something the industry wants, in exchange the industry says we’re going to make a free edition, a free file edition for lower income Americans. And exactly how they define low income has changed over the years but right now it’s if you make less than $66,000 which is actually, by the way, I think 70% of all taxpayers, so lower and middle income.

VALLAS: And yet one of the things that your series has exposed is that very few people actually use this program, great as it sounds, huge as the share of taxpayers who actually qualify for it, I believe it’s about 3 percent of eligible folks who actually use it, tell me a little bit about why that is?

ELLIOT: There’s a few reasons and I believe it’s 3 percent [INAUDIBLE] it’s more like 2, 2.5 percent over this large eligible population [INAUDIBLE] to do this. And so there’s a couple reasons. The first reason is that the program is very complicated and hard to navigate. Even though if you make under $66,000 you are eligible for this program you have to find the right offer and there’s 12 companies this year that are part of the program and each company has their own free file product and each product has their own eligibility rules. So you first have to find this IRS website with twelve separate offers and then find the one that you actually eligible for and they’re slicing it based on income, state that you live in, age, TurboTax for example, which is by far the biggest player in this space, their income threshold is much lower, you have to make under $44,000. So that’s sort of the first issue. The next big issue is that the companies, we found have been deliberately hiding this free file option, they’ve done that in a few ways that I can talk about but one of the big tactics of the companies is that they’ve created quote, unquote “free editions” that are actually totally different from the free file editions and you might have seen ads for TurboTax where they’re advertising the free edition, well if you click on one of those ads the odds are that you’re going to end up paying TurboTax and you’re not in the free file edition you’re rather in this whole paying commercial track. I can explain that more, it gets confusing and I think by design.

VALLAS: One of the parts of the series that you’ve been churning out piece after piece really scrutinizing Intuit and other companies’ behavior here you actually turned up that it’s not just about different versions of this software, that make it hard for people to find, there’s actually intentional trickery that Intuit, the maker of TurboTax has been engaged in to make it hard to find through Google and other search engines. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you found that they’ve been up to and what this intentional trickery looks like, technical as it gets.

ELLIOT: Sure, so when we started reporting on this one of the strange things that we found was we could never find the TurboTax free file edition which is, again, the truly free edition on Google. You would put right into Google “TurboTax free file” or you could also google for “TurboTax freedom edition” which is one of their other names for it. The main landing page which has never come up, so after we published one of our stories we got a tip and looked into it and turns out that Intuit actually added code to the page which tells Google and other search engines not to index the page. It’s called robot tag or robot.txt and this is, one of my colleagues actually said that she used the tag on her wedding site because she didn’t want her personal wedding site to be openly findable on Google. But the fact that Intuit the maker of TurboTax used this code on this truly free free file edition, I think clearly speaks to their intent that they don’t want people to find this. So we, after we published a story about that they announced that they were undertaking a review of their practices on that front and they actually removed the tag but this is all after tax filing season so it’s too late for a lot of people.

VALLAS: And one of the things that’s actually come out of this reporting, it’s been changes in behavior by the company, there’s been a lot that we’ll get into in terms of members of congress responding as well, but you’ve also heard from an outpouring of people who have been hurt by this kind of trickery with TurboTax effectively tricking people into paying when they should have been able to file for free. You’ve actually published some of the accounts that you’ve heard that help to put a human face on what happens when low income folks are getting nickel and dimed like this for profit. Would you share a few of those stories that you’ve received after this series has gone live?

ELLIOT: Yeah and it’s been really heartbreaking in some ways. I’ve gotten dozens of emails, phone calls from people. So these are people that by definition make less than $34,000 because that’s the threshold for the TurboTax free file edition and because the TurboTax people were instead steered by the company to paid versions and then often there’s other fees tacked on, there’s a whole area where if you pay through your refund then they tack on another $40 fee so I was getting emails and talking to people who paid, $150, $200 to TurboTax when they should have been able to file for free. And some of these people are making $15,000 a year so it’s actually more than nickel or dimed, we’re talking 1%, 2% of their annual income that is being paid to this company because this truly free version has been effectively hidden from people. So one of the stories that sticks out is I was talking to a gentleman who does his taxes for his 87 year old mother in law who has an adjusted gross income of maybe $12,000 or $15,000 and this was Social Security and I believe a small military pension. And this happened to him and he ended up paying like $150 to TurboTax and ultimately after our story was published he and a bunch of other people called and complained and at first TurboTax was giving people their money back but subsequently we’d heard that they seemed to be shutting that down because too many people were in that situation. So now people are emailing me and they don’t know what to do.

VALLAS: One of the people whose stories you shared a woman named Lucy is unemployed, recovering from chemotherapy, had ended up having to pay $200 that she says would have been hugely helpful for their family’s rent. They also have two disabled sons living with them. Another person whose story really stuck with me was a woman who wrote in named Kathy who has a husband who’s on disability benefits, only gets around $19,000 year and the family’s total income is less than $25,000. For them the refund on what they had paid to TurboTax wrongfully covers a full week’s worth of groceries, the stories go on and on of people who you’re exactly right to say, nickeled and dimed doesn’t do it justice at all, this is a huge share of people’s very low incomes.

ELLIOT: Yeah basically we have a system here where for a lot of people in the country there’s essentially a tax on paying taxes. It’s not a tax going to the government, it’s going to a handful of companies, Intuit is by far the biggest in terms of online filing, obviously there is a whole separate issue of the storefront business. But I think another striking thing here is that the deal between the IRS and the companies, which is laid out in a memorandum of understanding includes a provision where the companies promise that they will work to raise awareness of this program. And what we’re finding is that they’ve essentially done the opposite, so there’s a whole other issue of whether the IRS is properly overseeing this program, I can get into it if you want.

VALLAS: And one of the things I would love to point folks to who are listening right now is you have a great piece of this series which shares some of these stories but which also has really great resources and information for people to get the word out, that if they wrongfully paid or believe that they wrongfully paid and believe that they should have been able to file for free they actually are in the position to try to get a refund and some of the people who wrote in are actually in the position of being able to do that, that’s one of the stories I was describing, a refund that now is going to be a week’s worth of groceries for one particular family. So we’ll make sure that there’s a link to all of those resources and to that story in our nerdy syllabus page. But what is it that people should know about what their options are if they’re in this situation or think they or someone they know might have wrongfully paid?

ELLIOT: Yeah so I’ve heard from a lot of people who have called TurboTax and we have the phone number on that story you’re describing and complained basically and said you tricked me into using this paid edition even though I make under the threshold and many people have gotten refunds that way. TurboTax, Intuit the company that makes TurboTax has not answered my repeated questions about whether they have a policy on refunds and I’ve also heard from other people getting turned away, I’ve heard from people making complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, to state attorneys general, consumer divisions, to their members of congress obviously that’s not going to get anyone their money back but other people have done that.

VALLAS: So then in the next piece of this reporting, the series has a lot of different twists and turns that it takes but is not just specific to bad corporate behavior but actually takes us over to the halls of congress where a bipartisan group of law makers are considering as I mentioned up top bipartisan legislation that would enshrine this free file program into law and in so doing, would ban the government from offering free online tax filing itself, something that these companies like Intuit have been lobbying to see happen for years. Tell us a little bit about what this bill would do and some of the concerns by consumer advocates if it becomes law.

ELLIOT: Yeah, there’s an interesting history here so for years Intuit and H and R Block have been huge lobbying spenders in Washington, trying to get this free file program which is currently just a deal with the IRS put into actual law so for years there would be a bill introduced in the House called the Free File Permanence Act which they never ended up passing. What’s happening right now is this provision that’s been kicking around for years has been put into a larger wide ranging IRS overhaul bill that makes a bunch of changes to the IRS, it’s called the Taxpayer First Act, the consumer advocates I’ve spoken to say they actually like some things in the bill totally unrelated to the free file program but there is this provision that would put the free file program into law which again as you said restricts the IRS’s ability to ever make it’s own system, and codifies this system that very few people are actually using. This passed the house a few weeks ago, it took people by surprise, that’s actually how I first started writing about this issue, is I heard about this provision being snuck into this larger bill and then my stories started to get a lot of attention and you had a group of freshman Democrats in the house including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Hill and Katie Porter from California, there was a last minute push to take this provision out that failed. And this bill was passed the house, now it’s in the senate where the co-sponsors are Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden, [INAUDIBLE] and it was expected to fly through and after some of our stories were published including the stories about how the companies are hiding their free file options from Google, Senator Wyden has come out and been quoted saying he’s not sure anymore that we can support this particularly provision and so it’s really a big question mark what’s going to happen with this provision, whether the bill’s going to pass with it or without it or whether the bill is dead, so it’s all up in the air right now.

VALLAS: And there has been a tremendous amount of money your stories have exposed of lobbying dollars pouring into the companies here who stand to either lose or benefit tremendously depending on the fate of this legislation into the campaign coffers of the elected officials making these decisions, tell a little bit of that story and where you see this debate on this bill going.

ELLIOT: Sure so one of the interesting things about Intuit and H and R Block and the other companies is they explicitly say in their FCC filings that essentially if the IRS makes its own better filing system that that’s a potential threat to these companies. So the state of these companies and the value of the companies for their shareholders is really right up in preventing the IRS from creating its’ own easier filing system. So they are very heavily lobbying spenders, have spent millions over the years, I think Intuit alone have 5 or 6 lobbying firms representing them, they’re extremely active and they spread a lot of money around in a bipartisan way. Intuit [INAUDIBLE] California, they’re represented by a Democrat, I believe it’s Zoe Lofgren who’s been a supporter of the companies. It hasn’t been a partisan issue and the company’s definitely worked both sides of the aisle.

VALLAS: Your story also has sparked responses not just from members of congress trying to make different decisions or to push this bill in a different way, it’s not just garnered responses from companies, it’s also garnered responses from the bill sponsors over in the Senate, you mentioned that that’s Senators Grassley and Kelly, they published a Fox News op-ed that took real issue with your story, you really hit a nerve and what they said was “ProPublica reported this bill bans the IRS from creating its’ own online filing system. That is flat out wrong. Simply put, the Taxpayer First Act doesn’t prohibit the IRS from doing anything it can’t already do other than cancel the entire Free File program outright.” How do you read that response and is there any there there in terms of their critique of your story?

ELLIOT: Well there’s certainly a [INAUDIBLE] that’s sprung up after I published this story and it gets a little bit complicated but basically the provision in this bill says that the free file memorandum of understanding, which is this existing text of this deal between the IRS and the industry, the bill says that that memorandum of understanding is now law. So one of the confusing things about the bill is that it cites this other text and puts that other text into law so it’s not actually in the bill itself. So when you look at the memorandum of understanding it includes this clause that says the IRS can’t create its’ own system. Now the Republican sponsors of the bill are arguing that the IRS essentially has an exit hatch and can end the program if it wants to. And a bunch of outside law professors that I’m speaking to believe that there is no exit hatch and essentially the bill would permanently ban the IRS from creating its’ own system. So it does get complicated in terms of how much this bill ties the IRS’s hands. The thing that no one is contesting is that this bill would put into the law the free file program which again only two or three percent of eligible people are using. Whether or not it permanently or only temporarily ties the IRS’s hands does elevate this program which has been criticized by a lot of people into actual law which right now it’s not. And the last thing I would say is the companies for years have been lobbying for this exact language. The language in this bill is identical to language in previous bills called the Free File Permanence Act which was introduced in the House over many years. So one thing that’s not undisputed is this is the company’s law.

VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you I understand that this series now over, there’s more to come, where do things go from here and what should folks get excited about getting to read next?

ELLIOT: There’s a couple interesting things happening. One is that Congresswoman Katie Porter who is a freshman Democrat from California and I believe actually a consumer lawyer wrote a letter this week to the IRS and the FTC asking them to investigate the company’s practices and see if they violated laws against deceptive advertising. There’s something that just happened today is that Governor Andrew Cuomo here in New York has asked two of the New York state agencies who investigate similar issues and finally my colleague and I are working on another story that is going to hopefully give an inside view of how this is handled and seen from inside Intuit and H and R Block where we’ve been talking to a lot of people and by the way, if anyone out there has worked at Intuit or H and R Block or [INAUDIBLE] companies I want to hear from them.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Justin Elliot, he’s a reporter with PRoPUblica, his ongoing series about the makers of TurboTax and H and R Block as well as the members of congress all embroiled in this debate is at ProPublica.org you can also find it, of course on our nerdy syllabus page as well as information and resources to get out the word to folks who might have been bilked who should be able to get back what they paid wrongfully in tax filing fees. Justin thanks so much for taking the time for this really, really killer reporting.

ELLIOT: Thanks so much.

VALLAS: Don’t away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. “About three and a half seconds. That’s how long inspectors currently have to check a pig carcass for lesions, hair, infected organs, or fecal matter before it’s sent whirring to workers, who slice up the roughly 250-pound animals in a freezing room, side by side, for eight to 10 hours a day, churning out more than 1,000 pigs an hour. If a new pork inspection rule recently highlighted by the Washington Post passes next month, the lines will run even faster and plant employees will have to take responsibility for this visual inspection, putting workers and eaters at risk.” So writes Claire Kelloway, a reporter and researcher at the Open Markets Institute in a TalkPoverty article entitled “Meat Processing Is A Dangerous Job. It’s About to Get A Lot Worse.” Claire, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

CLAIRE KELLOWAY: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So woo, the words that just came out of my mouth are a lot and frankly sound a hell of a lot like something out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which is turn of the century, earlier 20th century but we’re actually in 2019 in the United States of American so before we get to the current proposals that this piece is about and how things might actually get worse you have written a tremendous amount and reported a tremendous amount on this subject, what are the conditions like today?

KELLOWAY: The conditions in meat processing today are dangerous, they’re dangerous for eaters, they’re especially dangerous for workers. I think speed is clearly one of the big themes as you pointed in the intro, workers are repeating thousands of repetitive motions a day, dismantling meat carcasses at breakneck speeds. And that creates a lot of issues with cuts, with musculoskeletal disorders, it’s really not a pretty sight.

VALLAS: There’s all kinds of numbers in this piece of yours that really help to put a toll on the human consequences of this type of a workplace. According to the Department of Labor you write “meat processors get injured five times more frequently than other workers, and are nearly twenty times more likely to develop carpal tunnel” as you were describing because of those repetitively motions that they have to go into. But how is it that this is actually something that can be lawful considering that we’re a country that has health and safety laws on the books?

KELLOWAY: The sad thing about those numbers is that a lot of them actually underestimate the issue because in meat processing in particular there’s a huge issue of underreporting injuries. A lot of these workers, 28% generally are not born in the US, even more are people of color, they’re vulnerable to retaliation from their employers so we see abuses of these vulnerable workers. And organizations, government agencies that are supposed to protect workers like OSHA have really I would argue not overseen particularly these repetitive trauma injuries because there aren’t standards for setting line speeds that consider workers’ safety. When we set line speeds we only consider the effect on food safety. And so that’s led to a regulatory regime in which you can increase speed so long as it doesn’t increase the risk of disease for food born illness but it does not consider how they effect workers so that’s how we see these increasing line speeds.

VALLAS: And to state the obvious but just to connect the dots here the increasing speeds are something that companies that are producing and selling meat because it achieves savings, it actually boosts their profits.

KELLOWAY: Right, exactly the more to can churn out of a plant the bigger your profits because you’re increasing the cost per animal. So there’s a huge incentive to run the lines as fast as quote unquote safely possible. And a lot of times in these plants you increase the speed of the line you’re not necessarily adding more workers. A lot of these plants have reached their capacity in terms of the amount of people they can fit on the line so in that way you’re also churning out more product per worker, it profits the company, lowers their cost, the toll is felt on the people who have to churn out more animals in less time.

VALLAS: Now bringing us not quite to present day but close to present day, some of the current proposals like that pork rule that I mentioned up top, that pork inspection rule that is potentially set to pass in a way that could actually make conditions even more dangerous for these workers we’re talking about, that actually is part of a process that started about 20 years ago when there was an effort launched to, I’m going to use quotes around this, “modernize” pork and poultry inspection processes and that set off a whole series of pilots. Tell a little bit of that story.

KELLOWAY: Yeah so these pilots, they’re called the HACCP pilots, long acronym —

VALLAS: I’m going to try and get it right from your piece, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Based Inspection Model Project, so you were not lying, extremely long acronym, we’re going to hereto-for call it HACCP.

KELLOWAY: HACCP, yes, and I think the point inspection part gets at a little bit of the goal. It was to increase the amount of spot inspections, so if you think of a meat processing plant, you imagine USDA federal inspectors going around spot checking animals as they’re going through and the idea was to take inspectors off of the line to make it quote, unquote “more efficient” and move those duties more to the back of the house and increase the amount of things like lab testing, the idea being you can cut down on the amount of employees, save money, also make the whole slaughter process more efficient, the other goal being speed, so again how can we be producing more meat, companies making more money. So essentially the goal of this whole pilot was to lower the amount of federal inspector involvement, particularly with visual checks and then also increase line speeds.

VALLAS: So as your piece puts it by speeding up processing lines and allowing meat packers to police themselves, the plants that you’re describing, these modernization efforts really post tremendous risks not just to already hazardous working conditions but also to food safety. That being said, you’ve actually good the USDA and perhaps unsurprisingly industry groups as well saying that these pilot programs have actually proven the opposite. What is their position on this?

KELLOWAY: So their position is that the pilots have shown that these new programs are just as safe if not more safe than previous models, these programs are also voluntarily, they’re opt-in programs, so I guess that’s not as relevant but other groups have found, even government agencies like the office of the inspector general has said that the food safety inspection service actually in the case of pork pilot has not done a good job overseeing this pilot. And even though it’s been going for twenty years this brought into questions and discounted the findings of the pilots, based on what we’ve seen the oversight of this program by FSIS is essentially not sufficient for us to try to findings of this pilot. Similarly in terms of the poultry findings, there’s a lot of focus on salmonella rates like how does this increase the rate of salmonella and they found that it hasn’t but they also found that in 2016 there was a flaw in the way they were testing salmonella and so that also brings into question all the findings of the pilot before then. And now that the poultry system is in place because it has passed it was implemented in 2014 they’re finding some of these plants that are using this program are failing some of these salmonella testing. So there’s a lot of counter evidence to suggest that these pilots are worth being further scrutinized.

VALLAS: There’s also just some common sense statistics that you cite. In the case of pork there are only five of these HACCP pilot plants in place but of the top ten pork plants in the entire country with the most food safety violations three of them, three of the ten worst were of the HACCP pilot plants including the worst one of the entire ten which itself racked up nearly 50% more citations than even number two on the list just over three years.

KELLOWAY: Right, exactly, findings like that speak for itself. And similar in poultry we saw one of the plants was suspended, one of the new pilot plants due to food safety violations. So we have clear instances of them not working and having poor outcomes.

VALLAS: I was really, really struck by one line in your piece continues to stick with me I would say probably is getting close to keeping me up at night and it will switch over there and go into effect more broadly but a particularly USDA inspector, even though USDA as an entity has said that maybe the findings are showing us that the changes are safe, one concerned USDA inspector publicly commented that if the proposal goes through and inspectors are cut, “I would not feel safe enough to feed poultry to my family.” Pretty stark.

KELLOWAY: Yeah definitely, public comments like that from inspectors who are on the inside and seeing how these pilots are running are definitely concerning and we’ve seen inspectors raise similar concerns about these changes.

VALLAS: Now take us to present day with what specifically is being proposed. I know there have been a range of proposals over the course of the past few years, some of them during the Obama era, some of this has come during the Trump era so take us to the last few years of the debate around this issue.

KELLOWAY: So we can think about the changes as the two major changes are how many inspectors a plant has where they’re doing inspections and the speed of the processing lines. So in 2014 at the end of these pilots, the Obama administration implemented what’s called the new poutry inspection system.

VALLAS: Much easier acronym.

KELLOWAY: Exactly, decreases the amount of inspectors from 4 to 1 required inspector. And it also originally in the pilot proposed to increase poultry processing line speeds to 175 birds per minute which you can imagine is very fast. But they actually blocked that after there was blow back from workers groups and other progressive organizations saying you cannot increase these line speeds, so they actually halted that proposed measure which was a big victory at the time but that has since been rolled back under the Trump administration and now plants can apply for waivers to run at the original proposed 175 birds per minute. So that’s what’s happened in poultry and those are in place so these aren’t things that are going to risk changing, the systems are operating currently. Pork is one where the new programs are not currently available but very likely perhaps even this month, May we could see those changes in pork approved. Which would again decrease the federal inspectors on the line visually checking for issues in pork carcasses and also lift all limits on pork speeds.

VALLAS: Would just lift them entirely.

KELLOWAY: Yeah.

VALLAS: They could run lines at whatever speeds they want no matter how dangerous they are.

KELLOWAY: Yes.

VALLAS: And this is something that advocates have been responding in force to your piece notes some of them like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Human Rights Watch, what are we hearing from consumer advocates and from worker advocates.

KELLOWAY: Yeah it’s really clear that again there are these really concerning injury rates in these industries. When you look at surveys that have been done by groups of workers like these it’s pretty clear that more workers are left harmed, few people make it unscathed than do leave with injuries. Rates like two-thirds to 75% of all workers reporting some sort of injury and also pretty much across the board in these different surveys done independently but organizations universally confirming that the line speeds are the central cause of this danger. Workers just reporting over and over again overwhelmingly that the speeds make their work more dangerous and that they consider it to be their top if not most concerning hazard in the workplace.

VALLAS: So also part of the backdrop here is how much corporate power there is by contrast to the incredibly tiny worker power you’re describing particularly given this largely immigrant and refugee workforce, many of whom speak English as a second language and otherwise have incredibly little voice on the job. Meanwhile, we’re watching these companies get bigger and bigger and powerful over time. Tell a little bit about that story and how we’ve watched the rise of this kind of corporate power in the industry.

KELLOWAY: Yeah so we’ve definitely seen a large amount of mergers in meat processing to the point where the top four companies control in the case of poultry anywhere from 55 to 60% of the industry depending on certain estimates. In pork we see the top four controlling 70%. And a lot of this is due to unchecked mergers and when you have this then in terms of the effect of the workers in the local communities there’s often just one employer in town. You have the rise of fewer, larger plants. This creates more power when you have fewer employers for more workers to force people to work in these hard conditions, to suppress wages, to really give workers little bargaining power vis a vie these larger and larger entities.

VALLAS: So what are the solutions here? What is the conversation that you wish we were having as a nation when it comes to the policies that could protect workers, that could protect food safety, it’s so frequent that we end in these defensive postures of oh there’s a rule and it’s going to make things worse! What’s the conversation you wish we were having?

KELLOWAY: Yeah I think one of the big issues we see is that these processing conditions are currently set by the food safety inspection service and a lot of these worker organizations have petitioned to OSHA in the past asking to create worker informed limits on processing line speeds. OSHA studies have acknowledged that these line speeds are a central risk for these working conditions but we’re really not seeing worker safety being put central in these decisions about how plants operate and it’s very clear that the main entities that we’re thinking about is the companies and how its effects their efficiencies and their bottom line when really it’s clear that we need to be putting the most marginalized first and putting them more centered in this discussion and I think too often they’re overlooked.

VALLAS: Do you see and I’m struck as we have this conversation I can’t have it without hearing Upton Sinclair’s words ring in my head he has a famous quote from an essay he wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine, it was called “What Life Means to Me” and the famous line goes, “I aimed at the public’s hard and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” He’s talking about The Jungle, his book we referred to before about the meat packing industry and what he’s referring to and what people have come that quote to mean is he intended The Jungle to spur a socialist revolution in the United States, a workers’ revolution but instead what ended up happening the novel was published in 1905 within a year of the publication of the novel there was a whole national furor around the unsanitary practices of the meat packing industry, not quite what he meant to spur through that book and that was was what then brought us the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act which established the agency that later became the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, which you’ve been talking about and so here it was this socialist call to arms that instead became a very targeted spur of specific policy change rather than a conversation about how we exploit workers. What do you feel in today’s climate as we’re having a different conversation than maybe, you know, in 1906 but maybe not by much. What would it take for us to be thinking about the workers in this way and connecting the meat packing industry and these horrible human rights violations that you’ve been reporting on for so long as part of a conversation about workers’ rights and even the broader labor movement.

KELLOWAY: I think anytime, visibility and story telling I think is really critical despite Sinclair’s best efforts. If you read The Jungle he does a very good job of his expressed goal. So how do you redirect the public to focus on that? I guess that’s a bigger question but I think we have more and more visibility in terms of literally putting images in front of people and making these issues very real. I think there’s been a lot of pretty good documentaries and exposures on this issue and I guess what would it take? I think it’s a appreciation of everyone eats, we all rely on the service and the work that food workers across the system provide to feed us and put food on our tables. I think we have a lot of reverence and respect for farmers, there’s been, I think that’s even changed in recent decades in terms of thank a farmer, think about all the work that goes into your food.

VALLAS: But you don’t hear thank a meat packer.

KELLOWAY: Exactly and it seems like that’s a simply connection. If we’ve already begun to appreciate farmers who grow our food I also think seeing everyone else who has a role in providing food for us. I think maybe that’s a good parallel to begin using.

VALLAS: So where does the conversation go from here on some of these proposed changes and what else would you encourage folks to read or to be bringing into their lives to be more aware and to make these issues more visible to them?

KELLOWAY: Yeah so we’ve talked a little bit about the Southern Poverty Law Center, they’ve put out some good reports on this, OxFam also has a really chilling report, interactive story on poultry plant workers. Those would be two good places to start, also the Arkansas Worker Justice Center is another, a lot of good reports out there you can also check out Food and Power which is my newsletter comes out every other week and it focuses on issues like this but also issues of consolidation, monopolization and corporate power in the food system. And I think we need to continue pounding the drum of holding very powerful entities to account and making sure interests outside of just their profit motives are being accounted for. So public interest, food safety interest and workers’ interest.

VALLAS: And your piece closes with incredibly powerful words to end on here, I’d love to share with our listeners, “No matter how you slice it, faster line speeds line meat processors’ pockets at everyone else’s expense. Their cost per animal go down the faster lines run, churning out more product per worker and per plant. The one leg meat corporations have to stand on is the argument that they’ll pass their savings onto consumers but recent price fixing cases prove even those talking points are hog wash. The only real winners are corporate packers and their shareholders, while workers and eaters pay the price.” I’ve been speaking with Claire Kelloway, she’s a reporter and researcher at the Open Markets Institute, she’s also the author of “Meat Processing Is A Dangerous Job. It’s About to Get A Lot Worse.” A new post over at Talk Poverty dot org and you can find all of that recommended reading she just made over at our nerdy syllabus page. Claire thank you so much for your reporting on this issue and for taking the time to join the show.

KELLOWAY: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter I’m Rebecca Vallas. As a bonus to round out this week’s show, as we kick off May as Mental Health Awareness Month, and with all eyes on 2020, far too rarely do we talk about the importance of people with disabilities and particularly intellectual and mental health disabilities, running for and holding elected office — and the stigma that stands in the way for many. So we’re bringing back a conversation I had last year with Reyma McCoy McDeid, then an autistic candidate for office in Iowa’s 38th Congressional District and the Executive Director of Central Iowa Center for Independent Living — her campaign drew significant and well-deserved attention because of McDeid’s powerful activism to break down this stigma and other barriers to people with intellectual and mental health disabilities running for office. Let’s take a listen.

REYMA MCCOY MCDEID: Sure so like you said I am the executive director of a center for independent living here in Iowa and one of the big things that I do both in my professional and personal life is mobilize people to participate in the political process who have been left out. And that most certainly includes people with disabilities. For instance, in Iowa there are 315,000 people who experience a disability and are eligible to vote and unfortunately only between 6 and 10% of that population actually votes. And so that’s, the ramification of that are pronounced and pretty monumental as far as I’m concerned. You basically have an entire segment of the population that is not participating in the political process. And the result of that can be seen in the legislation that is passed in Iowa and at the federal level when that voice is not being heard by our elected officials. So I’ve been very passionate about changing that paradigm for a long time now. And with the election of Trump in 2016 I think that my passion kind of pulled me into the direction of wanting to run for office and take the conversation that I have been reaching with people to the next level.

Now only do we need people with disabilities to vote, we also need people with disabilities to run and be elected to office and be able to participate in legislative conversations, have a seat at the table if you will. So that has brought me to running for office today and it’s, I’m in the early part of that particular adventure but it’s been really interesting and I’ve been touched by the number of people with disabilities, both locally and nationwide who have reached out to the campaign and shared their stories with me and also shared their own personal dreams to affect change at the legislative level. My message to everyone is do it, get involved, do what you feel moved to do to affect change and if that means running for office as well please do that we need you.

VALLAS: Now I think without question people agree and this is a statement that is true in 2018 that was not true decades ago but I’ll say it agree that people with disabilities should be holding elected office in much higher numbers. The piece that maybe is not clear to everyone and where there is some level of not just disagree but open questioning that’s happening right now in this conversation about Trump and his mental health and is is living with mental illness or a mental health disability or other kind of diagnosis something that makes one unfit to serve in elected office, something that a lot of folks are effectively saying about Trump. What do you say when you hear people start to get into that kind of a conversation?

MCDEID: You know I’m deeply distressed by that conversation. One, I think that Trump’s approach as president doesn’t differ that dramatically from the approach that he has used for decades and when I hear conversations about his mental fitness for office I hear a lot about well perhaps he has dementia or some kind of mental illness that has a late onset. And his track record indicates otherwise as far as I’m concerned. His decision-making processes have not differed that much in his life. So I really bristle at those types of conversations but the even bigger issue of whether or not people who experience mental illness or any kind of neuro-diversity, whether or not they are fit to hold office, that, my goodness, I think that’s, let’s have that conversation because it’s being had obviously. But we have to keep in mind that we are a representative democracy and mental illness is an experience that impacts millions of Americans. Millions of Americans who lead full, fulfilling lives experience mental illness and do really wonderful things. And in the midst of all of that they are proactive in seeking out the supports and treatments that they need in order to effectively live with a mental illness.

And I think to say that a person who has a mental illness is not fit for office, we’re basically saying that tens of millions of Americans who live in a representative democracy are not fit to represent themselves or others. And I really think that that is not true obviously. But when we start saying, talking about the fact that a person that represents tens of millions of people in this country should not represent this country, that’s not a healthy statement. I think that anybody who is of legal age and has a passion to represent the people should be able to do so. And I think that if a person used a wheelchair to navigate their day to day life and we were to say that that person should not be elected to office because they have a visible disability I think almost everybody would say that that is a ridiculous notion and so I think that that also is relevant with regards to people who have a mental illness or some other type of invisible disability. That should not discount them and what they would have to bring to elected office.

VALLAS: Embedded in a lot of that mindset is the myths about what living with mental illness or a mental health disability really looks like. For folks who maybe are wondering what is it that makes you qualified for office and the fact that you are autistic person as you’ve described does not make you someone who is unfit. You’re arguing that case strongly. What are the myths that we still need to bust at this point in the 21st century when it comes to mental illness and mental health disabilities?

MCDEID: Well that’s a great question. I think that the reality is that there are not enough people who experience a mental illness or other form of neurodiversity that are visible in society and so it’s still a bit of a boogeyman so to speak. And when we don’t have access to factual information it’s human nature to speculate. And so because we’re not hearing from people who are in elected office who experience mental illness and are able to with that mental illness do effect powerful change in their elected position, we’re left to speculate especially now that we have Trump in office and lots and lots of conversations are being had with regard to his own mental health status. At this time unfortunately the only reality is that he is the only person that we’re talking about with regards to elected officials and mental illness because no one has stepped forward who is a legislator and acknowledged that they too have a mental illness. And are able to operate the duties of their position and not necessarily in spite of but with that experience. And so yeah, I don’t know if I’ve answered your question but I think that in order to blow through the myths about people with mental illness we’ve got to elect more people who are neurodiverse into office but we also need people who are already elected and experience neurodiversity to bravely step forward and say I too have a mental illness, I too have a developmental disability and I am able to do this job and serve the people in an effective manner.

VALLAS: Reyma McCoy McDeid is the executive director of the central Iowa Center for Independent Living. She is an autistic candidate for the Iowa state legislature who is very public about her being autistic for all of the reasons described and why that makes her not just fit for office but a fantastic candidate for office. Reyma, where can folks find out more about your campaign?

MCDEID: Thank you Rebecca, you can find out more about my campaign by visiting my website and that is runreymarun.com, my name is spelled R-EY-M-A so runreymarun.com. You can also find me on Facebook by my name which is Reyma McCoy McDeid.

VALLAS: Reyma thank you so much for taking the time to join the show and best of luck. Run, Reyma, run indeed.

VALLAS: Take care.

MCDEID: Alright, bye.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.