How Tyson Foods Got 60,500 Workers to Get the Coronavirus Vaccine Quickly

SPRINGDALE, Ark. – When Tyson, one of the largest meat packers in the world, announced in early August that all of its 120,000 workers would need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or lose their jobs, Diana Eike was furious. Ms. Eike, an administrative coordinator in the company, had resisted the vaccine and not for religious or political reasons like many others here in her home country.

“It was just personal,” she said.

Now Ms. Eike is fully vaccinated and she is relieved that Tyson made the decision for her. The company, she said, “made the decision easier for me”.

Workers across the country have responded to vaccine mandates with a mixture of emotions. The demands of employers take effect in many areas without major controversy. But in some cities government workers have marched through the streets in protest, while others have quit. Numerous companies have hesitated with mandates for fear of a wave of resignations even though they had to contend with new coronavirus outbreaks.

Tyson’s announcement that vaccination would be required in its corporate offices, packing houses, and poultry factories, many of which are in the South and Midwest where resistance to the vaccines is high, was arguably the boldest mandate in the corporate world.

“We made the decision to fulfill the mandate with the full understanding that we are jeopardizing our business,” said Tyson’s CEO Donnie King in an interview last week. “That was very painful.”

But it was also bad for business when Tyson had to shut down facilities due to virus outbreaks. Since the policy was announced, around 60,500 employees have received the vaccine and more than 96 percent of the workforce have been vaccinated.

Tyson’s experience shows how compelling vaccination regulations can be in the workplace. It comes when the Biden government set a January 4 deadline when vaccines – or weekly testing – are required in companies with 100 or more employees.

Tyson’s aggressive push on vaccines is a significant turnaround for a company criticized early in the pandemic for failing to adequately protect workers at its plants. The low-wage workers typically stand elbow-to-elbow cutting, boning, and packaging meat, making them particularly vulnerable to the airborne virus.

Tyson, like other major meat packers, lobbied the Trump administration in 2020 to pass an executive order that essentially allowed plants to stay open despite rising infections. The move followed a warning from Tyson Chairman John Tyson of a meat shortage in the United States, despite the fact that the company and other meat packers were exporting more pork to China than they did before the pandemic, a New York Times investigation found.

A recent congressional report found 151 Tyson employees died from the virus. The report said inspectors at a plant in Amarillo, Texas observed that many employees were wearing “saturated” masks. At a pork factory in Waterloo, Iowa, when dozen of workers fell ill and three died, local officials, including the county sheriff, said the company initially denied their requests to close the plant in the spring of 2020.

Tyson says it has spent more than $ 810 million on Covid safety measures and new on-site medical services. It ran factory-wide coronavirus tests and hired its first chief medical officer.

And the vaccines brought a new tool to protect employees – while the company’s plants stayed open.

“This was a business decision,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the retail, wholesale and department store union, which represents thousands of workers in Tyson’s poultry factories, of the mandate. “There isn’t enough manpower to take the place when a lot of workers get sick.”

Mr King began to contemplate a mandate during his July 4th vacation – “the worst vacation of my life,” he said – when the Delta variant popped up across the country. He had only been in office a month after unexpectedly assuming Tyson’s fifth CEO in five years in June. Mr. King wears a red heart on his jacket that is inspired by the book “Love Works” and encourages managers to “lead with love”.

Updated

Nov. 4, 2021, 2:29 p.m. ET

Most corporate executives don’t want to be the first to take bold action or do so without data to back them up. Tyson introduced the requirement when the handful of companies announcing mandates mostly focused on office workers – who were statistically more likely to be vaccinated than factory workers.

Upon returning from vacation, Mr. King called the Tyson leadership team for a two-week discussion. The company consulted outside experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Infectious Disease Specialists, and Emergency Room specialists.

It was modeled what vaccination rate it could achieve and how many employees could quit. “We literally counted the cost,” said Mr. King.

By then, the company had spoken to its employees for six months since the vaccines first became available, trying to understand what had made nearly half of those who had not been vaccinated resistant.

“We already knew this vaccine was very polarizing in the community,” said King. “Part of it is religious, part of it is medical concern – but part of it is, ‘I just don’t want you to tell me what to do.'”

Tyson’s workforce is extraordinarily diverse: there are Burmese refugees, immigrants from the Pacific Islands, and many Black and Hispanic employees who work in the company’s pork, beef and poultry factories. The company asked doctors serving certain ethnic communities to speak to staff, in groups or individually, about the safety of the vaccine.

At a facility in Camilla, Georgia, Dextrea Dennard, a member of the retail and wholesale department store union, was initially upset that Tyson required a vaccination. “I felt that our rights were being violated,” she said.

Ms. Dennard had witnessed the effects of the illness first hand. Her brother caught the virus when the pandemic started and was on a ventilator for 30 days. A number of workers died at the factory they worked at, a 15-minute drive away in Albany, one of the outbreak’s early epicentres.

“We have many deaths in my ward,” said Ms. Dennard. “I thought about what my brother went through and got over – and I just felt it was time to do what I had to do about my daughter who is 10 years old and not vaccinated can be. ”

Ms. Dennard decided to get vaccinated after speaking to a doctor the company called in to discuss his time treating Covid-19 patients.

“And when I got it, a lot of my co-workers felt kind of weird – they got it later,” she said.

Others never got the shot. Monday was the last day of work for Calvin Miller, who worked in the dry storage facility at a Tyson facility in Sedalia, Missouri, where the local vaccination rate is 46 percent. Mr. Miller, who worked for Tyson for 12 years, said he felt “betrayed” by the mandate: “Many good workers and long-time workers lost their jobs because they did not trust the vaccine,” he said. He’s considering looking for a retail job even though he doesn’t pay as much as the $ 17.20 an hour he did at Tyson, he said. The complex in which the Sedalia plant operates is now 96 percent vaccinated.

The company announced that “a very limited number” of employees had resigned on the mandate. There are still approximately 4,000 unvaccinated U.S. workers employed at Tyson who have either been granted religious or medical exemptions, or who have previously been on independent vacation. Some of those, with exceptions, were placed in a position that enabled them to distance themselves socially. Others were given leave of absence.

Six employees have sued Tyson alleging that it violated Tennessee law by putting workers granted such exemptions on unpaid leave. The case is pending.

Mr King said he had received comments from workers in emails and text messages.

“I wanted to know what people think,” he says. Some of the feedback was angry. “I got a death threat on a bathroom wall in one of our factories,” he said.

To make it clear that the mandate was about worker safety, Tyson needed the support of its major unions, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. In exchange for her support, Tyson agreed to offer more benefits such as paid sick leave to all workers.

“People who run large corporations think in two ways: what’s best for my employees and what’s best for the company to keep going?” Said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “And in this case the two fit together wonderfully.”

As the number of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations increased over the summer, Ms. Eike, the administrative coordinator at Tyson in Springdale, began to question her decision not to get vaccinated. At about the same time, Mr. King announced the firm mandate and left her no choice. After Ms. Eike received the vaccine, her adult son, who had suffered a traumatic brain injury that made him afraid of the injection, received one. She now thinks that her resistance was “selfish” in the face of the mission.

“I kind of beat myself up,” she said, “and think why did it take someone else to help me see this?”