Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale said it fired seven plant managers after an investigation into allegations of a COVID-19 betting pool at its pork production plant in Waterloo, Iowa.
Tyson Foods did not name the fired employees, but plant manager Tom Hart was accused of organizing the pool this past spring on how many of the plant’s 2,800 employees would test positive for the coronavirus. The allegations came in a lawsuit filed by family members of Tyson Foods employees who had died; eventually about 1,000 employees tested positive and six died.
In November, shortly after the allegations were made public, Tyson Foods announced it had hired law firm Covington & Burling LLP to conduct an independent investigation, which was led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The company suspended managers at the plant without pay pending the results of that investigation.
“We value our people and expect everyone on the team, especially our leaders, to operate with integrity and care in everything we do,” Tyson Foods CEO Dean Banks said in a statement on Wednesday. “The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth. Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings.”
The company said Banks went to the Waterloo plant after the allegations surfaced to meet with employees and community leaders. Banks was scheduled to meet employees again today.
“The commitment and passion that our team members exhibit every day is core to who we are at Tyson,” Banks said. “We were very upset to learn of the behaviors found in the allegations, as we expect our leaders to treat all team members with the highest levels of respect and integrity.”
Banks said the company would work with Holder and his team to improve the work environment at Waterloo. In the blog post announcing the firings, Tyson Foods said it was committed to opening more communication channels and creating a working group of local community leaders.
Mel Orchard, an attorney for the deceased workers’ families, said the firings confirm the authenticity of some “ghoulish” allegations in the lawsuits. He said Tyson “gambled with workers’ lives” by downplaying the virus and not offering adequate safety precautions.
“I’m grateful that they might be getting to the bottom of it, but it’s way too late for some people,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “I hope Eric Holder stays on this case and continues to investigate the real issue: How is it that more than one thousand employees at one plant got sick and many died?”
In early December, the Des Moines Register reported that the lawsuit further alleged that Hart and human resources director James Hook had lied about the severity of the virus to interpreters (many of the plant’s employees are non-English speaking immigrants). The lawsuit alleged that the leaders told the interpreters that the plant had been cleared to operate when, in fact, the local health department was urging it to close.
Tyson Foods eventually temporarily closed the plant in April after a wave of infections, which prompted John Tyson, the company’s chairman of the board, to write the “food supply chain is breaking” in a full-page advertisement that ran in several national newspapers.
Another Lawsuit
Separately, the family of another Tyson Foods employee is alleging in a lawsuit that he died from COVID-19 after the company failed to implement safety protocols to guard against the coronavirus at the plant in Storm Lake, Iowa, where he worked.
Michael Everhard, 65, of Fonda, Iowa, died of COVID-19 on June 18, three weeks after being diagnosed with the virus. His family contends he became infected at the Storm Lake plant where he worked for 27 years, The Sioux City Journal reported.
The lawsuit, filed by Everhard’s three children, argues that Tyson and its managers required him and other employees to continue working in an environment “rife with coronavirus” and didn’t implement safety precautions to protect them from contracting the virus, Storm Lake attorney Willis Hamilton said.
In response, Tyson spokeswoman Liz Croston said the company has implemented several measures at its facilities that meet or exceed federal guidance for preventing the spread of COVID-19.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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