?A federal appeals court recently dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Tyson Foods was responsible for seven workers contracting COVID-19 at an Amarillo, Texas, meat-processing plant.
The workers claimed the company required them to continue in-person work during a local stay-at-home order, required people infected with COVID-19 to continue working, and failed to provide personal protective equipment or implement social distancing.
The plaintiffs’ allegations failed to satisfy the requirements for them to prevail on their negligence claims despite the Texas Pandemic Liability Protection Act (PLPA), the court stated. The PLPA shields corporations from liability for exposing an individual to a pandemic disease during a pandemic emergency unless claimants satisfy two requirements, which the plaintiffs failed to do in this case. First, they failed to show the employer knowingly did not: 1) warn of or remediate a condition that it knew was likely to result in exposure to the disease, or 2) comply with government-issued standards, guidance or protocols intended to lower the likelihood of exposure. Second, the plaintiffs didn’t establish reliable scientific evidence to show the company caused the individuals to contract the disease.
The “plaintiffs have provided no facts to plausibly suggest that of the myriad places and ways in which they could have been exposed to COVID-19, they contracted the virus at the Tyson plant as a result of Tyson’s negligence,” the court stated.
Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.
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5th Circuit: Workers Lacked Evidence
The workers didn’t provide enough evidence to support their allegations, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an unpublished 3-0 decision issued March 27. The workers didn’t confirm any dates or timeframes of exposure to the virus.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Another Case
In a separate case, the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear Tyson Foods’ arguments about why federal judges should oversee lawsuits tied to the COVID-19 deaths of its plant workers, including those from its nearly 2,800-worker pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa. The company maintained those cases should go before federal courts, because President Donald Trump’s administration ordered food processing plants to stay open in the first months of the pandemic. The court denied Tyson’s petition to review the decision of lower court judges, who ruled in multiple cases that Tyson employees can sue the company in state-level courts.
U.S. District Court and U.S. Court of Appeals judges in previous rulings on the wrongful death cases said the Trump administration’s order didn’t protect the company from liability.
At the Waterloo factory, about 1,200 workers tested positive for the virus and seven employees died in April and May 2020, according to data the company submitted to Congress.
Worker’s Compensation Denials
Across the meatpacking industry, more than 86,000 workers contracted coronavirus and at least 423 died, according to Investigate Midwest’s tracking.
Few workers’ compensation cases involving meatpacking companies’ liability for their workers’ deaths during the coronavirus pandemic have yet been decided in favor of the workers. Of the 935 workers’ compensation claims filed by meatpacking workers in Minnesota, none had been paid out by February 2021.
Smithfield Settlement and Citation
In November 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor reached a settlement with Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp., the nation’s largest pork processor, following an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection that led to an OSHA citation.
In September 2020, OSHA cited a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., for failing to protect meatpacking workers against COVID-19. More than a thousand workers became ill, and four died. A second plant was cited the following day.
(SHRM Online and SHRM Online)