Tyson Foods petitions U.S. Supreme Court for protection as Iowa lawsuits over COVID-19 deaths grow

As three more families sue Tyson Foods over COVID-19 deaths among workers at its Iowa plants, the meatpacking giant is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court for protection.

Tyson's attorneys filed the petition Friday, asking the country's highest court to hear their case and rule that a March 2020 executive order by then-President Donald Trump shielded the company from legal liability, Bloomberg Law reported.

Trump's order instructed the secretary of agriculture to take "all appropriate action" to keep the country's meat and chicken processing plants open as COVID-19 spread, though it did not prohibit them from temporarily closing their plants.

In their petition, according to Bloomberg, Tyson's lawyers wrote that the company followed "the federal government's instructions to help avert an impending national food shortage." They added that Tyson executives "will not be so eager to willingly aid the federal government in a crisis" if the company is subject to lawsuits.

Tyson filed the petition in response to a June 2020 lawsuit filed by the families of three workers at the company's Waterloo plant who died of COVID-19: Sedika Buljic, Reberiano Leno Garcia and Jose Luis Ayala Jr.

More: Unfounded shortage panic led to 'unsafe conditions' for meatpacking workers, report says

Tyson temporarily shut down the Waterloo factory in the first weeks of the pandemic, after 863 employees tested positive for the disease, according to documents the company later submitted to the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. 

Through February 2021, according to the company, 1,174 Waterloo employees tested positive. At least seven of those workers died.

Since their filing, judges have pushed the three families' cases back and forth between state and federal courts. Tyson lawyers have argued that the lawsuits belong in federal court and that the company isn't liable because of Trump's order.

More: 'If we lost Tyson, we lost everything': Iowa meatpacking plant both a COVID-19 risk and town's lifeblood

Meanwhile, more families have sued, with three more filing between June 1-13. That brings the total number of coronavirus-death lawsuits in Iowa to at least 14.

The new cases accuse Tyson of gross negligence that resulted in the deaths of   Ken Jones, Victor Barahona Rivera and Juan Jauregui Samudio, all of whom were employees at Tyson plants in Storm Lake. They allege the company failed to take prompt action to space employees apart along its tightly packed pork processing lines, erect barriers between the workers, slow down the speeds of the lines and provide masks and other protective gear.

The families also say Tyson managers did an insufficient job of testing employees for infections and cleaning the factories.

"Tyson and its managerial employees ... required (Jones, Rivera and Samudio) to work in an environment rife with Corona Virus (sic) when they know or should have known that Tyson wasn't implementing the necessary safety precautions," Mary and Willis Hamilton, the attorneys on the case, wrote in almost identical petitions.

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Tyson spokesperson Liz Croston declined to comment. But Robert Kelmer, an attorney for Tyson, wrote in an April 2021 letter to the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that that journalists and politicians punished Tyson for being more transparent than some of its competitors.

Kelmer wrote that Tyson executives created a coronavirus task force in January 2020, performed mass testing at plants in April and May of that year and shared the test results with public health agencies. In addition to buying protective equipment and cleaning supplies, Kelmer wrote, the company spent $86 million on testing.

Unlike other meatpacking giants, Tyson announced a coronavirus vaccine mandate in  fall 2021.

"Tyson's decision to be transparent with its testing, including publishing its testing data on an ongoing basis for months, has led to misplaced and misinformed public criticism," Kelmer wrote.

Despite outbreaks that led to temporary plant closures, Tyson still reported operating income of $775 million for the period of April to June 2020, down about $6 million, or less than 1%, from the same period a year earlier.

Storm Lake was among the hardest-hit meatpacking towns in the country. The company reported 1,476 infections through February 2021 at the Tyson pork processing plant there and a turkey processing facility of Hillshire Brands, a Tyson subsidiary — the third-largest Tyson-tied outbreak in the country.

The company also reported four deaths in Storm Lake. Attorney Willis Hamilton said he believes the town's death count is higher. In addition to the three cases his law firm filed last month, Hamilton represents the family of Michael Everhard, another Tyson employee in Storm Lake who died during the pandemic.

More: Michael Everhard, an unapologetic Vikings fan, was a fierce protector of his kids

He said he has heard that immigrants from Micronesia who worked at the plant also died, but their families have not filed lawsuits.

"I can't imagine there's only four (deaths)," he said.

Ken Jones was a maintenance worker at Tyson in Storm Lake who died after a two-week hospital stay.

His wife, Sara Jones, told the Des Moines Register later that year that he was a Chicago native who moved to Texas before settling in Iowa in 2007. He was a Jehovah's Witness who loved the Chicago Bears and Bull and cooked fried pork chops and salmon croquettes.

"He was there to help anybody, with a huge heart," Sara Jones told the newspaper in October 2020. "Everybody loves him."

Tyler Jett covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at tjett@registermedia.com, 515-284-8215, or on Twitter at @LetsJett.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa COVID-19 death suits lead Tyson to seek Supreme Court protection