Tyson Foods to require workers to get COVID vaccine. What it means for NC plants.
Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry producer, will require its roughly 120,000 U.S. employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
It’s the first poultry producer to make the vaccine a condition of employment.
That includes around 6,500 workers employed in North Carolina across several poultry processing facilities. The deadline to get the vaccine is Nov. 1.
“We did not take this decision lightly. We have spent months encouraging our team members to get vaccinated,” Tyson president and CEO Donnie King said in a public memo. “We take this step today because nothing is more important than our team members’ health and safety, and we thank them for the work they do, every day, to help us feed this country, and our world.”
Less than half of its U.S. workforce is fully vaccinated, according to the company.
All Tyson leadership will need to be fully vaccinated by Sep. 24. All office employees will need the vaccine by Oct. 1 with the rest of the employees by Nov. 1, the company said.
For front-line workers whose vaccinations are verified by the company, they will be eligible to receive $200 in compensation. The vaccination requirement of workers who are members of a union will be subject to union bargaining, King said. Workers are also eligible to be compensated for up to four hours of pay if they’re vaccinated outside of work.
At least 35% of the roughly 3,000 workers at the Tyson plant in the town of Wilkesboro has received a first dose of the vaccine, spokesman Derek Burleson said in an email to The News & Observer.
The vaccine mandate will include temporary contract employees. They will have a later vaccination deadline to give them enough time to get the shot, he said.
The company did not provide information on how many have been vaccinated at other Tyson locations or how many North Carolina workers are fully vaccinated.
Tyson is the latest of large U.S. employers to require the vaccine to work there. Tyson, Perdue, Mountaire Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride and other poultry plants began facilitating the vaccination of their tens of thousands of employees across the state this spring, The N&O previously reported.
Large poultry and pork processing plants have been very susceptible to virus spread throughout the pandemic. Around 600 workers at the Tyson Wilkesboro plant tested positive for the virus in May 2020, the largest publicly reported outbreak of its kind in the state.
