Tyson recovering from outbreak | Guest Opinion

When you manage a meat processing plant that employs 1,400 team members producing enough beef in one day to feed four million Americans, safety is always your top concern.

It’s the first thing I think about when I come to work and the last thing I think about when I turn out the lights at night.

We hope COVID-19 will one day be a distant memory, but today we continue to work tirelessly to fend off a foe we never could have predicted or imagined would wreak such havoc on our communities. We’ve got our fighting gloves on and will continue to do everything we can to help keep our team members safe.

Safety is why we made the decision to idle our Pasco plant on April 23, sending our team members home to wait for nearly two weeks, with pay, while we deep cleaned and sanitized the facility.

It’s why we are up and running again today, the result of all the protective measures we’ve put in place — measures that either meet or exceed CDC and OSHA guidance.

These include temperature checks for all team members before every shift, providing mandatory face coverings, and a range of social distancing measures we’ve put in place, including physical barriers between work stations and in break rooms. I also have a team assigned to zones throughout the facility whose sole assignment each day is to disinfect and sanitize lockers, welfare areas, cafeterias and other surfaces using atomized sprayers. Safety is a shared commitment.

With the support of the Walla Walla County Department of Community Health and Providence St. Mary Medical Center, we also ramped up testing. Testing can be critical to improving individual health outcomes, helping ensure plant and community safety while giving team members confidence to come to work.

As our communities continue to fight this pandemic, we are also helping our team members get the care they need through our partnership with Matrix Medical, a leading provider of mobile health clinics and community-based services with advanced diagnostic capabilities and enhanced care options.

Matrix tests team members immediately who show symptoms. We also increased short-term disability coverage to 90% of normal pay until June 30 to encourage team members to stay home when they are sick. We even doubled our thank-you bonus to our frontline workers and truckers, moving the payout dates up so they could receive payments earlier.

These are all positive steps designed to make our Pasco plant and surrounding communities safer.

These measures will stay in place as the state reopens, as will our commitment to working closely with our community partners to help minimize the spread of the virus going forward. Investing in my team members is a great investment. Without them we are nothing. I’m proud of them and the incredible work they are doing to put food on the tables of millions of Americans.

I’m also thankful for our Pasco community which has been an incredible support system throughout.

Our community is forever changed, but I’m confident we will come out of this stronger and better together.

This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 2:59 PM with the headline "Tyson recovering from outbreak | Guest Opinion."