WASHINGTON – Tyson Foods, the biggest U.S. food company, said Tuesday it is requiring all its employees to be fully vaccinated, joining a growing list of employers who are making vaccination a condition of further employment.
For months, Tyson said it has encouraged its 139,000 workers to get vaccinated, but to date only about 56,000 have been inoculated.
“We did not take this decision lightly,” Donnie King, Tyson’s president and chief executive, said of the mandatory vaccination requirement.
“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,” he said in a letter to Tyson workers.
Under the Arkansas-based company’s policy, Tyson workers at its U.S. locations must be vaccinated by October 1, with workers at its foreign locations vaccinated by November 1, although it plans to make exceptions to the directive for legitimate medical or religious reasons.
After individual workers are vaccinated, Tysons said it would pay them a $200 bonus, similar to what some other companies are doing to encourage vaccinations.
The U.S. meat-packing industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with critics saying Tyson, among others, has not done enough to protect its workers. Early in the pandemic last year, Tyson was forced to close some of its meat processing plants because of an outbreak of the virus.
The federal…
