The Iowa Supreme Court is set to decide if the families of four people who worked at the Tyson Foods meatpacking plant in Waterloo and died of COVID-19 in 2020 can move forward with their wrongful death lawsuits against company leaders.

The families of Sedika Buljic, Reberiano Garcia Leno, Jose Ayala and Isidro Fernandez allege they died of complications related to COVID-19 in the spring of 2020 because Tyson executives and supervisors failed to prevent the spread of the virus, lied to workers about the outbreak and ordered sick employees to continue working.

The Black Hawk County District Court dismissed their cases against Tyson last year. A lawyer for the plaintiffs asked the Iowa Supreme Court during oral arguments Thursday to reverse that lower court ruling and let the cases proceed.

Attorney David Yoshimura, representing some of the Waterloo Tyson plant supervisors named in the lawsuits, said these are “straightforward workplace injury claims” that belong in the workers’ compensation system, not in the courts.

“…Which is why the district court dismissed them. Nevertheless, the plaintiff here has engaged in some creative pleading of their own and tried to, through some gamesmanship, keep these claims in the courts,” he said.

But plaintiffs’ attorney G. Bryan Ulmer III said Tyson leaders’ actions satisfy an exception to that law.

He said Tyson executives and supervisors’ fraudulent misrepresentations and gross negligence caused the four employees to die of COVID-19. He said Tyson leaders told employees the virus wasn’t spreading at the plant and told workers with COVID symptoms to keep going to work.

“All the while, supervisors were placing bets on how many positive COVID-19 cases would result from the outbreak,” Ulmer said. “The end result was the largest workplace outbreak of COVID-19 in the entire country.”

The COVID-19 outbreak at the Tyson facility in Waterloo

The Tyson plant in Waterloo was in the spotlight in April of 2020, when local health officials and some state lawmakers were urging the company to temporarily shut down the pork plant to help stop the spread of the virus.

The workers’ families allege that by the beginning of April, Tyson supervisors knew that COVID-19 “was rampantly spreading” at the Waterloo plant. Some were part of a betting pool “to wager how many workers would test positive for COVID-19.” Tyson later fired seven managers who were involved.

The plaintiffs said that Tyson executives and supervisors “forced” sick workers to work at the Waterloo plant unless they got a formal positive COVID test result (which could take several days at that time), refused to provide proper masks and allowed employees to work without masks.

“A box of rags and frayed fabric was provided at the Waterloo facility for workers to use as ‘optional’ face coverings,” the plaintiffs alleged in a court filing.

Tyson had already closed its plant in Columbus Junction because of a COVID-19 outbreak, and, according to the lawsuits, was already taking virus precautions at its plants in China for months.

The Waterloo plant was closed on April 23, 2020, after the virus had been spreading there for weeks.

Local health officials reported in early May 2020 that more than 1,000 employees of the Tyson pork plant had tested positive for COVID-19.

The lawsuits

The families of the four Waterloo workers who died filed two separate lawsuits in the summer of 2020. They were combined for some legal proceedings.

At one point, the cases were sent to the federal court system.

Tyson argued that it was acting under the direction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to prevent a food shortage during the pandemic and that federal courts should hear these cases instead of state courts. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case and sent it back to the state court system.

The Iowa Supreme Court will likely decide by the end of June 2025 whether the cases can move forward.

Tyson Fresh Meats settled lawsuits earlier this year with the estates of three people who worked at its pork plant in Storm Lake and died of COVID-19.