Two weeks ago JBS allegedly sent a letter to various employees advising them of their absences saying they are “not in good standing with the company.”

The letter notified workers that their jobs were still available but “you, or someone close to you, needs to contact your HR department immediately.”

If the employees didn’t make contact by June 19 their employment would be terminated.

“The company wants to work with you to find a solution,” said the letter.

T-R photo by Thomas Nelson A woman stands outside JBS property near a sign advising workers of COVID-19 precautions Wednesday afternoon.

Joe Henry, president of LULAC, characterizes the letter as a warning to the employees who received it.

“The workers that we talked to about this felt that they were being more or less threatened,” Henry said.

The letter was sent out about two weeks ago.

“We have been extremely lenient with our attendance policy since March, with no one being termed for violation of attendance policies during this time,” said Cameron Bruett, JBS USA head of corporate affairs. “We have not returned to normal attendance policies. We are reaching out to our team members who have been absent for an extended period of time to ensure they have the opportunity to continue to work on our team if they desire.”

Henry is unaware of any employees being let go since the letter was sent.

LULAC has since sent a list of demands to JBS to keep workers safe.

“Workers need to have the right know who’s infected at their facilities,” Henry said. “That’s why we have asked for mandatory testing of workers on a regular basis.”

LULAC is pushing for testing by public health officials at all meat packing plants.

“Until that is done there is no way to ensure that the safety procedures that have been implemented in the workplace are working,” Henry said. “We’re concerned about attendance policy letters being handed out, because of the fact that we know workers are still getting ill.”

He has also pushed for information to be given out in multiple languages because not everyone at the facility speaks English.

“The speed of work needs to go down because of the fact they’re working at a fast pace,” Henry said.

In April the T-R reported there were 34 employees at JBS who were positive for COVID-19. Since then JBS and Iowa’s governor’s office have declined to produce any updated numbers on positive cases.

On May 15 JBS worker Jose Andrade-Garcia died, and his family said it was from COVID-19. Garcia, 62, was a week away from retirement from JBS.

In Colorado eight JBS workers have died from COVID-19 and at least 316 workers have tested positive, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7. Colorado’s state website reports six JBS workers have died and 264 workers tested positive.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued this a statement saying, “While reviewing case data with local public health officials, we made three changes to our [Greeley beef plant] data. The first took effect last week, and that was splitting the JBS outbreak into two outbreaks – one for the plant, and one for their corporate offices. We also realized that some secondary infections of employees’ family members had been incorrectly included in the JBS outbreak data. While those cases are important and are being tracked closely, they do not meet the definition of an outbreak case. For consistency, we removed them from JBS’s case numbers, which brought the plant outbreak’s total down from 316 to 264. Finally, we found that one of the deaths previously attributed to the JBS outbreak was an employee of another company. We could not confirm that they had ever worked at JBS, so we removed that death from the outbreak data. Because we recorded another death from the JBS outbreak this week, the total number of deaths remained the same [six].”

Like Iowa, Colorado’s numbers and reporting practices have changed throughout the pandemic.

“It needs to be clear to workers that they have the right to healthcare, that it should be fully paid healthcare,” Henry said. “We know the workers have to pay out of pocket expenses before they can get medical treatment. We know that medical bills have definitely increased over the last several months.”

Positive tests for COVID-19 have gone down overall in Marshall County since April, but the county still has one of the highest numbers of infected in Iowa.

“Ten percent of your community works at JBS, so that should be a concern,” Henry said. “No workers at the plant have been informed about any numbers of illnesses.”

This week will see the first jump in positive cases since April with more than 30 people reported to have tested positive for the coronavirus over a seven-day period.

“We need mandatory testing,” Henry said. “We’re surprised Marshalltown has taken a more aggressive approach with JBS. We feel strongly that elected officials need to work hard to see that workers are protected, because this virus is not going away.”

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Contact Thomas Nelson at 641-753-6611 or tnelson@timesrepublican.com