(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of the families of four workers at the Tyson meatpacking plant in Waterloo who died of COVID-19 in 2020. The workers’ families are asking the Iowa Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s decision that dismissed their claims as a workers compensation issue. Attorney G. Bryan Ulmer says Tyson executives and supervisors committed fraud and gross negligence after they lied to employees and told workers with COVID symptoms to keep coming to work. “Despite an ever increasing number of sick workers, Tyson denied that there was COVID 19 at the plant. It told workers that it had been cleared of COVID 19 by county health officials. It prohibited interpreters from communicating with non English speaking employees about COVID 19,” he says.

He says at the same time the supervisors were placing bets on how many positive COVID-19 cases would result from the outbreak. The end result was the largest workplace outbreak of COVID-19 in the entire country. He says that leads to this question. “Is whether or not the Workers Compensation Act, legislation, which was originally intended to protect workers, now protects employers and coworkers from intentionally tortious conduct,” Ulmer says. Attorney David Yoshimura represented some of the Waterloo plant supervisors who were sued and says these claims that belong in the workers comp system, not in the courts.

Attorneys in the Tyson Worker Covid deaths prepare to present their oral arguments to the Iowa Supreme Court on Nov. 14, 2024

“The legislature has made the judgment that the courts are divested of jurisdiction over these claims, which is why the district court dismissed them,” he says. “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.” “What the district court found was that assuming all of these well pleaded facts are true, there is no possibility for the court to maintain jurisdiction over these claims,” Yoshimura .

The Iowa Supreme Court will issue a ruling at a later date on whether the cases can move forward in district court, or if they have to be handled as worker compensation claims.