Editor’s note: The original version of this article ran as the Editorial in the September issue of Meatingplace magazine. It has been updated for this blog to reflect events that transpired after the magazine went to press. Chiefly, President Joe Biden announced an emergency order requiring all employers with 100 or more workers to mandate that they be vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 weekly.

The number of Tyson Foods employees fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus pretty much mirrored the national trend, which was about halfway there. But the company was not half-stepping, announcing on Aug. 3 a mandate requiring all of its 120,000-strong staff be fully vaccinated by Nov. 1. There’s a long way to go to get there.

And now the White House is trying to accelerate the process far beyond Tyson. About a month after Tyson’s move, President Biden announced OSHA is developing an emergency rule requiring all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or show a negative test at least once a week.

The heated comments below our news story on Tyson’s and Biden’s efforts make clear that the challenges go well beyond the simple matter of numbers. The discourse is a microcosm of the political chasm that has formed in this country since the pandemic began to spread in the United States in March of 2020, and one enflamed by the current resurgence of the Delta variant.

Tyson, whose sweeping policy was a first in the meat industry and rivals that of tech giants like Google in scope, was drawing a line in the sand, with chief medical officer Claudia Coplein calling the COVID-19 vaccination “the single most effective” tool in protecting people from the virus. That puts the company squarely on the other side of people who don’t agree with that statement, not to mention those strongly opposed to mandates. It’s hard to say which they find more intolerable — a mandate from the government or one from a corporation, but it’s clear now that both are pushing forth.

Beyond the risk of alienating portions of the population in a divisive political climate, Tyson and other meatpackers have to negotiate a more perilous tightrope — a tight labor market. Consider that nearly half of Tyson’s workforce, for example, is not fully vaccinated. Now, that can be for a number of reasons. But for some workers, one reason is that they don’t want to be — also for several reasons, from fear of its potential side effects to a downright distrust of the U.S. government/healthcare system. Early on, we saw some Tyson workers picketing outside its plants.

The choice between employment in a processing plant and what they feel is a threat to their health, or even just their personal liberties, is surely going to send some packing and looking for work elsewhere; there are plenty of openings. How staffing levels at Tyson and other meatpacking companies are affected, and how that impacts production and pricing, remains to be seen.

Either way, the industry has its work cut out for it. Among Tyson’s first tasks, for example, was addressing the concerns of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents some 24,000 of its workers. Multi-state companies also have to navigate not only the varying public health policies, but also varying labor laws. Federal anti-discrimination laws don’t prohibit employers from imposing such mandates, but the Americans with Disabilities Act and Civil Rights Act of 1964, among others, will require some careful consideration.

Tyson already has spent more than $700 million to address COVID-19 spread and infections so far this year, but it’s going to have to spend a lot more. And there will be more than monetary expenses in this effort, but we know more than ever that the company — and the White House — believes it’s all worth a shot.

Big shot

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