‘THEY’RE NOT JUST STATISTICS’
Cargill worker’s family devastated
Every night when Benito Quesada walked through the front door of his family home, everyone — including his youngest daughter, five-year-old Arexia — knew not to run into his arms.
The 51-year-old longtime Cargill meat plant worker, would take off his boots, go straight upstairs, shower, put on fresh clothes and only then was he touchable — but not kissable. Not anymore.
It was one of the many precautions the shop steward with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 401, took to protect his family from getting COVID-19. It worked. Not one of his five family members ever caught the virus that killed him.
Too bad his workplace wasn’t similarly careful.
On May 7, after a three-week fight for his life at Foothills Hospital, Quesada died with his wife Mary, 48, and eldest child, 16-year-old daughter Ariana, by his side.
“He had so many tubes coming out of him, I couldn’t even count,” sobbed Ariana during an interview, arranged at an outdoor location — a picnic table at a High River park
“He had lost a lot of weight,” she said. “His fingers were very stiff. It was horrible. He was usually very pale, much paler than the rest of us, but then he was quite dark; he had a reddish-orange tinge to his skin,” she wept.
On Thursday, April 9, after a hard day of work, Quesada wasn’t feeling well. By Monday, April 13, he was admitted to hospital with trouble breathing.
The family was able to Facetime him while he was in hospital, and he put on a brave and cheerful smile for all of them, but he never improved.
“My dad told us that there was no distancing between any of the workers,” said Ariana. “He was disappointed because everywhere else around the world, they were going to extremes to prevent their workers from getting sick, but not at Cargill.”
As of Sunday evening, there were five active COVID-19 cases in Cargill staff, 943 recovered cases and two deaths, including Quesada and 67-year-old Hiep Bui. Exactly 950 staff out of
2,000 employees — almost half of all workers at the High River facility — caught COVID-19 from their workplace. Another 668 people in the community were infected — making it the largest single-site infection in all of North America — a dubious and shameful record. One other man, Armando Sallegue — the 71-yearold father of a worker at the plant, who was visiting from the Philippines — also died.
Benito’s wife Mary, a family physician in Mexico, has not worked since moving to Alberta in October 2012 — five years after her husband first moved to High River to work at Cargill to send money home to Mexico City and to build a better life for the family. She worries about how the family will make ends meet, now that their only provider has passed away. She has set up a Gofundme page to help.
Ariana says comments online have been especially hurtful.
“I’ve been seeing online, many people have been saying, ‘If you compare three deaths to 2,000 workers, that’s not bad,’” said the articulate teen, who plays the clarinet and is a very good student.
“If you’re looking at it from numbers, three deaths isn’t so much, but it’s three lives,” she said. “It’s my dad. The dad of my two brothers and sister,” she said referring to Adriel, 12, Aldrin, 10, and Arexia.
“These people who passed away are real people who loved their families and their families loved them,” she said. “They’re not just statistics. They are not just numbers. They were loved people,” she says, choking up.
On April 20 — the day after Bui passed away — the Cargill plant that processes 4,500 head of cattle a day, was closed down for two weeks.
By May 4 — the day the plant reopened with much improved safety measures inside, including Plexiglas barriers between stations — Bui’s husband, Nga Nguyen, had not received any condolences from the multinational company which includes several billionaires on its family-based board of directors. She had worked at Cargill for 27 years.
That doesn’t surprise the Quesadas because they have not received any expressions of condolence from Cargill, either — no flowers, no fruit basket, no card. Not even an email. Quesada worked at the company for 13 years.
“We’ve been in contact with someone in human resources from Cargill to get all of his payment sorted out because when he was in the hospital, he was fighting for his life. His pay wasn’t consistent at all, but at the time it didn’t matter to us because at the time the only thing that mattered to us was getting him back,” said Ariana.
“But since that didn’t happen, now we’re fighting to get everything that he risked his life for, because everyday he went to work it was to provide for our family.”
In reply to a media request,
Cargill responded with a written statement that extended its condolences to the Quesada family and said, in part: “The company can confirm that a health services manager was in contact with the family during Benito’s hospitalization and that support was offered at that time. The company can further confirm that multiple efforts by senior members of the High River facility’s staff made immediate and multiple efforts to contact the family as soon as the staff were made aware of Benito’s passing.
... A moment of silence was held on the plant floor and the flag was flown at half-mast to honour Benito’s memory.”
Ariana and Mary deny the veracity of the company’s statement. “No phone calls, no emails, no condolences at all. Nothing,” said Ariana.
Benito’s death from COVID-19 wasn’t his first problematic medical situation with Cargill.
On April 1, 2016, he was hit in the leg by a machine at Cargill. A vein had ruptured. He almost died. He eventually required an operation to fix the problem. Benito was off work for seven months.
The company forced him to file for short-term disability when he should have filed a workers’ compensation board claim, said Ariana.
“When my dad was in the ICU, I was speaking with someone from Cargill and they told me they were going to file a shortterm disability for him. And I asked them, ‘What about a WCB claim?’ and the person told me, ‘We can’t do a WCB claim because there’s no evidence that he got infected at Cargill,’ ” said Ariana.
Just when you think a company can’t stoop any lower, it proves you wrong.