New law may block suits on COVID safety in Texas workplaces
Sybil Elijah believes she contracted the coronavirus while working at a Texas chicken production plant and passed the virus to her husband, who later died.
Elnora Brown also worked at the plant, and she died nearly a month later at age 60. Her husband is convinced she got COVID-19 on the job.
Those are among the allegations in a lawsuit filed against Pilgrim’s Pride, a multinational food corporation with operations in several states, alleging the company wantonly disregarded worker safety and was grossly negligent.
But the meatpacker is utilizing a new Texas law to argue the lawsuit should be thrown out. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a bill last month raising the bar for what employees will have to prove to sue employers for being exposed to the coronavirus at work. Consumer advocates and labor rights groups say the law effec
tively makes it nearly impossible for workers to win in court.
“You cannot prevail,” said Remington Gregg, an attorney with the nonprofit group Public Citizen. “A worker cannot prevail under Texas law.”
Though the lawsuit was filed in April, the new statute can be retroactively applied to cases s back to March 2020.
As the pandemic worsened, federal and state lawmakers pushed to pass legislation to protect businesses from coronavirus-related liability.
But COVID-19 business liability language did not make it into the federal coronavirus relief bill, leaving states to the task. Some, such as Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama, have put in place new regulations in states where advocates say there were already restrictive worker protections.
The Texas law protects health-care providers, businesses, nonprofit organizations, religious institutions and some schools.
Under the new law, workers making a claims would have to prove their employers knew of and did not warn them about a condition that would likely expose them to COVID-19. Then they would need to show that the business knowingly disregarded government safety standards. A plaintiff would then be required to provide “reliable scientific evidence” to show the employer’s actions led to them contracting the virus.
The Texas Civil Justice League, a legal reform organization focused on protecting businesses, was the primary group supporting the bill.. George Christian, senior counsel for the group, said the bill was meant to get ahead of civil suits that businesses and others anticipated would arise from the pandemic.
He said the bill isn’t blanket immunity and doesn’t protect bad actors, but acknowledged it would be difficult for most cases to make it through the law’s stringent stipulations.
Elijah, a custodian at the Pilgrim’s Pride facility in Mt. Pleasant, and the husband of worker Elnora Brown, Rayford Brown, alleged in their lawsuit that for the first few months of the pandemic, the meatpacking plant did not take steps to protect its workers.
The suit alleges the company “placed profits over safety,” keeping the plant open for all of 2020 as more than 400 workers got sick and several died.
Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation’s motion to dismiss said the lawsuit did not meet the new law’s “heavy burdens” and rejected the suit on several other grounds. Lawyers for Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. did not respond to a request for comment on the case.