“We have to do something…”
Reflecting on the pandemic five years later…
A message from President Thomas Hesse and Secretary Treasurer Richelle Stewart
“This thing is going to spread through our members’ workplaces like wildfire. We have to do something…”
Those were the thoughts running through UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse’s mind during the 2020 Easter long weekend. Hesse had just gotten off the phone with union staff giving him updates about cases of the then largely unknown COVID-19 virus in a variety of workplaces across the province.
Hours later, Hesse penned what have become known as the Easter Long Weekend Letters – letters to the operators of the Cargill food processing plant in High River, the JBS food processing plant in Brooks, and the Olymel food processing plant in Red Deer.
In those letters, Hesse wrote, “There are now reports of thirty North American UFCW member deaths. Employees are scared. Your employees are scared. It is time to act. It is time to protect life.”
The letters went on to call for an immediate two-week closure of the plants to ensure worker safety with a guarantee of worker compensation during that time and a meeting with various officials to discuss long-term plans to keep workers safe.
Local 401 quickly extended its communication to food retailers like Sobeys, Loblaws, Save-On-Foods, and Co-op and started pushing for new safety protocols in all UFCW-represented workplaces. Letters to every employer with whom Local 401 has interactions followed the next day.
Had employers listened and acted, the next few weeks and months may have played out very differently.
A cartoonist’s depiction of Cargill during the 2020 outbreak in the Calgary Sun.
A crisis at Cargill
In spite of overwhelming union efforts to protect workers’ safety, including rallies outside Cargill’s High River Plant that drew support from across Alberta’s labour movement, Hesse’s worst fears were realized with alarming speed.
Cases of COVID-19 at Cargill evolved into the largest single-site workplace outbreak in North America.
Local 401’s media campaign and advice to workers about their right to refuse unsafe work were successful despite Company resistance, with many workers staying home because of plant conditions and concerns about safety.
Fallen Cargill member and Shop Steward, Benito Quesada.
Ultimately, under persistent union pressure, Cargill announced the temporary closure of its High River Plant. But not before the event that brought the seriousness of the situation into stark focus came to pass: the loss of worker life.
“It is important to recognize that behind the statistics are hardworking people who have sought to make a living and support their families in Alberta’s meatpacking industry,” President Hesse lamented in a press release, grieving the passing of Local 401 shop steward Benito Quesada.
Much-loved and mourned Cargill member Hiep Bui.
The tragic loss of Quesada was preceded by the death of Cargill co-worker Hiep Bui, whose memorial service Hesse recalls attending with staff from the local union. The deaths underscored points Local 401 made to then Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in an April 23 letter calling for new government regulations.
“We’ve sought to work with employers through good faith discussions for weeks. Some have written good policies on social distancing and issued personal protective equipment (PPE) to employees. Others have been slow to act or resistant. But even with the best employers, there are gaps between head office policy and practices at the worksite, which are now a matter of life and death.”
At JBS in Brooks, union advocacy yielded a more rapid outcome than it did at Cargill. Gratefully, the Company seemed more responsive to union demands for things like shift staggering, social distancing, and the introduction of PPE, which ultimately saved lives at the Plant.
However, the Company did not act on its own initiative. It was only as a result of Local 401 shouting from the rooftops about the need to prioritize workers’ safety that such measures quickly came into effect.
Safeway member Sheena Thomson pictured for an article about the pandemic’s strain on grocery workers’ mental health. Soon thereafter, Local 401’s push for mandatory masking, limitations on customer numbers, social distancing rules, and pandemic pay were realized.
Grocery stores become public squares
While Cargill became the public face for COVID incompetence in the media, the local union’s letter to Kenney sought to draw attention to the broader risks associated with the virus in the province’s grocery stores.
During that chaotic time, President Hesse became a regular figure on the national news, appearing on local, provincial, and national news outlets and television programs like Power and Politics to advocate for worker safety.
“Grocery stores are some of the last public spaces where people can gather in large numbers that are prohibited anywhere else. Unfortunately, not everyone respects the risks taken by our frontline food workers,” noted Hesse.
While efforts were underway to make meatpacking plants safe, Local 401 was simultaneously pushing for protections in Alberta’s grocery stores.
Limits on the number of customers that could be in a store, enforcement of social distancing with directional arrows on the floors of aisles, enforced masking, and plexiglass barriers that, until recently, created space for cashiers and customers – all have their origins in President Hesse’s communications to Premier Kenney.
President Hesse with union activists outside a grocery store talking to customers about worker concerns.
The other initiative that is rooted in Local 401’s fight for fairness in grocery stores was so-called “hero pay”.
From the start of the pandemic, your union insisted that workers not bear the economic brunt of measures designed to keep Albertans safe. Whether it was plant closures or store slowdowns, Local 401 demanded that workers be kept whole with pay and compensation reflecting the hazards they uniquely faced during this health crisis.
In March of 2020, major Canadian grocers complied with those calls, issuing $2 per hour pay premiums tied to the risks associated with COVID-19. Similar premiums were also introduced at meatpacking plants and other workplaces.
While your union commended this move, the removal of that pay just four months later revealed the degree to which employer efforts were often all too short-lived.
President Hesse and Secretary Treasurer Stewart with union staff blockading Olymel’s Red Deer Plant in 2021.
Olymel outbreak repeats history
By 2021, the pandemic was far from over. But it was starting to feel like we might have had a handle on containing it so long as we remained vigilant.
Initially a proactive employer implementing and endorsing safety measures that kept their employees relatively safe, Olymel let its guard slip almost a year later. Early in 2021, your union began hearing troubling reports of production increases that boosted the number of workers in its Red Deer Plant and were not paired with a similar ramping up of safety protocols.
All too familiar with how easily an outbreak can occur, your union sprang back into action, staging massive protests outside of the Plant to draw attention to worker safety.
Secretary Treasurer Richelle Stewart recalls the intensity of the situation. “President Hesse and I decided that, once again, an unsafe workplace could not be allowed to operate. Through media pressure and protest, our singular goal was to pause production so that safety could move to the forefront of everyone’s mind.”
“COVID-19 was a highly contagious disease with the potential to kill. Our approach was black and white: lives needed to be saved,” concluded Stewart.
In a letter to then Plant Manager Rob Ackeblade, President Hesse wrote, “I do not know you well, but it has been my sense that you share at least some of my concern for the well-being of the employees. You are in a difficult spot right now, undoubtedly conflicted by the choices you must make. Yet, in my respectful view, there are circumstances when leaders are left with no choice. And you are in the eyes of the employees and through a legal and ethical lens, the leader of the Olymel plant.”
After unrelenting union pressure and investigative reporting that the local union worked on with the CBC, Olymel did temporarily close its Red Deer Plant to stop the outbreak. But, again, not before workers’ lives were needlessly lost.
The unnecessary loss of Olymel member Henry de Leon was devastating for Olymel workers and the local union alike.
Mourning the loss of union member Henry de Leon, Secretary Treasurer Richelle Stewart said, “Our union has lived through this horror before. We know the early warning signs. We tried to get anyone we could to listen. But here we are again, and I’m left wondering: when will big corporations and the Government of Alberta learn?”
The reality is that Local 401 was the only real voice for workers during this time.
One of the unforgiving lessons the pandemic taught us was that when it comes to the well-being of working Albertans, only their union will truly be there for them when the chips are down and lives are on the line.
Other stories arising from that period of time when the course and cadence of our world was so fundamentally changed are too numerous to recount in full. But we remember. You remember what you went through, and your union remembers what we all went through.
Secretary Treasurer Stewart and President Hesse with Dr. Annalee Coakley during one of many telephone town halls your union organized with doctors to give members expert advice on COVID-19 and the pandemic.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to be taking time and finding moments with our members to reflect on those events.
Five years have passed, and as we now confront an affordability crisis and the need to amplify our voices again, we can take some comfort in the fact that when we embrace our strength, being part of a union makes a real difference. It made a difference then, and it will make a difference now.
It is again time to stand up and be heard. It is again time to embrace our union values with a strong hug to find the unity we need.
“While we find the strength to move forward, we must never forget that while so many sat on their hands, we did something… and we always will.” – President Hesse and Treasurer Stewart.
In solidarity,
Your Union
UFCW Local 401
Posted on: March 29,2025