Employers Brace for Swine-Flu Outbreaks
By BETSY MCKAY And DANA MATTIOLI
Swine flu has made Friday afternoons a lot busier for some employees of Hormel Foods Corp. As they wind down the week, staffers in the food maker’s logistics, transportation and customer-service department take time to learn one another’s jobs.
The cross-training is meant to ensure that Hormel, based in Austin, Minn., can keep operating if many employees specializing in one task contract the flu simultaneously, says company spokeswoman Julie Craven.
Hormel’s Friday-afternoon training is an example of how corporations around the world are girding themselves for swine-flu outbreaks. The illness, also known as H1N1 flu, has infected millions of people and killed at least 5,700 world-wide.
Worried they could face throngs of ill and absent employees, companies are devising plans to keep their offices and factories running. They also hope to prevent or limit the spread of infection in the workplace by installing hand-sanitizer dispensers and thermal scanners, ordering workers to wipe down their desks and phones, and asking employees who don’t feel well to stay home.
So far, outbreaks appear to be more common in schools than workplaces. But the number of cases is rising, and deliveries of a new vaccine against the virus are slower than officials had hoped.
Eighty-one percent of attendees polled at a September conference by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota said their greatest concern about H1N1 flu was employee absenteeism.
Only a third of 1,057 businesses across the U.S. surveyed by the Harvard School of Public Health in July and August said they could avoid operational problems over a two-week period if half of their work force was out because of H1N1.
