A conservative investment fund group is pulling its holdings of Tyson Foods over the meat and poultry giant’s hiring of migrant and refugee staff — claiming the employment practice will repel customers.
The American Conservative Values ETF, an exchange-traded fund managed by Ridgeline Research LLC, divested from the corporate and slapped a “refuse to buy” rating on its stocks for its clientele.
“We consider Tyson’s management has blundered right into a political minefield (and will have known higher),” Ridgeline founder and CEO Bill Flaig told Fox Business on Monday.
Many Americans are outraged by the continued migrant crisis on the southern border and learning Tyson is giving jobs to asylum-seekers could possibly be enough for them to stop buying the corporate’s products, according to the CEO.
“The danger of alienating a major percentage of their customers outweighs any potential economic profit,” Flaig said. “In a recent Pew Research poll, 80% of U.S. adults say the U.S. government is doing a foul job of handling the migrant influx.”
He claimed Tyson could turn out to be the following victim of offended Americans voting with their wallets.
“We have seen the negative impact of alienating customers recently with Bud Light and Goal and by divesting we’re protecting our shareholders,” he said.
But Tyson is defending its hiring practices, noting that it only employs people legally authorized to work within the US because it tries to dispel growing misinformation online about its workforce.
“In recent days, there was rather a lot of misinformation within the media about our company, and we feel compelled to set the record straight. Any insinuation that we’d cut American jobs to hire immigrant staff is totally false,” the food giant said in a press release.
“Tyson Foods is strongly opposed to illegal immigration, and we led the best way in participating within the two major government programs to help employers combat illegal employment, E-Confirm and the Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers (IMAGE) program,” the statement continued.
The alleged falsehoods concerning the company spread after Bloomberg News reported last week that “Tyson is hiring Latest York immigrants for jobs nobody else wants.”
The article notes a partnership between Tyson Foods and Tent Partnership for Refugees, a nonprofit began by Chobani yogurt founder and CEO to connect refugees in need of work with private corporations in need of staff.
Tyson joined the nonprofit’s mission in 2022 and committed to hiring 2,500 refugees within the US over the course of three years, according to Fox Business.
Between February and March, the meat maker hired nearly 90 asylum seekers to work at its Tennessee-based plant, Bloomberg reported.
A Tyson human resources rep was quoted within the article, praising the corporate’s refugee and migrant employees as “very, very loyal.”
“They’ve been uprooted and what they need is stability — what they need is a way of belonging,” HR official Garrett Dolan said.
Tyson Foods currently employs about 42,000 migrants, who have legal work authorization, as part of its 120,000-strong workforce.
“We would really like to employ one other 42,000 if we could find them,” Dolan told Bloomberg.
Employee turnover within the food manufacturing industry is high at 40% a yr. Dolan said Tyson is continually searching for latest employees to fill the vacancies and doesn’t favor one group over one other.