Mosaic implements COVID-19 plan
March 26, 2020, 5:20 am
Rob Paul Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Canada, Mosaic has implemented plans to allow its miners to continue operating while also keeping their employees safe.
“We have a variety of business continuity plans in place,” said Mosaic’s VP, Public Affairs and Government Relations Sarah Fedorchuk.
“At our sites all non-essential work has been postponed. We’re saying no visitors, no external meetings, any employee who can work from home we’re asking them to work from home and for teams to have rotating schedules so different teams are only in the office on certain days.”
Mosaic has also increased their cleaning services and sanitization process for equipment as well as informing employees on the importance of staying hygienic.
“We have established extra cleaning by our janitorial staff and implemented hand sanitizers in many locations and an extra sanitization program for equipment,” said Fedorchuk.
For the last few days Mosaic had been preparing a plan and decision surrounding the COVID-19 situation.
“We’ve been talking about a response for about the past week and Friday morning (March 13) we decided a course of action and announced it Saturday morning to our employees,” said Fedorchuk
Mosaic believes the plan is working so far and they’ll continue to be thorough on making adjustments as needed with such a rapidly changing situation.
“The short answer for right now is it’s definitely working, but we’re continually working on our plan and revising based on things happening with different government protocols and recommendations and our different areas we operate because we operate globally,” said Fedorchuk.
If a Mosaic employee shows symptoms of COVID-19, Fedorchuk says Mosaic has a contingency plan on how to keep every employee safe and have taken precautions with employees who have left the country.
“They’d be self-isolating and getting medical treatment if needed and we’d map out who they’d come in contact with the last few weeks and notify those employees and if it was direct contact they’d self-isolate as well,” said Fedorchuk.
“We’ve asked all employees who have travelled outside of Canada to self-isolate for two weeks.”
Mosaic is making it a priority to keep all their employees in the loop with their current plans surrounding COVID-19.
“We’ve had multiple communications, obviously when you have an underground hourly workforce that doesn’t have access to emails or digital communication it makes it trickier,” said Fedorchuk.
“We’ve been really diligent about trying to get supervisors informed for those employees as much as possible and also limit the size of those groups for communication purposes so that we’re not increasing peoples risk.”
With the importance of education on COVID-19, Mosaic is working to make sure their employees are informed about the virus and how to stay safe.
“For the last two weeks we’ve had lots of communication on COVID-19 about prevention, techniques, things that they can do to protect themselves so this has been an ongoing discussion with our work force and community partners,” said Fedorchuk.
Mosaic doesn’t believe in their current situation that COVID-19 will have a major impact on their operations.
“Right now people are working from home and on-site because we’re doing rotated shifts, it’s not how we would normally run for maximum efficiency, but we don’t’ anticipate production impacts right now,” said Fedorchuk.
“It’s not ideal, but we are still running and just hoping to defer non-essential work so we can both protect our employees, but still ensure we’re making our targets.”
