How SPC went from weathering 20,000 abusive messages in under a week to making its vaccine policy public for all

On August 5, 2021, food processing business SPC put in place the first vaccine mandate across the nation not enforced by government health orders.

It gave employees at its Shepperton factory six weeks to get vaccinated, along with a day of leave to get the shot, and two days of sick leave if they experienced any complications.

For SPC, it was a position taken after listening to medical advice, motivated by wanting to keep employees safe while they undertook essential work in an indoor environment.

Shortly after its stance was publicised through the national media, SPC became the light attracting every single moth in the growing anti-vaccination movement.

Within a few days the company faced some 20,000 messages from the public, with the bulk coming through to its customer service lines, SPC chair Hussein Rifai, and CEO Robert Giles.

As Rifai tells SmartCompany Plus, “We expected a bit of pushback, but not the quantum and level of abuse that we copped.

“[But] we also received a lot of support from people for sticking our neck out, and asking us for help with setting up their programs.”

Here’s how SPC organised and triaged the abuse as it came in, prioritising worker safety and psychological health.

Vaccine policy

1. SPC has since shared its approach publicly for other employers that want help setting up the legal and practical elements of a vaccine mandate.

Sorting the crazy from the crazier

Rifai identified a mix of people. Some would send one message, but the ‘keyboard warriors’ at the fringes of society were the hardest to deal with. If they were blocked on one form of social media after being abusive, they would jump to another.

SPC’s first response would be, “We’re sorry to hear that you feel that way. We appreciate that you’re one of our customers, however we’re doing what we believe is best for our staff”. 

If customers would get threatening or rude, it would be escalated to the next level. This involved reporting them on the platform they were coming from.

The most concerning were the people who found his family members’ social media accounts, and the ones that threatened putting needles in the company’s products.

Industrial sabotage threats were reported to the police immediately.

SPC’s three step triage strategy

1. Block and report the people being rude.

2. Fairly respond to the people sharing a view: “We sorry to hear that you feel that way. We appreciate that you’re one of our customers, however we’re doing what we believe is best for our staff”.

3. Decent people showing concern were passed on to the customer service team.

Rifai is in surprisingly good spirits, attributing his thick skin to being able to weather abuse, which at times was also explicitly racist.

Speaking to him, I think it’s his sense of humour. It’s hard not to laugh when he’s talking about a real estate agent from the Gold Coast offering medical advice.

“I also had a ‘legal professor’ that was a tradie in Cairns working as a farmer’s helper lecturing me about the Nuremberg Trials and the Geneva Convention,” Rifai says.

He ignored those emails, because what else can you do with them. Many of the people would send follow up emails.

“One just started off with ‘Dickhead’. Okay, my kids call me that,” Rifai tells me with a chuckle.

There were also clear themes that came across. The ranged from ‘the vaccine is poison’ to the implication that Rifai had billions invested in pharmaceutical companies (he tells me he wishes he did), or that he’s a puppet of the Illuminati implanting 5G chips in them.

SPC also found a clear structure in how the people operated. For example, the real estate agent from the Gold Coast had a following of “maybe 100 people” around him, says Rifai, who soaked up what he was saying and would in organised cells bombard them with similar messages.

“As soon as one of them has a problem, they prompt the others to go and start attacking you,” says Rifai.

Considering many people sent multiple messages, Rifai believes that from the 20,000 abusive comments they received, they were likely five to seven thousand individual people sending them.

Staff support, and family support

The vaccine mandate was put in place to protect staff, and in a small community like Shepparton it was particularly important. SPC has 500 employees in the area, from a population of roughly 60,000. They each have families and kids, each with ties to different households.

The company made a conscious decision to inform the public and staff at the same time, to avoid the rumour mill kicking in and SPC losing the ability to define the message.

Within 10 minutes, it called the unions, and sent out a detailed message to staff — the bulk of which aren’t unionised.

Its first priority was to alleviate staff concerns, and offer a clear line of communication for any people that had questions or wanted to discuss hesitancy through a staff hotline.

The hotline was headed up by its HR team, and the company’s head of quality and process improvement.

“It’s something the whole staff was involved with. There were a lot of people to talk to and a lot of fires to put out,” says Rifai.

“But we’re not doctors. We don’t give medical advice. But there was fear mongering coming from outside being put in our employees’ heads, thinking we’d be lining them up and putting jabs in their arms.

“All we asked was please, please go and speak to your doctor and make an appointment with them,” says Rifai.

Rifai says he’s very glad that most of the staff didn’t receive the abuse that he and his family received.

His wife and son at home helped to sort out all the abuse that was coming through to their social media channels and email accounts, while his other three children were helping out from their own homes, up til 2:00-3:00am in the morning reading through messages and triaging them.

“I had five kids in their 20s all supporting me, and my wife Amanda as the conductor of the orchestra telling them what to do and how to respond.

“I am an extremely lucky person. My family wrapped around me so quickly, and we were running our own little emergency show.

“Not everybody is lucky enough to be in that position. Some good, successful people don’t have family or people around them to protect them, and they can’t cope with a level of abuse when people are constantly asking ‘Is your first name Sadam?’ Or go back to the tyrant country you came from,” says Rifai.

While the abuse reached its peak levels in the five days following, it spiked again whenever SPC was reported on. It also didn’t truly end, as a constant trickle of messages from August through to September, when we spoke.

His biggest takeaway from living through the experience is that the current social media laws around misinformation and freedom of speech aren’t fit-for-purpose anymore.

As Rifai puts it, “I don’t have the freedom to walk into a restaurant nude and sit down to eat. Why do you have the freedom of speech to hurt people, or cause damage to those who are vulnerable?”