Chad Longpre Shepersky repeatedly took COVID-19 tests—and waited on pins and needles for results each time—during a coronavirus outbreak at Guardian Angels Health and Rehabilitation Center in Hibbing, Minnesota.
Longpre Shepersky, a certified nursing assistant (CNA), never contracted the virus. But he watched in agony as dozens of his patients and coworkers fell ill and fought for their lives.
As a weary nation enters the holiday season, Americans have an opportunity to help health care workers like Longpre Shepersky and start bringing the raging pandemic under control.
Consistently wearing face masks, practicing social distancing and taking other safety precautions will slow COVID-19’s spread and provide much-needed relief to the frontline workers battling burnout as well as the virus.
“Everyone should do their part,” insisted Longpre Shepersky, financial secretary and steward for United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9349, which represents workers at Guardian Angels. “Just the other day, I witnessed people in Walmart not wearing masks or following 6-foot distancing. Too many people aren’t doing what they can to fight the virus.”
So many residents and workers at Guardian Angels contracted the virus that the Minnesota National Guard sent a five-person medical team in October to help keep the 90-bed facility operating. Even then, as he worried about his own safety and mourned the deaths of several patients, Longpre Shepersky logged grueling amounts of overtime to fill in for ill colleagues.
“It got to the point where you dreaded going to work because you didn’t know what the day was going to bring,” recalled Longpre Shepersky, a CNA for 21 years who considers his coworkers and patients a second family. “But there was no one else there to do it. I just pulled up my big boy pants and went in to work and got through the day.”
Many nursing home workers endured staffing shortages at their facilities long before the pandemic. Because of low Medicaid payments for patient care, among other reasons, facilities paid low wages, skimped on staff or battled chronic turnover.
Now, nursing home workers struggle to stay physically and psychologically healthy while putting in extra shifts to ensure residents receive the highest quality care around-the-clock. Besides longer hours, many also took on additional responsibilities, such as serving as surrogate family members to residents cut off from visitors during facility lockdowns.
These everyday heroes feel stretched to the breaking point. Many nursing home workers and other health care professionals report unprecedented levels of burnout and other mental health concerns as they worry not only about their own safety but the fate of their patients and the possibility of bringing the virus home to their own family members.
“I try to go in with a positive mindset,” explained Shirley Richardson, unit president for USW Local 7898, which represents workers at the 220-bed Veterans’ Victory House in Walterboro, South Carolina. “The main object is being safe. I try to stay focused. I don’t let little things get to me.”
“It’s going to get better,” she reminds coworkers who’ve endured about two dozen cases of COVID-19, including the deaths of several patients and a nurse, at their facility. “This can’t go on forever. We just have to work through it.”
The pandemic highlighted the essential work that nursing home staff members perform—and the necessity of treating them as essential workers from now on.
That will require fixing the nation’s health care system—even if that means allocating additional tax dollars—so that nursing homes receive adequate payment for their services. Then the facilities can hire and retain adequate numbers of workers—and provide hazard pay and paid sick leave to ensure staffing remains at high levels during emergencies.
“It’s just the staffing that’s been the worst part of this year,” explained Chris Sova, unit president for USW Local 15301-1, which represents nurses at Bay County Medical Care Facility in Essexville, Michigan.
“I feel like a zombie, almost. I honestly don’t know how we do it anymore,” marveled Sova, a third-generation nursing home worker, who described his routine some weeks as, “Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Wake up. Go to work.”
It infuriates Sova to know that while he and his coworkers put their lives on the line every day, some Americans refuse to take simple steps to slow the virus’ spread.
Across the country, some people fail to wear masks even as infection rates in their own communities skyrocket and strain the capacity of local hospitals.
“People wear seatbelts, but they have a big thing about face masks?” Sova fumed.
Longpre Shepersky faces the upcoming holidays with trepidation, realizing that the family gatherings and parties Americans long for so earnestly this year also present additional opportunities for spreading the virus.
The residents at Guardian Angels wear masks whenever they leave their rooms, and because of the risk of another outbreak, they also could face limits on visitors this holiday season.
If they can make sacrifices to help contain the virus, other Americans can as well.
“Everyone definitely has to take this seriously,” Longpre Shepersky said.
How much rage have you got left after four years of Donald Trump and nine months of coronavirus pandemic? Please set aside some to direct at the United States’ largest retail companies for their treatment of their workers.
A Brookings Institution report shows how 13 of the nation’s 20 largest retail chains, with a combined six million employees, have stiffed their workers through the pandemic. Well, 10 of the 13 did. Three—Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy—were comparatively generous, with bigger pay increases to workers than other companies and relative to their own profit increases in the time of COVID-19. But 10 companies in the analysis—Walmart, Amazon*, Kroger, Costco*, Walgreens, CVS, Lowe’s, Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize (the Dutch-Belgian grocery company that owns Giant), and Dollar General—have not boosted worker pay as much as their profits have risen.
The extra amount the average worker at these companies has been paid through the pandemic ranges from $4,414 at Best Buy, a 28% increase, down to just $300, or just 2%, at Walgreens and CVS. For many of the companies, hazard pay of $2 an hour early on has been yanked from workers, in some cases replaced by sporadic bonuses—because bonuses feel like a gift, whereas hourly pay becomes harder to take away after a while.
“The end of hazard pay also undermined racial, ethnic, and gender equity,” the Brookings report, authored by Molly Kinder, Laura Stateler, and Julia Du, notes. “Women and workers of color are overrepresented among the retail frontline workforce. Women make up a significantly larger share of the frontline workforce in general retail stores and at companies such as Target and Walmart than they do in the workforce overall. Amazon and Walmart employ well above-average shares of Black workers (27% and 21%, respectively) compared to the national figure of 12%.”
Meanwhile, of these companies, only Walgreens became less profitable. Others saw profits soar—Amazon’s by 53%, Walmart’s by 45%, Kroger by 90%, Dollar General by 77%. They just didn’t pass that along to the workers who made it possible. Instead, five of them—Walmart, Ahold Delhaize, Kroger, Lowe’s, and Dollar General—poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stock buybacks.
”All of a sudden, we went from being essential to being sacrificial, all for the sake of the bottom line. Now you’re telling us that this thing is still out here, people are still dying, and you want to do away with hazard pay and give a one-time bonus? It’s a bunch of B.S., to be honest. It is still a pandemic, the last time I checked. There is a still a hazard out there,” Giant Food worker Jeffrey Reid told Brookings.
Just as workers went uncompensated for the risks they took, in many cases they were actively put at risk in ways higher-paid workers in the same companies were not. Amazon brags about its on-site testing and other safety measures, but workers aren’t so sure.
“The fact that [Amazon executives] decided to close the Seattle building [and allow headquarters staff to work remotely] until next year while keeping thousands of us jam-packed in a small warehouse is more than a little upsetting,” Amazon Fresh warehouse worker Courtenay Brown told reporters on a call.
The bottom line is this, according to the report: “Amazon and Walmart could have quadrupled the hazard pay they gave their frontline workers and still earned more profit than the previous year.” They didn’t.
* Costco and Amazon did have $15 per hour minimum pay prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
This blog was originally published at DailyKos on November 25, 2020 Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.
The U.S. workplace will look much different with Joe Biden in the Oval Office — with some significant changes possible even if Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate.
“Biden, who won the endorsement of almost every major union in the country, has made labor reform a fundamental part of his program and is widely expected to name at least one union leader to his Cabinet,” your host reports. And “as the coronavirus pandemic continues to stoke permanent job losses and compromise worker safety, the case for structural change may be stronger than ever.”
What Biden can do will to some extent depend on which party controls the Senate, which won’t be determined until a pair of key Georgia runoffs in early January. “Still, the transition will be a sharp turn from the Trump White House, under which union membership has dropped, pay inequity has widened and enforcement has dwindled.”
Here’s some of what you can expect:
— Heightened worker safety enforcement: One of the first things a Biden administration will likely do is instruct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to step up worker safety enforcement by enacting an emergency temporary standard, or a set of guidelines governing how employers must protect their employees from Covid-19. He’s also likely to ramp up penalties for violators.
— A more labor-friendly NLRB: The former vice president is widely expected to appoint more Democrats to the National Labor Relations Board, the agency responsible for settling disputes between unions and employers. Right now, it’s three Republicans, one Democrat — and an empty seat.
— Pursuit of progressive labor policy: Biden campaigned heavily on enacting Democratic labor legislation similar to that passed out of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2020 and 2019, including a measure to hike the federal minimum wage to $15 and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, which would strengthen workers’ ability to unionize. This, of course, will hinge on the balance of power in the upper chamber, as many of the provisions are opposed by Republicans.
Union leaders rejoice: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ victory in this free and fair election is a win for America’s labor movement,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. Said AFSCME President Lee Saunders: “[C]ome January 20, we will have a White House that honors our work, respects our sacrifice and fights for the aid to states, cities and towns that we need.”
WHO WILL BE BIDEN’S LABOR SECRETARY? There are already several names in rotation as Biden’s transition team gets to work, our Megan Cassella reports.
“Biden is widely expected to choose a more progressive candidate to lead the Labor Department, one that would help balance out more moderate nominees he’s expected to place at other agencies,” she writes.
“Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), a former union organizer who also has Labor Department experience, is high on the list of potential nominees, as is California Labor Secretary Julie Su. Levin comes from a potentially vulnerable district, however, and Democrats may be wary of a special election there, given their unexpectedly narrow control of the House.”
“Other possibilities for Biden’s Labor secretary include DNC Chairman and former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, AFL-CIO Chief Economist Bill Spriggs and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who POLITICO reported is interested in the position.”
CALIFORNIA’S PROP 22 GIVES GIG COMPANIES A NEW ROAD MAP: The success of a California ballot measure allowing Uber, Lyft and other gig companies’ drivers to be independent contractors — while still enjoying a few employee-like perks — may provide employers with a model to use across the country, Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson reports.
Proposition 22 promises drivers “a guaranteed minimum pay rate while they’re assigned a task; a review process for terminations; and health stipends if they work enough hours,” he writes. “A University of California at Berkeley analysis concluded that after accounting for full expenses and wait times, the proposition’s pay guarantee is worth less than $6 an hour. (The companies dispute this.)”
“The companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads … [and] it was money well spent. Uber and Lyft alone gained more than $10 billion in market value after the vote, and defanged a recent state court injunction that would have required them to reclassify their drivers as employees.”
“The companies don’t plan to stop there,” Eidelson writes. “‘You’ll see us more loudly advocate for new laws like Prop 22,’ Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said on a Nov. 5 earnings call. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said in a statement: ‘We’re looking ahead and across the country, ready to champion new benefits structures that are portable, proportional, and flexible.’”
This blog originally appeared at Politico on November 9, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Rebecca Rainey is an employment and immigration reporter with POLITICO Pro and the author of the Morning Shift newsletter.
The United States’ surging coronavirus outbreak is on pace to hit nearly 1 million new cases a week by the end of the year — a scenario that could overwhelm health systems across much of the country and further complicatePresident-elect Joe Biden’s attempts to coordinate a response.
Biden, who is naming his own coronavirus task force Monday, has pledged to confront new shortages of protective gear for health workers and oversee distribution of masks, test kits and vaccines while beefing up contact tracing and reengaging with the World Health Organization. He will also push Congress to pass a massive Covid-19 relief package and pressure the governors who’ve refused to implement mask mandates for new public health measures as cases rise.
But all of those actions — a sharp departure from the Trump administration’s patchwork response that put the burden on states— will have to wait until Biden takes office. Congress, still feeling reverberations from the election, may opt to simply run out the clock on its legislative year. Meanwhile, the virus is smashing records for new cases and hospitalizations as cold weather drives gatherings indoors and people make travel plans for the approaching holidays.
“If you want to have a better 2021, then maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down,” said Cyrus Shahpar, a former emergency response leader at the CDC who now leads the outbreak tracker Covid Exit Strategy. “Otherwise we’re looking at thousands and thousands of deaths this winter.”
The country’s health care system is already buckling under the load of the resurgent outbreak that’s approaching 10 million cases nationwide. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has spiked to 56,000, up from 33,000 one month ago. In many areas of the country, shortages of ICU beds and staff are leaving patients piled up in emergency rooms. And nearly 1,100 people died on Saturday alone, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
“That’s three jetliners full of people crashing and dying,” said David Eisenman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. “And we will do that every day and then it will get more and more.”
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts 370,000 Americans will be dead by Inauguration Day, exactly one year after the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was reported. Nearly 238,000 have already died.
The task force Biden announces Monday will be staffed with public health experts and former government officials, many of whom ran agencies duringthe Obama and Clinton administrations — including former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, New York University’s Dr. Celine Gounder, Yale’s Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, former Obama White House aide Dr. Zeke Emanuel and former Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Julie Morita, who is now an executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Shahpar said that even before Biden takes control of government in January, he and his team can make a difference by breaking with Trump’s declarations that the virus is “going away,” communicating the severity of the virus’ spread and encouraging people to take precautions as winter approaches.
“There’s been a misalignment between the reality on the ground and what our leaders are telling us,” he said. “Hopefully now those things will come closer together.”
But Shahpar and other experts warn thateven if Biden and his task force start promoting public health measures now, it will take weeks to see a reduction in hospitalizations and deaths —even if states clamp down. And there is little indication that the country will drastically change its behavior in the near term.
Some governors in the Northeast, which was hit hard early in the pandemic, are imposing new restrictions. In the last week, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island activated nightly stay-at-home orders and ordered businesses to close by 10 p.m. And Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on Thursday ordered everyone to wear a mask in public, even if they can maintain social distance.
But in the Dakotas and other states where the virus is raging, governors are resisting calls from health experts to mandate masks and restrict gatherings. On Sunday morning, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem incorrectly attributed her state’s huge surge in cases to an increase in testing and praised Trump’s approach of giving her the “flexibility to do the right thing.” The state has no mask mandate.
And unlike earlier waves in the spring and summer that were confined to a handful of states or regions, the case numbers are now surging everywhere.
In New Mexico, the number of people in the hospital has nearly doubled in just the last two weeks and state officials said Thursday that they expect to run out of general hospital beds in a matter of days.
“November is going to be really rough on all of us,” said Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham — a contender to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in Biden’s administration. “There’s nothing we can do, nothing, that will change the trajectory. … It is too late to dramatically reduce the number of deaths. November is done.”
Minnesota officials said last week that ICU beds in the Twin Cities metro area were 98 percent full, and in El Paso, Texas, the county morgue bought another refrigerated trailer to deal with the swelling body count.
“We had patients stacking up in our ER,” Jeffrey Sather, the chief of staff at Trinity Health in North Dakota said during a news conference last week. “The normal process is we call around to the larger hospitals and ask them to accept our patients. We found no other hospitals that could care for our patients.”
An “ensemble” forecast used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — based on the output of several independent models — projects that the country could see as many as 11,000 deaths and 960,000 cases per week by the end of the month. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory suggest that the U.S. will record another 6 million infections and 45,000 deaths over the next six weeks, while a team at Cal Tech predicts roughly 1,000 people will die of Covid-19 every day this month — with more than 260,000 dead by Thanksgiving. The University of Washington model forecasts 259,000 Americans dead by Thanksgiving and 313,000 dead by Christmas.
Eisenman predicted that by January, the United States could see infection rates as high as those seen during the darkest days of the pandemic in Europe — 200,000 new cases per day.
“Going into Thanksgiving people are going to start to see family and get together indoors,” he said. “Then the cases will spread from that and then five weeks later we have another set of holidays and people will gather then and by January, we will be exploding with cases.”
This blog originally appeared at Politico on November 9, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Dan Goldberg is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro covering health care politics and policy in the states. He previously covered New York State health care for POLITICO New York.
Courtenay Brown spends her day making grocery runs for others in a football-field-sized maze of narrow aisles and refrigerated enclaves. At the Amazon Fresh unit in a Newark, New Jersey fulfillment center, she works on the outbound ship dock, helping direct the loading of trucks and send them off on local delivery routes. Brown says that after nearly three years at the e-tail empire, her job has been “hell.”
“Imagine a really intense workout, like you just got off of the treadmill, no cool down, no nothing,” she describes one especially grueling day with a resigned laugh. “That’s how my legs felt.”
Amazon Fresh employees often have to comb through huge stocks of various chilled and frozen items, which means they need to wear full winter clothes to work. The stress and physical exhaustion of the job tends to wear out many new hires within their first few days. “You don’t have that many that have lasted here,” she says. “It’s so hard.”
With the pandemic keeping consumers indoors, Amazon grocery sales have roughly tripled in the second quarter over last year. The number of delivery trucks moving in and out of the Newark fulfillment center has jumped accordingly.
“Every day I come in, it’s just more and more and more and more,” Brown says. “Literally every day we break the previous day’s record for the total number of routes that went out for the entire day.”
“Once we get home [from work], the only thing we can do is shower and disinfect,” she continues. “A lot of us [are] too exhausted to eat. We pass out. Then we repeat the process the following day.” Some coworkers have ended up oversleeping, she adds, and “end up missing the whole day.”
For its part, an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email that while some jobs at Amazon Fresh are physically taxing, workers can choose less strenuous labor.
“Imagine your standard normal supermarket aisle, [then] cut that in half,” she observes. “You’re expected to go through that aisle with other people stocking the shelves, or cleaning… it’s really, really, really cramped.”
Amazon boasts making 150 operational changes during the pandemic that include distributing millions of masks at worksites, adding thousands of janitorial staff, and redeploying some personnel to help enforce social distancing rules. While it has implemented social-distancing rules, and even provides an electronic monitoring system to help keep workers several feet apart on the warehouse floor, Brown says work spaces are still too crowded: “It’s pretty much a show…Where I work on the ship dock, we’re all mashed up together.”
The tense atmosphere has “definitely changed the relationship” among workers, she contends. Her fellow employees were friendlier before, but now “a lot of people snap at each other a bit more.”
The threat of COVID-19 has only added to the psychological burden. “When the pandemic first started, I remember a lot of us were watching the news,” Brown reflects. “I was talking to managers and trying to get them [to listen]. ‘Hey, you know, this is going on and we might want to start preparing.’ And they [were] just [acting] like it [was] not that big of a deal. People are dying, and it’s not that big of a deal?”
Although Amazon eventually enacted safety measures, Brown says she and her colleagues spent “months complaining” about what they saw as substandard protections, including inadequate safety gear and social-distancing measures. An Amazon spokesperson maintains the company moved to protect its workers at the outset of the pandemic, and that masks were distributed in early April.
But Brown bristles at the company’s claims, saying the response was slow and devoid of transparency. Workers were especially upset, she recalls, when they received news of a COVID-19 infection at their site two weeks after the individual had reportedly taken ill.
Eventually, Brown connected with other Amazon organizers through an online petition circulated by the advocacy network United for Respect. Earlier this year, she began working with the Athena coalition to pressure Amazon to reinstate some worker protections that were instituted earlier on in the pandemic and then discontinued. The workers are demanding the restoration of “hazard pay” for fulfillment-center workers, as well as unlimited unpaid leave for those who opt to stay home to protect their health. (Over the objections of its workforce, Amazon ended unlimited unpaid leave and scrapped its $2 hourly “incentive” bonus in May.) The coalition is also pushing for more transparency in the reporting of new cases, so management will “actually tell us the truth about the numbers of people that are sick.”
In April, Brown participated in a media conference call with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to promote an Essential Workers Bill of Rights that would beef up health and safety protections, provide childcare support and universal paid leave policies, and protect whistleblowers. More recently, she was featured in a New York Times video about the working conditions at Amazon. She claims her public campaigning has drawn the ire of management.
“I’m harassed every day, all day,” she says. One safety supervisor in particular is “just watching” to see if she violates the company’s social-distancing rules.
Brown recalls a recent incident in which she was speaking casually with some co-workers about safety issues when the supervisor intervened, shouting at them to keep six feet apart. Although they were all maintaining their distance, she says, “he [yelled], ‘you’re in a group!’” They answered, “Yeah, but we’re all six feet apart from each other with our masks on.” But she says the manager nonetheless threatened to write them up and warned they could be terminated.
Amazon has stated that it opposes retaliation against employees who voice their concerns about working conditions. But like other Amazon organizers, Brown believes her treatment reflects a broader campaign aimed at dissuading employees from organizing.
“What they’ll do is they’ll find an individual, and they’ll kind of make an example of you. And that scares everybody else,” she says. Her observations are affirmed by a recent Open Markets Institute report that finds that Amazon has used sophisticated workplace surveillance tactics to intimidate and suppress workers who seek to unionize or challenge the company’s labor practices.
Brown, meanwhile, is dedicated to improving her workplace. This is not the first time she has faced hostile circumstances, both inside the Amazon warehouse and out. For a stretch in 2018, she had to live in a motel with her sister, who also works at Amazon, because the two could not secure a rental apartment with the wages they were earning delivering food for the corporate behemoth. “We were literally starving,” she says. “We weren’t making enough to be able to pay for the room, eat, and make it to and from work.”
Amazon has denied charges of employee surveillance, dismissing the Open Markets Institute as “a perennial critic that willfully ignores” the company’s record of creating jobs with “industry leading wages and benefits.” The company claims that it does evaluate workers’ performance “over a long period of time,” and provides under-performing workers with “dedicated coaching to help them improve.”
Given the dangers of speaking out, Brown sometimes wonders if she might end up homeless again. But she’s less fearful about losing her job than she is about the health hazards she faces every day as she fights to hold her employer accountable. “It’s really terrifying,” she says, “but if I don’t do this, then I could potentially get sick and die.”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on October 7, 2020. Reprinted with permission
About the Author: Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
About the Author: Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York, and is the author of, most recently, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham). Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animated short, A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been nominated for a 2020 Emmy for Outstanding News Analysis: Editorial and Opinion.
For Sean Carlisle (a pseudonym) a 32-year-old graduate student and native of California’s Inland Empire, the last three years at his local Amazon fulfillment center have been an education. As a student of urban planning, he studies how built environments shape a community’s behavior. As a picker, he packs items at a breakneck pace amid stacks of inventory and snaking conveyor belts while delicately practicing strategies to raise his coworkers’ political consciousness.
Amazon’s logistical infrastructure is designed to make humans perform with machine-like efficiency, but Sean is trying to make the workplace a bit more human, advocating for stronger worker protections and corporate accountability in his community.
When he first started at Amazon, Sean enjoyed what he calls a “honeymoon phase.” He liked that workers were promoted readily to managerial positions, especially people with a college education like himself. “They ha[d] all these things that help their employees advance. They have these school programs,” he says, referring to Amazon’s professional education schemes. But about eight months in, he realized “there was some stuff going on here that really could be improved. [I thought] ‘I don’t know if I like this company as much as I did before.’”
“The catalyst was seeing [so many] people get hurt,” he continues. He says workers would tell him, “ ‘I got hurt, and they gave me physical therapy, and I got even more hurt because they didn’t really assess me right and now I have this problem.’ ” It was around the holiday season during his second year “when things hit a significant decline in terms of safety, and there was more focus on productivity.” He says that sometimes workers would accidentally strike the shelves as they navigated forklifts through the center’s aisles, causing the vehicles to tip over.
“The safety problems continued to get worse, and my coworkers and I would say, ‘Hey, [the management has] got to do something about this,’” he recalls.
Sean believes the speed with which workers must process orders—sometimes hundreds of items per hour—leads them to cut corners or ignore problems with their equipment. He says that one byproduct of the relentless pressure to pack more items faster is a high turnover among those who “couldn’t keep up.” Burning through new hires creates a constant churn in the workforce, as temporary workers are cycled in and out during peak seasons.
Amazon’s official data on workplace injuries suggest that many of its fulfillment centers have rates that far exceed the average warehouse. Yet the company claims these statistics are primarily a testament to its meticulous reporting rather than a reflection of its shoddy safety standards. “We ensure we are supporting the people who work at our sites by having first aid trained and certified professionals onsite 24/7, and we provide industry leading health benefits on day one,” a spokesperson said in an email.
Amazon also claims to have spent “over $1 billion [on] new investments in operations safety measures” that include protective technology, sanitization procedures, and training and education programs for workers. The company maintains that it is “continuously learning and improving our programs to prevent future incidents. ”Sean contends that some managers have simply failed to take workplace hazards seriously. He recalled his surprise when a manager told him, “‘if people didn’t feel safe, they wouldn’t go to work.’”
“That’s not how that works, dude,” he muses. “People go to work because they need a paycheck, not because they feel safe.”
While working as a picker, Sean’s academic work led him to a campaign against the planned construction of a huge cargo facility for San Bernardino International Airport. Various community groups, including Teamsters local 1932 and environmental activists, formed the San Bernardino Airport Communities Coalition to oppose the project, which they warn will deepen the economic and environmental exploitation of the region by corporations like Amazon—the area’s largest private employer. Despite a legal challenge brought by the coalition’s leading groups earlier this year, the facility’s construction is moving forward, and Sean has now shifted his focus to helping protect his coworkers from the pandemic.
One practical benefit that Sean and the other organizers aim to secure for workers in the short term is paid leave so that those affected by the pandemic can stay home without sacrificing wages. The company initially provided unlimited unpaid leave for workers who self-isolated due to COVID-19-related health concerns but ended the policy in May. Now Sean is encouraging coworkers to seek benefits under a new state law for food-industry workers that provides up to two weeks paid leave for workers who have been advised by a medical professional to self-isolate or ordered not to work.
Amazon initially argued that it was exempt from the mandate. But as Vice reported in July, community groups and labor activists, along with the state labor commissioner’s office, pressured the company to comply on the grounds that its warehouses serve as major retail food distributors. In June, approximately two months after the order was enacted, Amazon finally agreed to follow the law.
With a poster detailing the state’s new paid-leave policy now on display in the breakroom, Sean says he is advising his coworkers to take advantage of what he calls a legal “loophole” that allows Amazon employees to take paid time off outside of the company’s more restrictive allotment. The workers who qualify have managed to use the law “just to take a break, or reevaluate their situation.”
Sean says that despite his advocacy on behalf of Amazon employees, he has avoided the kind of retaliation from management that other worker-activists have reported.
At the same time, he acknowledges, “I’m also not trying to [provoke] them directly.” When it comes to engaging with his colleagues on workplace justice issues, he says, “Usually, I’ll have a conversation where it just kind of unfolds like, ‘Man, someone in my family just recently passed, and I can’t take time off work.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, you should check out the law that was just recently passed and I think you can get time off for it.”
Sean is building a safer workplace within Amazon’s e-commerce leviathan one conversation at a time. The son of an ironworker and grandson of a teamster, his sense of mission is informed by the family stories he heard as a child about strikes and picket lines.
Amazon, which has managed to keep unions at bay for years, bears little resemblance to the union shops of past generations. But today’s Amazon warehouse workers and drivers are just as critical to California’s economy as the longshoremen, truck drivers and iron workers were a century ago. “I see Amazon as something that’s probably here to stay and likely going to shape our future and our understanding of American capitalism and consumption,” he says.
Though yesterday’s militant shop-floor struggles have long faded from California’s industrial landscape, the challenges facing the labor movement remain basically the same. When workers organize, Sean says, they can “hold the company accountable and shape it to be the company it is. Without the workers, the company would not be what it is.”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on October 7, 2020. Reprinted with permission
About the Author: Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
About the Author: Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York, and is the author of, most recently, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham). Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animated short, A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been nominated for a 2020 Emmy for Outstanding News Analysis: Editorial and Opinion.
Hibaq Mohamed has worked for Amazon nearly as long as she’s been in the United States. In 2016, the twenty-something Somali immigrant landed in Minnesota by way of a refugee camp, joining one of the largest East African communities in the country. She soon joined the legion of workers who fuel the state’s main Amazon facility, the MSP1 fulfillment center in Shakopee, near the Twin Cities.
“This was my first job,” Mohamed says. “They were hiring workers … East African and people like me. [These workers] didn’t have a lot of experience, they don’t know a lot.”
The Shakopee facility employs roughly 1,000 workers to execute Amazon’s highly mechanized work regimen every day, packing orders at a frenzied rate of around 250 units per hour. While items zip down a conveyor belt, the workers are monitored, through an automated system, to track their speed and any errors that might damage their performance ratings.
On top of the pressure to meet quotas, Mohamed says management decided to “fire a crazy number of workers” shortly after she started working there. “And they are not telling us what they fired them for,” she recalls. She says the workers were immigrants who did not speak English fluently.
Though Amazon says these were seasonal hires—and were therefore dismissed once their temporary stints ended, the seeming lack of transparency troubled Mohamed. “I feel like this was unfair,” she says.
Around 2017, Mohamed and other East African immigrant workers started meeting with the Awood Center, a Minneapolis worker center. As fledgling community organizers, Mohamed says, “We have to be smart, we have to have the training to do this.” Over the past two years, East African workers have spearheaded a number of walkouts and protests at Amazon against what they perceive as incompetence, inhumane productivity standards and a lack of diversity among the management. Images of hijabis walking the picket line and banners proclaiming that workers are “not robots” garnered national headlines.
Following initial protests in 2018, Amazon management sat down with MSP1’s East African workers to discuss working conditions—highly unusual for Amazon, which had previously avoided such direct talks with workers.
Amazon eventually agreed to make some accommodations at the facility, such as committing managers to meet quarterly with workers and respond to complaints within five days, according to the New York Times. But workers have continued to complain about the intense productivity pressure, which often leaves them without time for daily prayers and bathroom breaks, despite Amazon claiming that workers can pray at any time. MSP1 also has one of the highest injury rates among Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
Awood has become a hub for the East African worker community, teaching organizing tactics and building mutual support. Awood operates as a grassroots group and not a formal union, but other unions—including the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters—have been supporting Amazon workers at MSP1 and other facilities.
Just over a month after Minnesota issued stay-at-home orders, Amazon eliminated unlimited unpaid time off for those who opted to stay home for health concerns, which triggered a walkout by more than 50 MSP1 workers. The workers also protested what they said was the retaliatory firing of two worker activists, Faiza Osman (who Awood claims was terminated after staying home with her children to avoid infection, but was later reinstated) and Bashir Mohamed (who apparently was disciplined for violating social distancing guidelines, which workers say are selectively enforced).
Workers’ fears about the virus were confirmed in June, when about 90 warehouse employees tested positive for Covid-19. Bloomberg reported that Amazon had carefully tracked the Covid-19 infection rate at MSP1, but did not disclose details on the number of cases to workers.
Management “want[ed] to hide it,” Mohamed says. But while the higher-ups were not exposed like the frontline workers on the warehouse floor, “We are the ones who are going together to the bathroom, to the break room. We are the ones getting the virus.”
Amazon has boasted about its Covid-19 response, claiming it has taken extensive measures to keep workers safe while easing up on quotas. But Mohamed says Amazon’s leaders “focus more for the money than the workers and people.”
Last week, workers’ fears about their risk of infection were realized when the company reported that more than 19,000 of its 1,372,000 employees at Amazon and Whole Foods had tested positive for COVID-19. Though it claims that the infection rate at its facilities was about 40 percent lower on average than in surrounding communities, labor advocates denounced the company for needlessly putting workers’ health at risk.
The management seems focused on Mohamed, however. Amid rising fears of Covid-19 risks at work, Mohamed was written up in July for taking too much “time off task,” Amazon’s term for intermittent breaks. But she contends she had rarely received any disciplinary write-ups until the management “clearly made me a target” after she had protested working conditions.
She wrote to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison seeking protection under an executive order shielding whistleblowers from retaliation.
“Amazon managers have targeted me and openly harassed me before,” Mohamed wrote, “but increasingly during the pandemic.”
Amazon denies Mohamed and her coworkers’ claims of retaliation. Amazon spokesperson Jen Crowcroft states via email, “We do not tolerate any kind of discrimination in the workplace and we support every employee’s right to criticize their employer, but that doesn’t come with blanket immunity to ignore internal policies.” Similarly, Amazon attributes Bashir’s dismissal to violations of workplace rules. It also states Osman still works at Amazon and was not fired.
Mohamed’s allegations reflect a broader pattern of firings and punishment of worker-organizers during the pandemic, which has prompted lawmakers to investigate Amazon’s labor practices.. Last week, 35 workers at MSP1 staged yet another walkout to protest the alleged firing of one of Mohamed’s coworkers, Farhiyo Warsame, for “time off task” violations, after she had voiced concerns about safety protections at work.
For now, however, Mohamed’s outspokenness might protect her, as the workers’ uprisings have put Amazon’s labor practices in the public spotlight.
Amazon estimates about 30% of its Shakopee workers are East African, many of whom live in the Twin Cities Somali refugee community, which has historically struggled with racial discrimination and socioeconomic hardship. Now, these bonds have transformed into organizing power against a corporate empire. Having built a diverse community of militant workers at MSP1—Somali, Spanish and English speakers alike—Mohamed knows there is safety in numbers.
“We have one goal, and we can understand each other,” Mohamed says. “We have the power to change policy. … We have the right to exercise that in the United States.” Although the company “give[s] us a lot of fear,” she adds. “[we] still have the courage to fight back and work for the change we want.”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on October 5, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States early this year, frontline workers in sectors deemed “essential” have staged hundreds of strikes, sickouts and other job actions to protest unsafe working conditions.
At hospitals, warehouses, meat processing plants, fast-food restaurants, transport and delivery services, and retail and grocery stores, workers have demanded their employers do more to prevent the spread of the virus—including keeping worksites clean and providing adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). They have been aided in many cases by unions and new initiatives like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee—a joint project of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Meanwhile, the government agency tasked with ensuring on-the-job safety—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—has received over 26,000 Covid-related complaints at the federal and state level, but to date has issued citations against only four employers, all of them nursing homes.
While the AFL-CIO has called on OSHA to adopt an emergency temporary standard on infectious diseases as an immediate, enforceable mechanism to keep workplaces safe during the pandemic, the agency has refused, saying there’s a lack of “compelling evidence” that diseases like Covid-19 pose a “grave threat” to workers. Instead, OSHA has put forward non-binding guidelines around coronavirus.
Critics like Peter Dooley of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health say OSHA is “missing in action” and that the agency’s lackluster pandemic response is “a national disgrace.”
In a new report released today, the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR)—a network of over 60 scholars advocating public protections around health, safety and the environment—is calling on Congress to significantly strengthen the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the legislation that first created OSHA nearly 50 years ago.
Katie Tracy, senior policy analyst at CPR and a coauthor of the report, says OSHA’s poor response to the pandemic “is emblematic of several decades of choices by our national and state leaders that prioritize short-term profits ahead of people.”
“Since 1970, Congress and the White House have hollowed out [OSHA], denying it resources and trimming its authority, leaving it in a weak state,” adds CPR member scholar Rena Steinzor, another report coauthor.
As a result of this hollowing out, the agency now has only one inspector for every 79,262 workers. The report explains that with so few resources, OSHA has the capability to perform only one inspection per worksite every 134 years.
CPR member and report coauthor Michael C. Duff points out that “Black, Latinx and other people of color are disproportionately represented” in some of the most high-risk and low-paid jobs deemed essential during the pandemic. “Our governing institutions have done little to safeguard these workers from the health hazards or economic challenges exacerbated by Covid-19,” he says.
The CPR report specifically recommends the Occupational Safety and Health Act be amended to allow workers to enforce the law themselves by filing lawsuits under a private right of action. Such “citizen suits” are already a feature of many other federal regulations, including the Fair Labor Standards Act and Clean Air Act, the report notes.
“Empowering workers with a private right of action is critical to ensuring safer and healthier workplaces because, even with a robust regulatory system, there will always be limits on what OSHA has the resources and political will to do,” the report says. “When the prospect of a private lawsuit is put on the table, the agency may be more motivated, even compelled, to pursue the serious allegations raised by employees.”
The report spells out how a private right of action would work, including provisions for notice of intent to sue, waiting periods, standing, statutes of limitation, discovery, robust remedies, and more. Importantly, it calls for beefed up whistleblower protections to prevent retaliation against employees who speak up, as well as an end to arbitration agreements that require workers to forfeit the right to sue their employers.
Further, the report urges lawmakers to expand the Occupational Safety and Health Act to include public sector workers, farmworkers and gig workers misclassified as independent contractors—all of whom were excluded in the original 1970 legislation.
“Fixing the current system requires an updated and vastly improved labor law that empowers workers to speak up about health and safety hazards, rather than risk their lives out of fear of losing employment and pay,” says CPR board member and report coauthor Thomas McGarity.
Tracy tells In These Times that as a nonprofit, CPR doesn’t do political lobbying, but still hopes that “some of our allies off and on the Hill will find this concept worthy of taking up because it would be such an improvement over the status quo.”
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are fighting to include employer liability protections in any new Covid relief package, warning there will be “a second epidemic…of frivolous coronavirus lawsuits.”
“Rather than fight for business liability immunity,” Tracy says, “we need to be empowering workers to enforce the law when OSHA won’t.”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on July 29, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Jeff Schuhrke is a Working In These Times contributor based in Chicago. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Master’s in Labor Studies from UMass Amherst. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSchuhrke
Buried on the 18th page of a recently updated federal government memo defining which workers are critical during the Covid-19 pandemic is a new category of essential workers: defense industry personnel employed in foreign arms sales.
The memo, issued April 17, is a revised version of statements issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Defense in mid-March. In those, the defense industry workforce was deemed “essential” alongside healthcare professionals and food producers, a broad designation that prompted criticism from a former top acquisition official for the Pentagon, defense-spending watchdog groups, and workers themselves. The original March memos made no mention of the lucrative foreign arms sales that U.S. companies make in the order of $180 billion a year.
The new text indicates that the federal government deliberately expanded the scope of work for essential employees in the mid-April memo to include the “sale of U.S. defense articles and services for export to foreign allies and partners.” In These Times spoke with numerous workers who instead say their plants could have shut down production for clients both domestic and foreign. The updated April 17 memo was issued as the United States reported more than 30,000 Covid-19 deaths, a number that would come close to tripling in the following weeks.
The new memo, which says essential workers are those needed “to maintain the services and functions Americans depend on daily,” also reflects what defense workers tell In These Times has been a reality throughout the pandemic: Work is ongoing on military-industrial shop floors across the country, including on weapons for foreign sales.
A memo in March said essential workers are those needed to “meet national security commitments to the federal government and U.S. military.” In April, the government quietly updated the memo to include a new line of essential work: foreign arms sales.
Arms manufacturing for export has continued at a Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, which has stayed open 24 hours a day during the pandemic and manufactures the F-35 fighter jet. Asked by In These Times if F-35 production for international customers was ongoing in Fort Worth during the pandemic, a Lockheed spokesman responded that “there are no specific impacts to our operations at this time.” The company has a robust slate of domestic and foreign orders to fulfill for the F-35—the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history, one the company now advertises at a price tag of at least $89 million per jet. This slate includes 98 for the United States in the fiscal year 2020 and scores for international buyers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, according to a recent report on the F-35 program from the Congressional Research Service.
An employee at the Fort Worth plant told In These Times, “I don’t think it should be designated essential if we’re not doing it for our own country. I understand these other countries have put money into it. I do understand that. But these other countries are shut down, too,” the worker added, referring to the major disruptions of economic activities across the globe. The employee said they have seen computer monitors indicating jets were destined for Japan and Australia in recent weeks.
In the first weeks after the country shut down, the employee says they and their fellow workers asked themselves, “Why don’t we move these aircraft out of the way for a minute? And we have enough manpower here we could make masks. We could make ventilators.” But the company’s priorities for its essential workers, the employee says, has been: “Let’s get these jets and let’s get them running. Let’s pump them out the door.”
Several defense industry workers told In These Times they believe on-site manufacturing work at weapons plants for both foreign and domestic use could have been suspended at least for a matter of weeks during the pandemic. They also said they worry about the feasibility of keeping busy workplaces safe and sanitary, and that they distrust employers’ methods for handling virus cases that have emerged among workers.
Alarm over the expectation to continue reporting to shop floors for hands-on jobs has opened a rift between defense contractors and their employees, with the latter feeling constrained from speaking out publicly due to the confidentiality surrounding national security work. Several workers, all concerned about the risks of plants staying open, spoke with In These Times on the condition their names not be published, fearing repercussions or losing security clearances.
Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said at an April 30 press conference that of 10,509 major companies tracked by the Defense Contract Management Agency, just 93 were closed, while 141 had closed and reopened. While many in the defense industry can work remotely—a Lockheed spokesperson told In These Times by e-mail that about 9,000 of its 18,000 employees in Fort Worth are telecommuting—the thousands that remain on plant floors, workers say, are often blue-collar employees whose jobs are hands-on. On an April 21 earnings call, outgoing Lockheed Martin CEO Marllyn Hewson told investors that “our manufacturing facilities are open and our workforce is engaged.”
Concern for the safety of that workforce prompted Jennifer Escobar—a veteran and wife of a Lockheed Martin employee in Fort Worth who himself is a disabled veteran—to publicly denounce the company for staying open during the pandemic.
More than 5,000 people have signed her petition calling for the Fort Worth site to shut down and send employees home with pay. A similar petition on behalf of Lockheed Martin employees in Palmdale, Calif., garnered hundreds of signatures. Escobar spearheaded the campaign, she says, for “everybody else who couldn’t stand up because they have a fear of retaliation from the employer.”
Escobar also started a GoFundMe page for the widow of the Fort Worth site’s first reported Covid-19 death. Claude Daniels, a material handler, and his wife, also a Lockheed employee, had together spent about seven decades working for the company, according to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union.
The local machinists union reported in late April that the Fort Worth site had 12 confirmed virus cases among Lockheed and non-Lockheed employees. Since the plant has remained open during the pandemic, the company has responded to the outbreak by identifying and informing workers who have been in proximity with an infected employee and asking them to stay home, according to a Lockheed spokesman.
But Escobar and one plant worker said there are gaps in that response. For example, Escobar says there were instances in which a worker was sent home while their spouse, also a company employee, was not, despite the presumably close contact the pair has in a shared living space. One Fort Worth worker also said that while the company will remove an employee who works within six feet of someone who tests positive, there are cases of people who work at greater distances—the employee gave the example of workers on either side of a jet’s wings—who still share items during their shift.
“Even though we were sharing the same workstation, the same computer, the same toolbox, that doesn’t count,” the employee says.
In response to these concerns, Lockheed Martin told In These Times via email, “Our Facilities teams have increased cleaning schedules within all our buildings and campuses across Lockheed Martin, with a high concentration on common areas like lobbies, restrooms, breakrooms and elevators. Upon learning of probable exposure, a contracted professional cleaning and restoration company sanitizes the employee’s workspace, surrounding workspaces, common areas, and entrances and exits throughout the building.”
Anger at the expectation employees continue working led one to spit on the company’s gate in Fort Worth. Escobar says, “He was just really upset that the company was treating him like that.”
Lockheed Martin spokesman Kenneth Ross told In These Times that the company’s security team was aware of and investigating the reported spitting incident. “Obviously, that kind of behavior is not fitting with what we’re trying to do to create a Covid-19 safe environment,” he said
One Fort Worth employee infected with the virus filmed a video of himself from a hospital bed that went viral and was viewed by many of his coworkers. In sharing his story, he also exposed a gap in the company’s ability to respond to the virus while maintaining its floors open.
In Anthony Melchor’s video, which has been viewed more than 16,000 times, he is interrupted by coughs and wheezy breaths. “I’m cool on my stool, you know me,” he says, warning his fellow workers that “this Covid ain’t no bullshit, man.” He calls on them to sanitize their work areas and not go to work if they feel unsafe.
During a weekend in early April, Melchor, who suspects he was exposed to the virus at work, began to have severe migraines. He woke up the next day in a pool of sweat. His doctor ordered a Covid-19 test, but his first result was a false negative, which Melchor believes happened because his nasal swab was too shallow. After several days passed and his condition worsened, his wife insisted he receive medical attention. A second coronavirus test then came back positive, he said.
Melchor says his delay in informing Lockheed that he was positive for the virus also meant his coworkers were delayed in being removed from the line. Asked whether workers are removed from the plant when an employee shows symptoms of the virus or only after one has tested positive, a Lockheed spokesman wrote that the company “identif[ies] and inform[s] any employees who interacted with individuals exposed to or diagnosed with Covid-19 while maintaining confidentiality.”
At a Lockheed Martin site in Greenville, S.C., where the company is currently producing F-16s for Bahrain—the company appears to have only foreign clients for the fighter jet—one employee expressed concern over how close workers get to one another when they often work in pairs on either side of a jet. The worker also says it is “the nature of our business” to have employees who frequently travel, including out of the country, leading the worker to fear what they may bring back to the workplace when they return.
“From a financial standpoint I know it’s not beneficial for us to be at home,” the Greenville worker says, “but the safety of employees to me should be most important.”
Lockheed’s fighter jets are among many defense products that U.S. companies export.
In addition to Lockheed Martin, In These Times submitted questions to three other defense firms about ongoing exports during Covid-19. Northrop Grumman announced in its April 29 earnings call that the company had delivered two Global Hawk surveillance drones to South Korea that month. Asked about the precautions the company took for the safety of workers handling the drones in the final weeks leading up to the April delivery, a spokesperson wrote that the company is “taking extraordinary measures to maintain safe working conditions.” The U.S. ambassador in Seoul tweeted a picture of the sleek gray drone emblazoned with Korean letters in an April 19 message congratulating those involved in its delivery.
Another contractor, Wichita-based Textron Aviation, told In These Timesthat, during Covid-19, the company “will continue to support our customers according to our funded contract requirements, which includes foreign customers.”
Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Arms Control Association, says the pandemic does not appear to have caused any “deviation” from the Trump administration’s policy of promoting foreign arms sales. He notes that the State Department approved numerous potential sales, including ones to controversial clients like the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines, in the midst of the global pandemic.
“It certainly seems that this administration is trying to get a message to industry that you are important. There will be work for you,” Abramson says.
Despite the essential designation, some Boeing defense-industrial sites buckled under pressure as the virus spread and closed during the pandemic. A day after the death of an employee infected with the virus in Washington State, Boeing announced it would shutter its Puget Sound site, where some 70,000 people work on both commercial and defense aircraft. Boeing also shut down a Pennsylvania site that produces military aircraft for two weeks, saying the step was “a necessary one for the health and safety of our employees and their communities.”
When Boeing partially reopened Puget Sound after about three weeks, the first production it resumed was on defense products. Asked if work was underway on P-6 patrol aircraft for foreign clients such as South Korea and New Zealand, a company spokesperson responded, “We are evaluating customer delivery schedules and working to minimize impacts to our international customers.”
Unlike the United States, some countries have allowed defense production to shut down. Mexico did not declare its defense industry essential, prompting a rebuke from the Pentagon’s Ellen Lord, who wrote to the Mexican foreign ministry regarding interruptions to supply chains. Lord later said she had seen a “positive response” from Mexico on resolving the issue. F-35 facilities in both Japan and Italy shut down for several days in the early weeks of the pandemic.
Melchor, the Fort Worth employee who is now recovering from Covid-19 at home, says he agrees with the defense-industrial base’s designation as essential, including when that involves commitments to customers amongst U.S. allies. “I just also believe that our customers would have understood if there was a two-week delay or even a month delay because of this virus,” he says.
He believes leadership is needed to address the issue in a unified way and says debate about the crisis amongst workers, whom he called on in his video to “pull together,” has become fractious.
“What I found interesting is the very thing that we build [is] to serve and protect, foreign and domestic, to protect us from any type of evil or wrongdoing,” Melchor says. “At what point does our company protect us?”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on May 19, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Taylor Barnes is an Atlanta-based journalist who covers militarism, conflict, dissent and foreign affairs.
Legions of undocumented immigrants in the United States carry letters signed by their employers stating that President Donald Trump’s administration considers them essential workers amid the pandemic. While these letters exempt them from being arrested by local agents for violating stay-at-home orders, these workers could still be detained and deported by federal authorities.
José (a pseudonym to protect his identity as an undocumented worker), a landscaper in Connecticut, has had such a letter since the beginning of the stay-at-home executive orders in March. His job, though, could hardly be considered essential.
“We are sent in to maintain malls, apartment buildings, corporations and government offices,” says José, who has worked for Middletown, Connecticut-based Bravo Landscaping, for over a decade. “We first pick up all the dead leaves, then mark the edges of the green areas and cut the grass.”
Although he’s been deemed “essential,” José is not entitled to protective gear, compensation, federal financial aid or safeguards from immigration agents. For several weeks, José actually worked without protective equipment.
“Two workers already contracted Covid-19, and their whole teams were sent home to quarantine with just 60 percent of their wages,” says José. “As for the sick co-workers, I don’t know if the company is paying for their treatment.”
Connecticut has qualified landscaping as an essential industry since March. Under this cover, companies such as Bravo Landscaping can determine how to manage their undocumented workforce through a deadly pandemic.
“The Covid crisis is really highlighting the contradictions that have always existed in the United States,” says Tania Unzueta, political director of Mijente, a grassroots organization advocating for social justice. “Whether immigrants or U.S.-born, essential workers are not given a livable wage, health insurance or a social network of support.”
Undocumented essential workers were not even considered in the $2.5 trillion relief package approved by Congress and, except in California, have not received financial aid from state or local governments. Additionally, they are being detained and deported.
Though the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has suspended large-scale raids since mid-April, it still arrests immigrants that pose “a criminal or public safety threat”—a vague and arbitrarily enforced mandate.
With a Supreme Court ruling impending, the debate over massive ICE raids and deportations, however, will be back in the spotlight.
This ruling, which might put hundreds of thousands of people at risk, will assess whether the Trump administration’s decision to terminate DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is constitutional or if it flouted federal government regulations.
“Good” or “bad” immigrant?
Initiated by a 2014 executive order of President Barack Obama, DACA grants two-year renewable work permits and deportations deferrals to 690,000 migrants that arrived in the United States as minors before 2007. Trump’s administration argued in 2017 that the program is unconstitutional and should be terminated.
The lower courts concluded, nonetheless, that the administration’s decision to end the program was “arbitrary and capricious.” Having heard oral arguments last November, the Supreme Court has yet to issue an opinion, expected before June 20.
Whichever way the Supreme Court rules—whether it terminates DACA immediately, phases it out or sides with the lower courts—immigrants advocates expect that Trump will try to exploit the issue to boost his chances for reelection in November.
“Republicans have used the same playbook since 2016—to criminalize immigrants and blame them for anybody else’s misfortunes. And to do anything and everything in their power to fear monger and scare everybody,” says Pili Tobar, deputy director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group for immigration reform. “The upcoming election won’t be any different.”
President Trump has proposed in the past to keep DACA in exchange for accelerating deportations and drastically reducing immigration. In practical terms, he offered Democrats to save some immigrants from deportation while removing the vast majority of them. “Republicans are always going to try to pit immigrants against each other,” says Tobar.
Trump’s previous strategy certainly suggests that once the Supreme Court rules, he will try again to pit DACA recipients, U.S. citizens save for their papers, against hard-working immigrants like José, essential workers too but lacking any legal or political recognition.
“For people, it’s easier to argue for the undocumented young person or the kids locked in cages, but I think it’s important to talk about how to roll back the system,” says Unzueta. “When children are detained at the border and placed in detention centers, at the same time, their parents are being criminalized, charged with felonies and put in federal prison.”
The United States needs to figure out how to bring immigrants into the citizenry, says Tobar, rather than demonize, exploit and dispose of them during a crisis. “All of the 11 million undocumented people in this country are essential workers, contributing, one way or another, to their countries and communities.”
This blog originally appeared at In These Times on May 15, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Maurizio Guerrero is a journalist based in New York.
The Workplace Fairness Attorney Directory features lawyers from across the United States who primarily represent workers in employment cases. Please note that Workplace Fairness does not operate a lawyer referral service and does not provide legal advice, and that Workplace Fairness is not responsible for any advice that you receive from anyone, attorney or non-attorney, you may contact from this site.
