Essential worker

The Right To Refuse Unsafe Work Is More Important Than Ever

June 13, 2020 Kathy Wilkes, Portside. Strategize! COVID-19, Essential worker, health, PPE

The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a heavy toll on workers. Reports of job hazards grow increasingly dire as several governors and President Trump push past CDC guidelines to "reopen" the economy while forecasts predict soaring infections and deaths. Some states at the direction of the Labor Department threaten termination of unemployment benefits for workers fearing return to dangerous jobs. A disturbing June 5 New York Times' report reveals how far those machinations have gone. The result: workers fired without pay or benefits or trapped in a deadly vice between poverty and disease. In short, the news is terrifying – and rightly so. But it often misses essential information about rights workers have to save their own lives. First and foremost is the right to refuse unsafe work free of employer retaliation.

From George Floyd To COVID-19, Two Pandemics Target Black Workers

June 9, 2020 Southern Workers Assembly. Organize! COVID-19, Essential worker, Rebellion2020, Worker Rights and Jobs

Compounding the devastation of coronavirus, Black people in the US continue to face threats, brutality, and death for going to and from work. For being out jogging. For being poor. For sleeping in their own bed. For watching birds in a park. For being Black. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade highlight this grim reality. Now millions of people all across the country are protesting. After experiencing two months of grief from COVID-19, there is now a righteous feeling of collective anger. According to the statement from UE national officers, “It is not surprising that protests over Floyd’s and Taylor’s killings have erupted into rage.

Two Bimbo Bakery Workers Dead, Others Fired After Raising COVID-19 Concerns

June 2, 2020 Ankur Singh, Cicero Inepdendiente. Resist! COVID-19, Essential worker, health, Worker Rights and Jobs

Two workers who were employed at Bimbo Bakeries USA’s Cicero factory have passed away due to COVID-19, according to records from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Their deaths come after the company fired two other employees who were quoted in a Cicero Independiente article published on April 7 raising concerns about the lack of workplace safety during the COVID-19 crisis. Prior to the two deaths, Bimbo Bakery USA workers, many of whom are organizing with a group called Black Workers Matter, accused the company’s Cicero factory of lacking proper sanitation, failing to enforce social distancing, and being slow to communicate when employees tested positive for COVID-19. Workers are also protesting what they say was an act of retaliation from Bimbo Bakeries USA.

Caravan Supports Workers And Fights U.S. Postal Service Privatization

May 28, 2020 Martha Alston, Peoples World. Resist! COVID-19, Essential worker, US Postal Service, Worker Rights and Jobs

On Thursday, May 21, 80 cars lined up, in front of the Main Post Office in downtown Detroit, to thank Postal Workers, and to insist that the Post Office not be privatized. For over an hour, cars circled the Post Office, with drivers blowing their horns and leaning out their windows to yell “Thank You” to the workers. Postal employees responded by smiling, fist pumping, and applauding as the cars drove by. One creative driver had stacked Priority Mail boxes on the roof of her car—just in case someone didn’t know that it was the Post Office the caravan was supporting. Participants said that the action raised their spirits and made them feel they could have their voices heard even in the midst of a pandemic. Many said they were willing to participate in more such actions.

Hundreds Of Maquiladora Workers Dying After Back-To-Work Orders

May 25, 2020 Eric London, WSWS. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, Mexico, Workers Rights and Jobs

On Saturday, the health secretary of Northern Baja California announced that 432 of the 519 people who have officially died from the virus in the state were maquiladora workers. In Baja cities like Tijuana and Mexicali, as well as other border cities like Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, doctors report that their hospitals are overflowing with sick maquiladora workers, some of whom are dying in their work uniforms. Mexican maquiladora workers make between US$8 to $10 per day. Hospital officials say the government’s official death toll and the total number of positive cases nationwide—5,177 and 49,219 respectively, as of yesterday afternoon—vastly understate the real impact. They claim that hundreds or thousands more maquiladora workers are dying than is officially acknowledged and that the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is obscuring the real toll in an effort to force workers back to work.

Thousands Of Essential Workers Are At Risk of Deportation

May 25, 2020 Maurizio Guerrero, In These Times. Educate! Deportation, Essential worker, Food and Agriculture, Immigration

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. Although deemed “essential,” they are not entitled to protective gear, compensation, federal financial aid or safeguards from immigration agents. 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.

Essential Sanitary Workers Strike For Hazard Pay And PPE

May 17, 2020 Mike Ludwig, Truthout. Resist! COVID-19, Essential worker, PPE, Wages

The severe outbreak of COVID-19 in southern Louisiana was the last straw for a group of sanitation workers who pick up trash in eastern New Orleans. Last week, they walked off the job and went on strike, demanding hazard pay and a $15 living wage. Without “hoppers,” as the workers are known, garbage would pile up on the streets and contribute to the spread of disease and other public health problems. However, the group of hoppers in New Orleans say their employers did not provide them with hazard pay or sufficient personal protection equipment as COVID-19 shut down the city. Technically employed by a subcontractor and working for a private disposal firm, the hoppers say were paid as little as $10.25 an hour, with no benefits such as paid sick leave, for lifting 250,000 pounds of waste per week — an essential public service.

Worker Advocates Condemn Virginia’s Plan To Reopen

May 15, 2020 Ally Schweitzer, The DCist. Resist! COVID-19, Essential worker, Reopen Economy, Virginia

Immigrant advocates, progressive groups and NAACP chapters in Northern Virginia are calling on Gov. Ralph Northam to cancel his plans to partially reopen the state on May 15. Reopening too soon, advocates say, imperils black and Latinx workers on the front lines. In a remote press conference Thursday, the coalition demanded extensive COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, free medical services, hazard pay, ample personal protective equipment and other protections before workers are called back to their jobs across the state. Their demands are outlined in a new open letter to the governor. Latinx and black Virginians have been hardest hit by the pandemic in the commonwealth. In Fairfax County, Latinos make up nearly 60% of the jurisdiction’s known cases, but approximately 16% of the population, per Census data.

A Healthcare Worker Answers Governor Cuomo’s ‘Conundrum’

May 14, 2020 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, Pandemic, Working Class

In a recent press conference Governor Andrew Cuomo highlighted information from a new analysis of COVID-19 data finding a majority of the new patients being admitted were staying at home. Cuomo described the new data as a “surprise” to him as it was initially thought exposed frontline healthcare workers would be the brunt of new admissions. According to Cuomo discussing the new patient cases, “They’re not working, they’re not traveling, they’re predominantly downstate, predominantly minority, predominantly older, predominantly nonessential employees.” As Newsday reported, this gives the state “a conundrum” of how to stop the viral spread. “A conundrum,” you say? A surprise? For those of the working class, this new data is probably no surprise whatsoever...

Who Is ‘Essential’ To Our Covid-19 World

May 14, 2020 Andrea Mazzarino, Tom Dispatch. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, health, US military

“When he first came home, it was tough.” So Aleha, the wife of an airman in Colorado, told me. She was describing her family’s life since her husband, who lives with chronic depression, completed a partial hospitalization program and, in March, along with other members of his unit, entered a pandemic lockdown. He was now spending full days at home with her and their four children, which offered needed family time and rest from the daily rigors of training. Yet the military’s pandemic lockdown had its challenges as well. Aside from weekly online sessions with his therapist (the third the military had assigned him in so many weeks), Aleha was left to provide her husband with needed emotional support, while homeschooling their older children and caring for their toddler.

Philly Unions Are Calling For A Citywide Essential Worker Bill Of Rights

May 1, 2020 Juliana Feliciano Reyes, Philadelphia Inquirer. Create! Essential worker, Philadelphia, Unions, Worker Rights

As workers grow increasingly desperate in the face of life-threatening conditions, Philadelphia labor leaders have come together to say the city must do more to protect employees deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic. Officials representing more than 30 union locals and worker groups called Monday for Mayor Jim Kenney to make testing available for all essential workers and prevent employers from firing employees who stay home if they feel sick. The effort, led by UPS workers’ Teamsters Local 623 and the worker group One Pennsylvania, is the first attempt at uniting the city’s labor movement to get better protection for workers during the pandemic. “Workers were called upon to deliver us through this crisis,” the union leaders wrote in a letter to Kenney.

Instead Of Providing Masks Or Allowing Unions, Whole Foods Unveils New ‘Hero’ Uniform

April 26, 2020 Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Educate! Corporatism, COVID-19, Essential worker, PPE

Megan Murray, a Whole Foods store worker in Philadelphia, writes that many of the precautionary procedures put in place are laughably poor. For instance, while employees have their temperature checked each day, the contactless reader is hopelessly inaccurate, measuring greatly different temperatures every time she uses it. Even if workers are diagnosed in-store with a high fever, they do not receive paid time off and are merely sent home. Only if they have tested positive for the virus or have been instructed to quarantine by a doctor do they qualify. But getting tested for COVID-19is extremely difficult, and finding the money to pay for a doctor harder still. While those who study to work in a hospital or a nuclear power plant understand that there is an unwritten assumption that, during a crisis, they might need to risk their lives to prevent greater disaster, this is not the case for retail workers. “It feels like we’ve been drafted into war...

OSHA Leaves Out Millions Of Essential Workers In COVID-19 Workplace Safety Protections

April 21, 2020 By Michael Grabell, Bernice Yeung and Maryam Jameel, ProPublica. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, OSHA, PPE

As news emerged that the novel coronavirus was infecting hundreds of workers in meatpacking plants, Gregoria Rivas began worrying that her chicken processing facility in North Carolina wasn’t doing enough to protect workers like her from the virus. There was no social distancing, she said. Everywhere she went at the Case Farms plant, there were dozens of workers crowded into a small space. In the locker room, where everyone put on their uniforms. On the cutting line, where she spent eight hours slicing chicken breasts. In the cafeteria during lunch. Even at break time, when workers lined up to use the bathroom. “I tried to bring my own face mask that I had bought at the pharmacy, but they wouldn’t let me wear it,” said Rivas, 31. “When they wouldn’t let me wear my own mask, I went to the nurse’s station at the plant, and they said there were no masks available.”

My Parents Have Always Been Essential Workers

April 21, 2020 Monica Grover, NCRC.org. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, Food and Agriculture, health

Where do we get our food? Who stocks our local store shelves? Who rings us up at the cash register? Who bags our groceries? Who is deemed an essential worker in the age of the coronavirus? It is elderly shop owners who are stacking cans of soup, packing bottles of juice and soft drinks into coolers, making sure we have bread, milk, eggs and our local newspaper. It is people with underlying health conditions who are reaching out to suppliers to ensure that shelves are fully stocked with toilet paper, detergent, hand soap, chips, cookies and alcohol for you. It is immigrants putting their lives at risk to serve us, their community and our country at large. We all rely on people like my parents, owners of a small grocery store in Maryland. We need them to ensure that we all get through this crisis and they need our support in return.

Essential Workers Of The World Unite!

April 19, 2020 By Santiago Leyva del Río and Kaveri Medappa, ROAR Magazine. Organize! Essential worker, International Solidarity, Strike, Working Class

Ironically, the global pandemic which threatens our lives has put a spotlight on the infrastructures that sustain them. The workers who have always been saving lives, caring for the ill, cleaning and sorting waste, producing goods and providing services essential for the uninterrupted running of lives have been made “heroes.” The same capitalist actors who considered these workers easily replaceable and often dismissed their work as “unskilled” are now cynically hailing them as “warriors.” The classification of certain workers as “essential” has created conditions, which allow for disparate groups of workers to think about themselves as part of a collective. The nature of this crisis has made the infrastructural labor that sustains everyday life evident. On the one hand, this conjuncture has revealed, and will exacerbate the shared vulnerabilities of “essential workers.”

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