Food production workers (photo via Creative Commons)
A new report, “The COVID Jungle: Chicagoland’s Essential Food Workers and the Need for Vaccination Priority,” describes unsafe working conditions, employers’ disregard for the health and safety of workers, and ongoing threats of retaliation against employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It reflects the broader culture of disdain toward low-wage workers who have kept our country running during the pandemic. These workers have made incredible sacrifices so the rest of us can work from home and quarantine—yet their lives are treated as disposable.”
As an epicenter for food production, distribution, and logistics, with more than 4,500 food and beverage companies, including more than 2,600 food manufacturers, Illinois is home to several world-renowned companies—Mars Wrigley, Trader Joe’s, Vienna Beef, El Milagro, Fisher Nuts, and Goya Foods—as well as hundreds of lesser-known companies. Employing more than 130,000 workers, these companies bring in more than $32 billion in sales each year. As the pandemic wears on, the profits have come at a deadlier cost.
Factories and warehouses are the leading source of COVID-19 outbreaks in Illinois, according to the state’s Department of Public Health (IDHP). It bears repeating that essential workers are at much higher risk of contracting the virus, risking not only their lives but the lives of their families and members of their communities. Based on the findings of “The COVID Jungle,” these concerns have been ignored by employers.
In December, Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) and Chicago Workers’ Collaborative (CWC), along with Temp Worker Justice, interviewed ninety workers who were employed or previously employed during the pandemic in food production, distribution, or logistics in the Chicago area. Their testimonies are presented with “confidentiality to protect the workers from retaliation.”
This report draws inspiration from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which exposed the horrors Chicago workers were forced to endure in these industries more than a century ago. Peppered with quotes from the novel mirroring the present dangers threatening workers’ lives, the report notes that, since Sinclair’s time, these facilities have “moved from the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago to the surrounding suburbs, bringing with them similar lawlessness and lack of accountability,” contributing to COVID-19’s spread throughout these facilities statewide.
Eighty-five percent of workers surveyed said their employers refused to address safety concerns, took little to no action to improve safety conditions, or retaliated against those who voiced their concerns about the employer’s handling of COVID-19. Meanwhile, 65 percent of these workers had either fallen ill from COVID-19, or knew someone from their workplace who contracted it.
“The workers who were surveyed and interviewed knew of so many of their coworkers who had gotten sick and even died from COVID-19,” Dave DeSario, director of Temp Worker Justice, tells The Progressive in an email. “It was a reminder of the constant stress and fear that essential workers are under, seeing firsthand the effects all around them.”
One worker describes an outbreak in her facility, which supplies food products to the likes of Burger King and Walmart, which killed several of her coworkers and friends: “Five of my friends died from COVID-19. They would tell me that they had body aches. One of my friends vomited; she went home and the next day she was pronounced dead by her family.”
“The COVID Jungle” contains several troubling findings reported by workers:
- 49 percent “have not received new training or information from their employer on how to work safely during the pandemic.”
- 96 percent are not receiving hazard pay.
- 61 percent said “they would not receive pay from their employer if they were sick or forced to quarantine.”
- 49 percent have no health insurance, 20 percent have Medicare or Medicaid, and only 30 percent are covered by private health insurance plans.
- 83 percent of respondents who reported getting sick from COVID-19 “did not receive paid sick leave from their employer or government assistance.”
“That is absolutely inexcusable,” Raise the Floor Alliance Executive Director Sophia Zaman tells The Progressive in an email. “It reflects the broader culture of disdain toward low-wage workers who have kept our country running during the pandemic. These workers have made incredible sacrifices so the rest of us can work from home and quarantine—yet their lives are treated as disposable.”
The IDPH recognizes food and agricultural employees as “frontline essential workers,” including them in Phase 1b of the “Priority Vaccine Allocation and Administration” plan. However, WWJ associate director Roberto Clack says there is a “life-threatening blind spot in vaccinations for essential workers,” namely workers who are employed through third-party logistics companies and temp-staffing agencies. Illinois temp workers spend an average of six years in so-called ‘temporary’ assignments, and most of these assignments never turn into permanent positions, according to survey data collected by the National Staffing Workers Alliance.
More than half of the respondents in the “COVID Jungle” were hired through such agencies, and the report’s co-authors argue that there are tens of thousands of other workers, possibly hundreds of thousands, who are often “invisible in traditional data collection, and without careful planning, are likely to slip through the cracks” in the state’s vaccination efforts.
“Black and Latinx workers, who are overrepresented in these industries, have been disproportionately affected and put in harm’s way, working on site throughout this pandemic. A public health response grounded in racial justice and equity demands that these workers are recognized for their contributions as essential workers and receive priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine.”
“Temp workers lack the basic protections that we want to assume essential workers have, because universally we believe they deserve [to have them]—so many of these workers do not have health insurance, and when they get sick or need to quarantine, [they] almost never get paid sick leave or unemployment insurance,” DeSario says. “The result is a constant pressure to go to work despite illness or the risk, because it’s the only way they can get by financially.”
The report (supported by the pro-labor advocacy groups the Chicago Region Food System Fund, the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the Heal Food Alliance, and Temp Worker Justice) recommends that these workers be treated as essential workers during the vaccine roll-out process and prioritized for vaccines. It asks Illinois state and local public health departments to collaborate with worker centers to coordinate the vaccine distribution process, and to require that employers provide manufacturing and warehouse workers with hazard pay and paid time off should they need to quarantine after a positive test result or exposure.
What’s happening in Illinois represents the challenges confronting workers nationwide over the past year, as workers continue to rise up to protect not just their livelihoods but their lives. As widespread reports of the coronavirus mutating into a potentially more infectious strain of the disease continue to surface, the calls for drastically overhauling how the United States conducts business and enacts public policy are growing louder by the day.
“Our best chance at being ready for this next phase is by building worker power and by developing a better economy than the one the pandemic shut down,” Zaman says.
“Our public leaders have an opportunity to deploy a truly equitable, justice-centered recovery plan that honors the sacrifices made by our communities of color, with paradigm-shifting policy interventions that match the level of crisis these communities have endured,” she adds. “It simply takes moral clarity and political will. Without it, the health of our entire country is at stake.”