The U.S. Department of Labor is giving employers workplace safety suggestions, rather than clear regulations and rules for their enforcement. Some states have tried to fill the vacuum. Meanwhile, workers themselves, supported by unions and advocacy organizations like the National COSH (Council for Occupational Safety and Health), are demanding safer workplaces in this new pandemic environment. Here are some of their stories.
Farmworkers in Oregon
“I tried to get my employer to follow social distancing, clean the bathrooms, and sanitize. . . . I was also worried because the employer did not have a mask for sick people. But when I spoke up, they just ignored me and then they got mad at me for making problems. Now I am worried that I might be one of the first ones laid off. I need this job for my family.” (A farmworker’s statement to Oregon OSHA in support of new COVID-19 regulations, April 3, 2020.)
Roughly 160,000 farmworkers and their families live and work in Oregon. They work primarily by hand, particularly from May to September.
“The owners of these factories can save the lives of workers and members of the public in general if they fix conditions at their plants right away,” says Adrian Ventura, director of Centro Comunitario. “This is about human rights and public health.”
Farm labor contractors take workers to and between worksites in vans or mini school buses. Passengers are crammed together. At the worksite, soap and water are hard to come by, often a quarter-mile away. The single portable toilets, one for every twenty workers, are inadequate. Breaks are provided, but there aren’t enough areas protected from the sun and rain to avoid close worker contact.
More than 300 labor housing camps in Oregon can accommodate about 10,000 farmworkers. Housing typically includes one sink for every six people, one washtub or washing machine for thirty people and one shower for every ten people. Indoor plumbing for kitchens or sinks in the workers’ quarters isn’t required; portable toilets are common.
Deplorable as these conditions are under normal circumstances, they are much more hazardous in the age of COVID-19.
Recognizing this impending nightmare, Oregon farmworkers and their advocates called for emergency rulemaking by Oregon OSHA. The Oregon Law Center (OLC)— a nonprofit law firm, working in tandem with Safe Jobs Oregon, a COSH-affiliated coalition founded by the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project—pressed Oregon’s safety and health regulators to act.
“Not another day should go by without clear rules on how to reduce the risk of COVID-19 on the farms and in employer-provided housing,” said OLC farmworker program director Nargess Shadbeh. The state has now passed new Temporary Rules, effective May 11, doubling the number of portable sinks and toilets in the field, requiring social distancing, and taking other preventive measures. Housing that is too crowded remains a point of contention, but the farmworkers’ advocacy has moved the needle in the right direction.
Massachusetts Seafood Processing Workers
“[The company] isn’t treating us how we deserve to be treated because we are the ones who keep working despite all that's going on. . . . Sometimes there isn’t even soap to wash our hands. . . . We are so close to each other that we can hear the person next to us breathing. And nowadays this is not how things should be.” (Fish processing plant worker, New Bedford, Massachusetts, to The Public’s Radio in Massachusetts.)
New Bedford, Massachusetts, is North America’s scallop capital and the most valuable fishing port in the United States. Seafood processing plant workers there, many of them immigrants from Central America, have been organizing for better working conditions for years.
In 2014, a worker named Victor Gerena died after falling into a clam-shucking machine. This tragedy catalyzed seafood processing workers affiliated with human rights organization Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores to form Pescando Justicia (Fishing for Justice). They’ve been fighting for safe and healthy workplaces, fair pay, and respect ever since.
Enter COVID-19. Typical conditions in these plants—crowded shoulder to shoulder, messy, wet—are potential hotbeds for spread of the virus. What protective measures company owners had taken were inadequate, and several workers had already fallen ill.
Pescando Justicia—with legal support from Boston nonprofit Justice at Work and technical input from Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH)—knew that the workers’ concerns needed to be heard. So on April 13, workers delivered letters to more than thirty area companies, advocating for maximum safety protocols and a pay bump that recognizes the risks they’re facing.
National Public Radio, The Boston Globe, and other outlets covered the story. The city of New Bedford seems to have noticed too. Days later, the Health Department shuttered one of the plants for deep cleaning, and on May 5, the mayor issued an emergency order mandating vigorous COVID-19-related safety protections at all industrial plants, and compliance with all applicable sick pay laws.
“The owners of these factories can save the lives of workers and members of the public in general if they fix conditions at their plants right away,” says Adrian Ventura, director of Centro Comunitario. “This is about human rights and public health.”
New Jersey Warehouse Workers
Warehouse workers in New Jersey recognized the threat of COVID-19 to front-line employees early on. Already suffering high rates of infection weeks ago, they sought support from Warehouse Workers Stand Up, a coalition of warehouse distribution workers, labor unions like Workers United SEIU and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and other advocacy organizations. The coalition includes COSH-affiliated New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC), an alliance of seventy labor, community, and environmental organizations.
Strong, ongoing engagement with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy led to an expansion of the state’s Temporary Disability Insurance and Family Leave Insurance programs, along with mandated social distancing measures and other safety guidelines for all essential businesses. More aggressively, on April 10, the governor issued Executive Order 122, requiring explicit worker protections—consistent with CDC guidance—for specific industries, warehousing included. Unlike federal OSHA’s recommendations, these mandates must be followed.
“Our strength is in bringing environmental and community organizations together to support labor, and vice versa,” says WEC Executive Director Debra Coyle McFadden. “We’re in this together to make a difference, and I think we’re doing that here in New Jersey.”
Grocery Store Workers in Buffalo
“They [the CDC and health experts] say, you know, ‘Stay home, stay six feet away from people,’ and when there’s a customer two feet in front of you and they’re giving you money and you’re touching all the stuff that they touched, there’s no advice on how to handle that situation.” (Cash register worker in Buffalo, New York, interviewed by WFBO radio.)
Two months ago, grocery store workers in the Buffalo area realized little was being done to address the COVID-19 hazards they were constantly exposed to. They reached out to Brian Brown-Cashdollar, program director at Western New York COSH (“WNYCOSH”). The group saw that no one had been thinking about supermarkets as a place to do infection control—when that kind of thinking was exactly what was needed.
So they brainstormed with workers, colleagues at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, and industrial hygienists at the Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations School’s Worker Institute. The result was a March 19 guidance document that urged employers to, among other things, use floor markings to distance customers, schedule handwashing and cashier station sanitation breaks, and encourage customers to pay with credit cards over cash. WNYCOSH, with the union’s help, notified the major supermarket chains in the area, and alerted the media.
Press interest was immediate; so was the response of several grocery chains. An April 1 NPR story observed that “as of press time, some—but not all—of WYNCOSH’s recommendations have become the new normal in Western New York grocery stores.” As new infection controls were recognized, WNYCOSH updated its recommendations accordingly.
“Once more, we’re expecting workers—whether doctors, nurses, or grocery clerks—to expose themselves to risk at a time of national emergency,” says Brown-Cashdollar. “It’s the lesson we don’t seem to learn.”