For at least ten hours a day and “sometimes twelve hours or more,” Maria Ramirez packed hamburgers at the Strauss Brands meatpacking plant in Franklin, Wisconsin. The job, which she held for thirteen years, was tough. Then came COVID-19, which made her work “more dangerous,” says the forty-one-year-old single mother of four, originally from Mexico.
“I think most egregious is that OSHA has effectively taken no enforceable action. We’ve had 190,000 people die from the virus, a lot of them on or around the job.”
“Everyone was worried about infecting our families,” she recalls. “We had a lot of fear because there were not the necessary precautions. No masks, no hand sanitizer. No distancing.”
Ramirez says she and others “made complaints to the heads of the plant,” to no avail. Soon, like hundreds of thousands of essential workers across the United States (largely in the food industry and health care facilities) she became infected with the coronavirus. Despite experiencing stomach and throat pain, and even coughing up blood, she “could not go to a doctor because everything was virtual.” Then, literally adding insult to injury, “when we complained and demanded more protections, they fired us.”
Ramirez and her fellow workers are among the millions of workers who have been endangered by unsafe and unregulated workplaces during the pandemic. Many are being fired for speaking up. “There have been scores of cases of health-care workers fired for insisting on proper PPE [personal protective equipment] or even bringing in their own N-95 respirators from home,” wrote Representative Bobby Scott, Democrat of Virginia, in a May 11 letter to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), urging change. “Others were fired for talking to the press or using social media to describe unsafe conditions in their facilities.”
After persistent worker action and pressure, together with advocacy by the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Voces de la Frontera, Ramirez and twenty-seven other Strauss employees are getting some modest re- compensation, as a result of a settlement with the company. “Thanks to God,” she says, “the first payment arrived from the settlement and I was able to pay my rent with that.”
Ramirez continues to suffer “chronic symptoms” from her bout with COVID-19. As of this writing, she is without health insurance and looking for another job. After first being notified of problems in April, OSHA is now investigating what happened at Strauss.
While much of the U.S. economy went into a partial freeze earlier this year, millions of American workers were required to keep toiling amid the peril of the pandemic. As of September 18, according to a tally maintained by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, at least 59,430 food industry workers, mostly in meatpacking but also food processing workers and farmworkers, have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 254 have died.
Through September 18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 160,380 COVID-19 cases and 703 deaths among health-care workers—although other estimates found at least 1,000 U.S. health-care workers have died so far. Workers in prisons and Veterans Affairs facilities are also imperiled, union complaints show.
The Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Veterans Affairs have compelled workers to stay on the job even when they have “come in contact with or been in close proximity to individuals who have shown symptoms of the virus,” according to complaints filed by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest public employee union.
Even these unionized, public-sector facilities are “failing to provide workers with N-95 respirators and other necessary personal protective equipment,” AFGE says, and “refusing to provide COVID-19 testing to employees who have been exposed to those known or suspected of having the virus.” The Bureau of Prisons “has even recalled staff who have been screened and ordered home due to possible exposure within forty-eight hours of suspected infection.”
On September 8, OSHA slapped a Veterans Affairs medical facility in Indianapolis with three serious violations for failing to provide PPE to mitigate the hazards of COVID-19.
“The administration has failed workers by not issuing standards and not doing inspections,” says Milly Rodriguez, an occupational health and safety specialist with AFGE. In a statement, the union’s national president, Everett Kelley, went further, saying the federal government’s “actions and inactions are inexcusable and are literally endangering people’s lives.”
“Many lives could be saved if OSHA took action,” Representative Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, tells The Progressive. “I think most egregious is that OSHA has effectively taken no enforceable action. We’ve had 190,000 people die from the virus, a lot of them on or around the job.” Even now, nine months into the pandemic, he says, “There is presently no enforceable regulation to protect workers from airborne infectious diseases.”
Given this ongoing epidemic of worker infections and deaths, one would expect the government agency covering workplace safety and health to vigorously expand inspections and enforcement to protect employees at risk across the United States.
Wrong.
“The leadership of the Department of Labor has people’s blood on their hands now.”
At a time when more workers are being exposed to life-threatening hazards and illness, Trump’s OSHA has its lowest staffing levels since the early 1970s, with millions more employers to monitor. According to a 2019 report by the AFL-CIO, the agency had just 1,815 inspectors (752 federal and 1,063 state) to cover 9.8 million workplaces across the country. That’s one safety inspector for every 79,262 workers. The report shows that OSHA inspectors have plummeted from 14.8 per million workers in 1980 to just 5.6 per million in 2018, and falling.
Even before the pandemic, critics say, Trump’s OSHA was anemic. Mark Lauritsen, international vice president and head of meatpacking with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, says Trump’s OSHA typically takes companies at their word about job conditions: “OSHA calls the HR people, HR says things are fine, and they say ‘case closed.’ This is fundamentally different from the Bush years, never mind the Obama years.”
David Michaels, OSHA’s top administrator in the Obama Administration, and now a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, tells The Progressive that “OSHA has been the subject of malign neglect.” Nearly four years into the Trump Administration, Michaels’s former position at OSHA still has not been filled. “Most senior positions remain empty, there is no assistant director, no nominee,” he says. “Worker safety is a low priority for this administration, even in this unprecedented crisis.” According to Michaels, no President has ever failed to appoint (and have confirmed by Congress) an OSHA administrator in the agency’s fifty-year history.
Loren Sweatt serves as OSHA’s principal deputy assistant secretary, a position that Michaels says has far less policymaking or political clout. “There really is a worker safety crisis now, it’s unprecedented in history,” he charges. “OSHA has not responded forcefully even though hundreds of thousands of workers have been infected.”
Stunningly, when House Democrats questioned OSHA officials at hearings on May 28, they discovered that despite thousands of worker complaints about unsafe working conditions amid the pandemic, OSHA had issued only one citation.
Since then, OSHA has cited two more firms: an Ohio health-care company for three “serious” violations, and top meatpacking corporation Smithfield Packaged Meats for violating the general duty clause of “failing to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards that can cause death or serious harm.” Through September 17, OSHA had recorded 8,909 complaints of unsafe workplaces, and had closed 8,225 of those cases.
In the House hearings, Representative Alma Adams, Democrat of North Carolina and chair of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, concluded, “In the middle of this global health emergency that is causing more deaths in less time than any other workplace crisis that OSHA has faced in its fifty-year existence, OSHA stubbornly refuses to use its authority to protect this nation’s workers. This failure to act is a stunning act of abdication by the senior leaders in the Department of Labor.”
Worker safety is under siege from a deadly unchecked pandemic and from companies emboldened by Trump’s anemic and enfeebled OSHA.
Adams called the COVID-19 pandemic “largely a tragedy inflicted on our nation’s essential workers—people who don’t have a choice on whether they have to go to work. Many of those on the front lines are low-income workers and disproportionately people of color who don’t have the luxury of teleworking from home.”
John Christie, Adams’s legislative director, tells The Progressive that the Congresswoman believes Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Sweatt is constrained by the White House from taking steps to make workplaces safer. “When [you’re] not a confirmed administrator, you’re not empowered in the role,” Christie explains. “OSHA is invisible. They’re not really doing anything. There’s really no accountability at all.”
The Department of Labor refused requests by The Progressive to interview Sweatt, insisting on written questions via email, to which they replied “on background,” attributable to a Department of Labor spokesperson. OSHA is “working around the clock” to keep workplaces safe, the email says, adding, “OSHA investigates all complaints. The agency has six months to complete an investigation.”
Besides OSHA’s failure to protect workers in a pandemic, the AFL-CIO notes that Trump’s Department of Labor has stopped posting information on worker fatalities and repealed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule designed to “hold federal contractors accountable for obeying safety and labor laws.”
“The leadership of the Department of Labor has people’s blood on their hands now,” says Rebecca Reindel, the AFL-CIO’s director of occupational safety and health. “That’s on them. You can’t deny that the workplace is a major place of exposure now.”
As far back as January 30, when COVID-19 was just beginning to reach America’s shores, Representative Scott urged Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, to finalize a long-languishing infectious disease standard for OSHA. Already, Trump had stymied progress on the standard in 2017 by relegating it to the regulatory dustbin on a “long-term actions” list. As Representative Scott recalls, “They were on their way to getting it done, and the Trump Administration came in and just stuck it on the back burner and essentially ignored it.”
Since early March, when the pandemic began hitting the United States, the AFL-CIO has urged and petitioned Trump’s Labor Department to enact an emergency standard to protect workers.
“Employers following an OSHA Infectious Disease Standard would have planned for and prevented” workers’ earliest exposures in nursing homes, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka argued in a March 6 petition letter to Labor Secretary Scalia. OSHA’s reliance on voluntary guidelines, the union federation warned, allows employers to “implement, ignore, or selectively follow the guidelines . . . . Workers have the right to consistent levels of protection that will be implemented in all workplaces.”
But, as the coronavirus rages on, Trump’s OSHA and Department of Labor have vigorously opposed an emergency standard that would empower the agency and workers to enforce safety protections. They’ve even gone to the legal mat to prevent an enforceable standard, repelling (so far) a lawsuit from the AFL-CIO and pressure from Congress.
In early June, Sweatt rejected the AFL-CIO’s petition for an emergency standard, making this rather startling claim: “Your petition does not explain how infectious diseases as a group pose a grave and urgent threat to workers, let alone provide compelling evidence that those diseases pose a grave danger to worker health.”
Instead of an infectious disease standard empowering OSHA to enforce safety rules, the agency has issued employer guidance with recommended practices, and memos encouraging inspectors to use “discretion” and consider employers’ “good faith” efforts when evaluating their COVID-19 response.
This employer guidance, OSHA makes clear, “is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations . . . . The recommendations are advisory in nature, informational in content, and are intended to assist employers in providing a safe and healthful workplace.”
Belinda Thielen, a former union health and safety official now with Voces de la Frontera, says OSHA “did a terrible disservice” to workers by inserting such terms as “where appropriate” and “if feasible” into its COVID-19 guidance, signaling that these safety precautions are suggestions rather than requirements.
“By doing what they’re doing, they’re signaling to employers, ‘Hey, whatever you do, we don’t care that much,’ ” Thielen says. “I have so much respect for compliance officers, but they’re basically being told, ‘Back off from employers.’ ”
Making matters worse is an OSHA enforcement memo issued in April that gives inspectors “Discretion in Enforcement when Considering an Employer’s Good Faith Efforts During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic.”
The little-reported memo, from Patrick J. Kapust, OSHA’s acting director for the Directorate of Enforcement Programs, reads, “Where an employer has made attempts to comply in good faith, Area Offices shall take such efforts into strong consideration in determining whether to cite a violation.”
Christie argues this violates the safety agency’s very purpose: “OSHA is supposed to protect the worker in the workplace. Their job isn’t to look out for employers, or to allow employers to sweep things under the rug or cut them slack just because it might be difficult to comply with a safety standard.”
OSHA’s “discretion in enforcement” memo has been adopted in states including North Carolina and Hawaii, meaning that state-level worker safety agencies may be more lenient and permissive with employers if they decide there is a “good faith” effort being made. In its email to The Progressive, the Department of Labor stated, “OSHA will take employers’ attempts to comply in good faith into strong consideration when determining whether it cites a violation.”
The American workplace is always a battleground of productivity, profits, and power. The question is not whether workers will be exploited, but how much or little, and at what cost to their lives and society. The answer is largely one of power—worker and union power, and political clout to compel a pro-worker version of law and order.
Now, worker safety is under siege from a deadly unchecked pandemic and from companies emboldened by Trump’s anemic and enfeebled OSHA. Even unionized workers must battle their employers to provide a safe job, something that they’re legally required to provide.
Against prodigious odds, Maria Ramirez and the Strauss workers in Wisconsin fought back and won, at least in part. In California, where 420,000 farmworkers toil on 70,000 farms, the United Farm Workers union is “developing worker leaders, giving them the tools like union contracts, so they themselves can enforce the law,” says Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer.
One of the fights the union has taken on is to expand shade for farmworkers who are contending with the current blistering triple-digit heat and COVID-19 threats. “You’re supposed to be distancing, but growers aren’t providing additional shade,” Elenes says.
The battle for worker safety goes on in Congress, too. Representative Scott’s COVID-19 Every Worker Protection Act, passed as part of the HEROES Act, would require OSHA to implement an emergency standard for companies to protect employees from exposure to COVID-19. For now, though, even as workers die from COVID-19 exposures on the job, the bill, passed in May, awaits likely death in the Senate. As the Department of Labor notes pointedly in its email, “The ‘HEROES Act’ was not enacted and is not law.” They continue to insist, “an emergency temporary standard is not necessary at this time.”
In a social media post in May, Jordan Barab, who held Loren Sweatt’s position during the Obama Administration, wrote: “Thousands of health care, meatpacking, transit, grocery store & warehouse workers are sick & dying while the Trump Administration stops #OSHA from enforcing safe working conditions.”
For now, as the Trump Administration erases OSHA from the job safety landscape, workers’ lives will be in their own hands—and the hands of Congress, and of voters on November 3.