‘That Was What Hurt the Most’

by

In April 2020, Manuela Sepulveda, a home health aide in Chicago, informed her employer that she had tested positive for COVID-19 and needed to quarantine for two weeks to ensure her health and protect her clients.

Although Sepulveda didn’t experience severe symptoms or health complications, she paid a heavy price. She lost her job, which delivered a devastating blow to her finances and mental health.

The nonprofit health agency refused to accept a note from Sepulveda’s physician stating that it was safe for her to return to work and demanded that she produce documentation of a negative test result. The stringent deadline was a major hurdle; tests were in short supply. Most test sites refused to retest those who had safely quarantined. But Sepulveda persevered, obtaining an appointment one day after the arbitrary deadline.

When Sepulveda informed her employer of the date, she was fired.

“After risking my life to go to work, to not be valued at all, that was what hurt the most,” Sepulveda told researchers from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a New York City–based nonprofit that studies and recommends workplace policies. She said employers like hers “don’t value us as humans and don’t think about how an unjust firing impacts not just the worker but an entire family, both economically and emotionally.”

Like most low-wage workers, Sepulveda lived paycheck to paycheck. Unable to pay her bills, she sank into a deep depression. Today, she has a new job that enables her to provide for her family, but still worries about the long-term impact of her depression on her son.

Sepulveda’s experience is not unusual, says Irene Tung, co-author of NELP’s March 2021 report: “Secure Jobs, Safe Workplaces, and Stable Communities: Ending At-Will Employment in Illinois.”

“Our study of 806 Illinois workers revealed dozens of unfair firings,” Tung says in a phone interview. “In Illinois and most other states, employment laws allow employers to fire workers abruptly—without cause, or even without a good reason—and leave them with bills due and no paycheck or severance pay.”

The statewide survey found that almost half of all workers in Illinois (46 percent) have been fired or let go from jobs at some point in their careers. More than one in three (37 percent) reported that they were fired for no reason or an unfair reason, and 71 percent said that they had borrowed money or used credit cards to pay their bills. Two out of three depleted all their savings after job loss. More than seven in ten reported a negative impact on household and family relationships. Nine out of ten suffered stress and negative mental health.

At-will employment, Tung explains, is at the center of the power imbalance between U.S. workers and their employers. In addition to giving employers inordinate control over workers’ livelihoods and undermining workers’ efforts to bargain for wages and benefits, at-will employment perpetuates longstanding racial bias.

“Forty-six percent of Blacks and 42 percent of Latinx workers in our survey reported unfair discipline,” Tung says. “But despite its pervasiveness, it was difficult for public enforcement agencies, such as the Illinois and U.S. Departments of Labor, to protect workers because they rely on workers for complaints. Workers can’t speak up because they fear that they will lose their livelihood.”

Even when workers file complaints, it is difficult for them to prove that they were fired for no reason or disciplined because of their race, ethnic background, gender, or religion, Tung says. Evidence is often circumstantial and workers rarely have a smoking gun to prove their allegations.

Indeed, a study of complaints to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2010 to 2017 by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity, an investigative newsroom, found that most cases were closed without concluding discrimination had occurred.

But now there is a grassroots movement across the United States to pass “just-cause” legislation—a requirement that employers must have a legitimate reason and a fair process for firing workers. It is backed by advocates for low-wage workers, unions, and community organizations.

“Workers have always strived for job security,” says Candace Chewning, strategic enforcement and communications director at the Philadelphia Department of Labor’s office of worker protections. “But it is even more important today in the gig economy, with its frequent turnover and low wages.”

In May 2019, Philadelphia became the first city in the nation to pass an industry-wide law. It requires parking lot employers to demonstrate “just cause” before they fire, decrease working hours, or discipline attendants.

“The just-cause law and its companion measure, which mandates that parking lots and valet services provide sufficient staff, is a significant milestone in Philadelphia’s plan to overcome poverty,” Chewning says. “Although the city’s 1,000 parking lot attendants work hard, they struggle to survive.”

A report by the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, noted that 40 percent of parking lot attendants earned less than $20,000 a year, 31 percent lacked health insurance, and 20 percent reported skipping meals because they couldn’t afford food.

The survey, which was conducted at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, found that 43 percent of the workers had more than one job; one in six worked more than seventy hours a week. Almost 90 percent of the workers were Black; 49 percent had more than one child.

In January 2021, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, signed two bills that protect fast food workers by requiring their employers to provide warnings and consistent, proportionate disciplinary actions before letting employees go.

In addition to receiving a written explanation for why they were terminated or had their hours reduced, employees have the right to appeal their firings through arbitration. In cases where companies lay off workers for legitimate reasons, such as downsizing because of a decrease in foot traffic, New York City law requires that termination or hours reduction be carried out in reverse seniority order.

Passing just-cause laws at the state level has proven more difficult. In 1987, Montana became the first state to enact legislation that prohibited discharge for other than good cause after a six-month probationary period. But in June 2021, Republican Governor Greg Gianforte signed three bills that extended the probationary period to twelve months and made other changes that will make it easier for employers to fire workers.

Introduced in February 2021, the Illinois Employee Security Act would require employers to establish a progressive disciplinary system that gives workers an opportunity to improve their job performance before being fired. It also requires that employers provide a written explanation of worker discipline and discharge, as well as severance. An employee would accrue one hour of severance pay for every 12.5 hours worked during the first year of employment, and every fifty hours thereafter.

Stable Jobs Now, a coalition of worker advocates including unions, policy organizations, and community groups, is lobbying the legislature in support of the bill, which has drawn opposition from employers.

“During the past few decades, middle-class jobs have disappeared and more people across the country find themselves working in low wage jobs,” says Sophia Zaman, executive director of Raise the Floor, a nonprofit organization of eight workers’ centers that advocate for justice for low-wage workers in Chicago.

“Today, one-third of the jobs in the Chicago region are low wage, so this law is necessary to prohibit employers from reducing hours to get workers to quit, firing them because they alert governmental agencies and the public to dangerous conditions in the workplace, and other forms of exploitation and discrimination,” says Zaman, whose organization has recovered $1.3 million in wage theft for workers since 2015.

Celina Villanueva, the bill’s lead sponsor in the Illinois state senate, agrees. “As a working-class person from an immigrant background, I have seen the injustices that were hidden before the pandemic,” she says in a phone interview. “But I believe the public is now aware of the tremendous contributions that home health aides, warehouse workers, and other low-wage workers made to our communities so that voters will say enough already and demand that just laws be enacted.”

A Case in Point

The greatest challenge Martha faced as a custodian at a suburban school outside Chicago was getting her employer to pay the wages she was due.

“I was supposed to receive $9 an hour,” says Martha, a forty-two-year-old Latinx single mother who asked that her last name not be used. “But the outside contractor, which had been hired by the school, used a variety of ways to ensure I received far less.”

The school’s custodians, most of them people of color, were required to work through lunch hours and work overtime, and even on weekends without pay, Martha relates. Frequent changes in schedules and methods of calculating wages resulted in late paychecks that didn’t reflect the hours worked.

“Despite the obstacles, I always did my best because I had two teenage children to support and owned a home,” Martha says in a phone interview. “Because of my limited knowledge of English, I was terrified that I would never find another job and my family would suffer.”

Martha eventually summoned the courage to raise her concerns about the unpaid wages with the cleaning service. “Not only was I rebuffed but the managers retaliated by giving me fewer cleaning supplies and more work,” she says.

Seeking strength in numbers, Martha and other custodians who had experienced similar intimidation met with the managers who threatened to fire them and withhold their paychecks.

“Retaliation escalated and after six years, I was fired along with seven other custodians,” Martha recalls. “I was sad and hurt because I had done more and more work and had close relationships with people at the school. Our firing made no sense because there had never been a single complaint by the school.”

Martha was unemployed for three months. Because she earned so little, she had no savings and had to borrow to pay her basic living expenses and was unable to celebrate her daughter’s high school graduation. Although the fired workers formed picket lines, contacted the school, and obtained legal help, they never regained their lost wages, Martha says.

“Low-wage workers like Martha are often victims of wage theft because unscrupulous employers know they can’t fight back,” says Linda Brito, a labor organizer with Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, a workers’ center that promotes social and economic justice for immigrants and workers of color in Southeast Chicago and neighboring suburbs. “That is why just-cause legislation is so important; it removes the employer’s most effective weapon: unfair termination.”

After her termination, which just-cause legislation could have prevented, Martha worked at several temporary positions that required her to spend hours commuting. Today, she is a custodian at a University of Chicago student center.

 “It is a wonderful place to work,” Martha says. “In addition to a good salary and benefits, the students and faculty treat me like a human being. I never have to worry about being cheated out of my earnings because I finally have a job with dignity and respect.”