Five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic caught our health care system unawares, nurses and other health care workers say we are no more prepared for the next threat. “It’s scary,” says Tatiana Mukhtar, a nurse in New Orleans. The exposure during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic “was horrific, for patients and for health care workers” she says, “and having been there and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
If you’ve been a union organizer for as long as we have, you occasionally get invited to speak at a high school or college class on “what do unions do?” One of the first questions we ask at any class is, “How many of you have worked a union job?” and if so, “What job and what union?” We can reliably anticipate the most common answer: “I worked a summer job in a supermarket for three months.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New York State’s social safety net contains a gaping hole: hundreds of thousands of workers whose labor is central to the state’s economy are excluded from receiving unemployment insurance. Freelancers, cash economy workers, formerly incarcerated people and undocumented workers are among the large swath of New Yorkers shut out of receiving unemployment protections that “traditional” workers take…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Healthcare and education have been at the center of pandemic labor struggles. Two rank-and-file leaders from these sectors join the podcast for a live episode.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
While essential workers kept society running throughout the pandemic, governments and bosses have worked assiduously to undermine their pay and conditions. Fred Fuentes reports.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The United States has one of the lowest levels of unionization among developed countries, with less than 11 percent of total workers being members of a union. In Sweden, on the other hand, over 66 of the labor force is unionized; in Belgium, close to 50 percent; and in Iceland, virtually the entire labor force (almost 92 percent) is unionized. In the U.S., moreover, collective bargaining coverage (all people whose terms of work are collectively negotiated) is also almost the same as the union membership rate, while in the European Union, over 60 percent of employees are covered by collective bargaining.
What’s causing the decline of unions in the U.S., from over 20 percent in 1983 to less than 11 percent today? What is undercutting the ability of unions to organize and bargain? Are unions themselves to blame? How can militancy and union power be revived in the neoliberal age? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, veteran labor organizer, labor negotiator and attorney Joe Burns offers his own insights into these questions. Burns is the author of Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. His latest book, which was just released by Haymarket Books, is Class Struggle Unionism.
C.J. Polychroniou: Since the 1980s, there has been an erosion of unionization in the U.S. even though survey data reveals that nonunion workers seem to prefer unions in their workplace at a higher rate than was the case 40 years ago. In addition, unions in the U.S. remain weak. What are the causes for union decline and their declining political effectiveness, and is there a link between a weakened labor movement and rising economic inequality?
Joe Burns: Unions came under a withering attack by Corporate America beginning in the 1970s. With our hands tied behind our back by the rigid restrictions on strike activity imposed by Congress and the court system, unions were busted in industry after industry in the 1980s. But our unions, after decades of bureaucratization and business unionism, were not up to the fight.
Business unionism was, and is, the guiding philosophy of much of the U.S. labor movement. Business unionism sees a limited role for unions in representing workers at a particular plant or employer, and are often cautious and bureaucratic. Many opted for accommodation with employers in labor management programs rather than fighting our way out of the problem.
With only 6 out of 100 workers in unions, management has largely been able to dictate terms in the labor markets. Thus, whereas 500,000 truckers were covered by the National Master Freight agreement, which was the primary labor agreement between the Teamsters Union and the motor carrier industry across the country, trucking is mostly nonunion today. We see a similar story in other industries. Without a strong labor movement, we see widening inequality and the erosion of hard-won labor standards.
In your new book, Class Struggle Unionism, you argue that contemporary unions in the U.S. have been swept by the ideology of “labor liberalism” and thereby lack class consciousness and do not challenge capitalist exploitation. How exactly do you define labor liberalism, and do you think this development itself is linked to the decline of unions?
Up until the 1980s, the main challenge to bureaucratic business unionism was class struggle unionism, which is based on the idea that workers who create all wealth in society are exploited in the workplace, creating the billionaire class. From that simple idea flows a form of unionism which is based on workplace militancy, class-wide struggle, and a commitment to worker-led struggles.
In the mid-1980s a new form of unionism developed which sought to form a middle ground between bureaucratic business unionism and the more militant class struggle unionism. This was typified by the Service Employees International Union and the organizing approach in the 1990s, but also present in many initiatives, such as social unionism (an organizational-maintenance strategy), workers centers (institutions that help immigrants make inroads in the world of work in the U.S.), etc. For the last several decades, this has been the leading approach in the labor movement among progressive trade unionists. I call this approach labor liberalism.
While it supports more progressive positions on social issues, labor liberalism lacks the conflict with the labor bureaucracy and focus on rank-and-file shop-floor militancy which typified class struggle unionism. In general, the approach had more in common with the middle-class social movements than the traditional workplace concerns of both business unionism and class struggle unionism.
While the framework has helped push the rest of the labor movement to think broader, ultimately labor liberalism is not up to the task of reviving the labor movement. For that we need an approach that is a lot more militant, lot more willing to take risks and is based in the rank-and-file of unions.
Within the same context, how do you understand class struggle unionism and how can it be revived in both the private and public sector?
Some of the greatest struggles in U.S. labor history were led by class struggle unionism. The Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s advocated for an uncompromising unionism which embraced all workers. In the 1920s and 1930s, class struggle unionists engaged in the militant struggles which led to the creation of the modern labor movement, often having to take on both the business unionists and the bosses. Adherents built a civil rights unionism in the South in the 1940s which offered a different path for unionism.
More recently, thousands of radicalized civil rights, antiwar and student activists from the 1960s entered the labor movement and helped build a wildcat strike wave, built reform movements and left us with enduring institutions, such as Labor Notes, Teamsters for a Democratic Union and Black Workers for Justice. They offered a different path than the accommodation and weakness of the business unionists.
The core of class struggle unionism is the understanding that the interests of labor and management are opposed. As the United Electrical Workers union calls it, this creates a “Them and Us” form of unionism. This form of unionism sees shop floor/workplace struggles as key, as this is where the power of the billionaire class is created, in the employment transaction. In order to pick the big fights, break through restrictions on labor law, we have to have a new philosophy which class struggle unionism provides.
The general strike was — and remains so even today — an instrument of radical European labor movements. In the U.S., however, there hasn’t been a general strike since 1946 Can a general strike play out in today’s U.S.?
Many in recent years have put out calls for general strikes. This is based on a correct understanding of the incredible power of the working class. As we learned during the global pandemic, essential workers are key to running society. Meatpackers, telecom workers, transportation workers all continued working during the pandemic because without their labor, society would grind to a halt. If all workers were able to strike at the same time, we would have incredible power.
There are, however, no silver bullets, and general strikes do not materialize out of thin air or through Facebook posts. As Kim Moody has pointed out, most actual general strikes have come from extensions of solidarity. Groups of workers engaged in militant strikes asked for help, and the strike spread as other workers joined the battles.
In order to be able to engage in general or mass strikes crossing industries, we need a fundamentally different type of labor movement. One willing to violate the restrictions of labor law, confront the powers that be, that prioritizes class-wide struggle and that is deeply rooted in the working class. For that reason, the only hope for the labor movement lies in reestablishing class struggle unionism.
Can we really expect a radical labor movement to be revived and trigger a successful transition into a more democratic and egalitarian socioeconomic order in a political system deprived of the presence of radical political parties?
One thing we know from labor history is when workers get in motion, great things can happen. Whether it be private sector workers in the 1930s or public employees in the 1960s, when workers begin striking in large numbers, they can quickly transform the landscape.
In many ways, the weakness of the labor movement is the weakness of its left wing. In the absence of a strong, organized class struggle trend, labor liberalism and business unionism have dominated labor strategy.
But it is also true that any movement of radical political parties must rest on a strong foundation of class struggle unionism. The labor movement plays a particular role for those who want to see a more just society. The source of power and privilege in society, and the reason we have billionaires, begins in the workplace. For it is here that the value created by workers is separated from them as the producers of goods and services, flowing upward to a global elite. The workplace is where workers of different nationalities and genders come together. For that reason, the labor movement must be at the heart of any project of social transformation.
After several decades of experimentation, it’s time to get back to basics. Only class struggle unionism, with its worker-led militancy and willingness to challenge the status quo, holds any hope for changing the political equation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The pandemic has confronted unions with a historic challenge. COVID-19 and the response to it have simultaneously illuminated and intensified the ways “women’s work,” labor traditionally done by women in and for social reproduction, is both essential and devalued. The pandemic has exposed our dependence on people who are paid to provide physical and emotional care, along with our society’s inability and unwillingness to support and protect these workers as they risk their lives for us. From nurses, therapists and teachers to workers in jobs viewed as less skilled with lower status and pay, like aides in hospitals and nursing homes, restaurant workers and hotel workers, it’s clear the less respect (and money) workers receive, the more disproportionately the job is done by Black, Latinx and Indigenous people, often women. The poor pay and working conditions of much caregiving work reflect not only who is doing the care but for whom it is being done. Low-income people of color get the short end of both sides of the stick.
Social movements for racial and gender equality have exposed disparities at the workplace, giving unions an opening to support workers who most need the protection collective representation brings. We see employers, from nonprofits to transnational corporations, giving verbal homage to correcting inequalities while failing to disrupt underlying inequalities in how work is organized, classified and paid. Outrage at the hyper-exploitation of food delivery services forced some of the most exploitative businesses to modify practices, stating clearly that delivery fees weren’t going to workers and providing ways for customers to tip. We should be fighting for the “gig economy” workers in food services to earn a living wage and have stable hours. Even the modest improvement masks a gender divide. The apps and websites allow customers to tip the workers who do deliveries (mostly young males of color) while the workers who prepare, pick and package food (traditionally women’s work) remain invisible and subject to whims of employers about wages.
Labor Day invites us to commemorate significant contributions unions have made for working people, recognizing courageous sacrifices of workers who lost their jobs and sometimes their lives fighting for the right for us to have collective voice at the workplace, and to force both political parties to pass legislation limiting employers’ exploitation. At the same time, we confront sobering realities of how many advances have been undercut, as labor’s economic and political power and its numbers waned, due in part to widespread acceptance of “business unionism,” which makes workers clients served by a union apparatus, rather than “owners” of their unions. The pandemic has created a global opportunity for disaster capitalism to mask policies that increase exploitation — and profits — in rhetoric about addressing longstanding social inequality. One ominous change is the chilling intensification, development and application of information technology to control workplace conditions; provide social, health and educational services; increase surveillance and data mining; and replace workers with AI.
Employers applaud themselves for boosting the prominence and authority of individuals from historically marginalized groups, substituting this shared power at the top in dominating workers instead of supporting workers’ voice and power. In contrast, when workers organize collectively, independent of the employer, they challenge the employer’s unilateral control over life at work, from pay and hours to the air they breathe, which in the pandemic is literally a matter of life and death. Collective organization brings voice, but whether and how that voice translates into power depends on the extent to which workers control what unions do in their name. Unions are only as strong as workers’ understanding that they, not union staff or officials, “own” their organizations. It’s important we not romanticize workers and diminish the enormousness of what we ask. Given the harsh conditions for work, expecting working people to do the jobs for which they are paid and also help organize their workplaces is a huge ask.
To address this, we need to see the inseparability of struggles for social justice and workplace democracy. We are not diluting our power to improve economic conditions at work when we fight for demands to make our society and workplace more equitable, just and humane. On the contrary, we benefit from the synergy of increased resources and networks, often missed even when unions organize and defend workers who do “women’s work.” They often ignore the power of highlighting the gendered nature of work. UNITE HERE’s campaign opposing Hilton Hotel’s elimination of the daily requirement for cleaning rooms, putting housekeepers’ jobs in jeopardy, rightly highlights how this harms communities of color and low-wage women workers. But what it misses is how housekeeping can be eliminated because “women’s work,” cleaning the home, is taken for granted. Women who do this work, and the work itself, should be valued and respected. Seeing gender (and its intersectionality with race) in labor requires dispelling the inaccurate nostalgia for a white, male cisgender working class. Many Black women have historically worked for pay outside the home (in addition to caring for their own families) when they could. Teachers and nurses have often displayed a resilience and militancy defending their own working conditions and protecting those who are most vulnerable in our society. In this way they are a model for the rest of the labor movement.
When Liz Shuler, the newly elected president of the AFL-CIO, who proudly claims the mantle as first woman to hold this position, tweets “I am humbled, honored and ready to guide this federation forward. I believe in my bones the labor movement is the single greatest organized force for progress,” we must be careful not to accept as reality what is actually a hope, a vision to embrace.
To support labor and realize that vision, we need to say labor officialdom’s actions often undercut our chances of success. For example, the AFL-CIO has gone all in for the PRO Act, and while the legislation is important, the assumption that its passage will solve labor’s problems is a huge mistake. We cannot rely on Biden and the Democrats’ promises of legislation to substitute for workers fighting for what they want and need, for themselves and the society.
When a hospital starts to hire “replacements” for striking nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have been on the line for months, demanding conditions that protect patients, the state and national AFL-CIO need to speak up for a state-wide one-day walkout — and provide resources to organize it.
When teachers and staff demand school districts change policies to help keep schools safe, reflecting new dangers brought on by the Delta variant, they deserve to have the state and national teachers’ unions show up with resources for organizing one-day statewide walkouts and protests. As one activist pointed out to me, teacher unions have the most influence over the White House than we’ve had in a generation, and yet both national unions, AFT and NEA are “working as mouthpieces for the administration instead of pushing the envelope.”
Movements fighting for social justice need a massively reinvigorated labor movement, just as much as labor unions need social movements. We need new understandings and enactments of solidarity that recognize how social oppression affects us all. Unions are stronger when they recognize this fact and provide democratic spaces for workers to hammer out political differences and specifics for fighting back. When we use our power on the job to force those who exploit us to hear us, value us, and respect our humanity, we are demanding a new world. The challenge workers and their organizations face is not so different from what women must accomplish when they go into labor — arduous work that requires courage, confidence and hope — the work essential for birthing a new society, which we need and deserve.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Until she got her first Pfizer shot on July 16, Cindy Cervantes toiled in the Seaboard Foods pork processing plant in Guymon, Oklahoma for most of the pandemic without a vaccine — working unprotected in an industry devastated by Covid-19 illnesses and deaths.
“In one day, at least 300 people were gone” from the plant, sick from Covid, Cervantes says. Still, “Seaboard wanted a certain number of hogs out. They kept pushing people, the chain was going even faster. People were getting injured, and we were losing even more people.” Six of her coworkers have died from Covid-19, and hundreds have gotten sick, she says.
Ravaged by the pandemic, the roughly 500,000 U.S. workers in meatpacking, meat processing and poultry are not getting much help from the industry or the government. In a sector described as “essential” during the pandemic, at least 50,000 have been infected and more than 250 have died, according to Investigate Midwest, a nonprofit news outlet. Yet amid this grim toll, the North American Meat Institute lobbied successfully to exclude meatpacking and poultry workers from new Covid-19 worker safety rules enacted this June.
Even as vaccine availability in the United States steadily expands, workers still face pandemic peril on the job, from breakthrough cases of Covid-19, as well as low vaccination rates in many areas due to a combination of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and serious access barriers to immigrants who fear deportation. Workers and advocates are sounding the alarm that President Biden has dropped the ball on pandemic-era worker protections, violating one of the first promises of his presidency. This warning has particular salience after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Tuesday that some people who are fully vaccinated should wear masks indoors in areas where there are severe outbreaks, due to the spread of the Delta variant.
On his second day in office, Biden signed an executive order promising to enact new emergency safety rules “if such standards are determined to be necessary” by March 15 to protect millions of “essential” workers like Cervantes. The goal was straightforward: to give workers enforceable protections on the job, such as mandating that companies provide physical distancing and personal protective equipment (PPE). But the deadline came and went, with no new rule. Then, on June 10, after heavy lobbying by many industry groups — including the American Hospital Association, the National Retail Federation, the North American Meat Institute and the National Grocers Association — Biden issued a narrow rule covering only health care workers.
This is despite the fact that other industries have been devastated by the pandemic. “Almost all my coworkers have gotten it,” Cervantes says of the virus, noting that many of them were out sick for months, and some returned to work with lingering Covid-19 symptoms. Yet, she says, “a lot of workers I work with have not gotten the vaccination” for a host of reasons. Some are “skeptical,” and “think it’s got a chip in it or that it’s not going to work.”
It’s not hard to get a vaccine at the plant, Cervantes says. But in an industry that relies heavily on immigrants, Latinx and often undocumented workers, there are many barriers to vaccination, researchers note. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “Large shares of Hispanic adults — particularly those with lower incomes, the uninsured, and those who are potentially undocumented — express concerns that reflect access-related barriers to vaccination.” Oklahoma, home to the Seaboard plant where Cervantes works, is among the nation’s most dangerous Covid-19 states, with just 40% of the population fully vaccinated, and “high transmission rates,” according to the CDC.
In an email response to questions, Seaboard communications director David Eaheart said the company “proactively” notifies workers of any Covid-19 cases in the plant, and has taken numerous precautions based on CDC and state health guidance, including paid leave for infected workers, and plexiglass shields at “select line workstations.”
Eaheart acknowledged that in May 2020, testing at the plant identified 440 employees with “active cases of Covid-19,” the plant’s “highest week of reported active cases. All these employees self-isolated at home and were required to follow CDC guidance before being allowed to return to work.” During that week, he said, “overall production was scaled back in the processing plant and fewer animals were processed and products produced.” More than 1000 workers at the plant have tested positive, and six have died, Eaheart confirmed.
Since March 15, when Biden’s promised Covid-19 workplace safety protections were supposed to take effect, more than 15,000 working-age adults have died from the pandemic in the United States, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH). “Every one of those individuals had a family that was also at risk of Covid,” said Jessica E. Martinez, co-executive director of National COSH, in a June 9 press release anticipating Biden’s rule. “Releasing an emergency standard three months late and just for health care workers is too little, too late.”
The original rule drafted by the Department of Labor did cover all workers, as Bloomberg Law first reported—but then the infectious disease standard met the buzz saw of politics and industry pressure, and the White House opted to cover health care workers only.
As the Department of Labor’s draft standard stated, “For the first time in its 50-year history, OSHA faces a new hazard so grave that it has killed more than half a million people in the United States in barely over a year, and sickened millions more. OSHA has determined that employee exposure to this new hazard, SARS-CoV‑2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) presents a grave danger in every shared workplace in the United States.”
Citing rising vaccination rates — 60% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC, though just 49% of the population overall — Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said the new rules focusing on healthcare workers “provide increased protections for those whose health is at heightened risk from coronavirus.” Neither the White House nor the Department of Labor provided any explanation for why other workers in high-exposure jobs were excluded.
“That’s kind of ridiculous,” says Louisiana Walmart worker Peter Naughton. “They should cover retail workers as well. We come into contact with people who may have the virus without knowing it.”
In Louisiana, where new Covid-19 cases are double the national infection rate and vaccinations lag far behind, Naughton, 45, toils in fear every day at a Walmart in Baton Rouge. He got vaccinated in May, but in his job helping customers navigate self-checkout kiosks, Naughton says, “I come into contact with hundreds, possibly thousands, of people a week.” Naughton, who lives in Baton Rouge with his parents to make ends meet, says that despite the recent uptick in Covid-19 cases, and the spread of the extra-dangerous Delta variant, there are minimal safety precautions, and “Walmart is acting like the pandemic is over.”
While the vaccines vastly reduce risk of death or serious illness, infections and “breakthrough cases” are still infecting vaccinated people. And the CDC’s befuddling guidance making masks voluntary for those who are vaccinated, on the honor system, hasn’t helped. Furthermore, the CDC explains, “no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people. There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from Covid-19.”
For Naughton and millions of other “essential workers,” laboring in the pandemic has been a mix of fear, insult and injury. Even when Covid-19 was at its most deadly and virulent, basic safety measures such as social distancing, mask-wearing and cleaning were “never enforced” at Walmart, says Naughton. “They never gave us any PPE, just glass cleaner, which doesn’t protect us. Customers could come in without masks and nothing would be said to them. I complained about it and the manager said, ‘Don’t worry about it, let the customers do what they want.’”
Several of Naughton’s coworkers got infected and ill from Covid-19, but “management never said a word to any of us,” he says. “Most of them I came into close contact with. That kind of scared me. … We all should have known about it.” Naughton says he filed a complaint in November 2020 requesting OSHA to inspect the Baton Rouge Walmart, but “I never heard back, nothing ever happened.”
To top it off, when Naughton received the vaccine in May, he was hit by a 102.4 degree fever — but he had to work anyway, because Walmart employees can “lose our job” after five absences for any reason. Nobody at Walmart took his temperature or inquired about his health, he says.
Through email, Tyler Thomason, Walmart’s senior manager of global communications, insisted to In These Times, “We encourage our associates to get vaccinated. We offer the vaccine at no cost to associates… We continue to request that associates and customers wear face coverings unless they are vaccinated. Any information on confirmed, positive COVID-19 cases would come from the local health authority.”
Naughton isn’t the only person disappointed by Biden’s exclusion of most workers from this emergency pandemic protection. Unions have pushed for the protection since the pandemic began ravaging the United States in March 2020. First, they encountered staunch resistance from the Trump administration; now, while pledging expansive worker protections, the Biden administration has delayed and diminished them.
On June 10, as the Biden administration announced the narrow new rule leaving out millions of workers, advocates expressed disappointment and frustration.
Biden’s decision to cover only health care workers “represents a broken promise to the millions of American workers in grocery stores and meatpacking plants who have gotten sick and died on the frontlines of this pandemic,” stated United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union International President Marc Perrone the day the new rule was announced.
That day, the AFL-CIO added, “we are deeply concerned that the [standard] will not cover workers in other industries, including those in meatpacking, grocery, transportation and corrections, who have suffered high rates of Covid-19 infections and death. Many of these are low-wage workers of color who have been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 exposures and infections.”
On June 24, the AFL-CIO and UFCW filed a petition in federal court demanding that all workers be covered by the emergency standard, which, the petition says, currently “fails to protect employees outside the healthcare industry who face a similar grave danger from occupational exposure to Covid-19.”
Another champion of the emergency standard, Rep. Bobby Scott (D‑Va.), Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, also expressed frustration when Biden released the narrow new rule, calling the diminished standard “too little, too late for countless workers and families across the country,” including workers throughout the food industry and homeless shelters. Rep. Scott added: “I am disappointed by both the timing and the scope of this workplace safety standard.” The rule, Scott said, “is long past due, and it provides no meaningful protection to many workers who remain at high risk of serious illness from Covid-19.”
Biden’s decision to exclude meatpackers, grocery and farm workers, retail and warehouse laborers and others means especially high risks for workers of color, Rep. Scott noted. “With vaccination rates for Black and Brown people lagging far behind the overall population, the lack of a comprehensive workplace safety standard and the rapid reopening of the economy is a dangerous combination,” he said.
Much of this “essential” workforce of people of color, immigrants and low-income white people, toils in dangerous farm labor and food processing plants where Covid-19 has spread like wildfire while vaccination rates remain low. “Workers in this industry have a very low vaccination rate,” as low as 37% in some states, says Martin Rosas, president of UFCW Local 2 representing meatpacking and food processing workers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. “I don’t know who in their right mind would think we’ve passed over that bridge and think all workers are safe now.” Rosas adds, “The federal government has failed to protect meatpacking workers” by leaving them out of the final emergency standard. “I’m extremely disappointed in the Biden administration.”
Both the Department of Labor and the White House declined multiple interview requests, but a Department of Labor spokesperson emailed a statement insisting that the health-care-workers-only rule “closely follows the CDC’s guidance for health care workers and the science, which tells us that those who come into regular contact with people either suspected of having or being treated for Covid-19, are most at risk.”
The Department of Labor spokesperson stressed that the agency’s existing (yet unenforceable) “guidance” and the “general duty clause” protect other workers adequately, particularly in “industries noted for prolonged close-contacts like meat processing, manufacturing, seafood processing, and grocery and high-volume retail.” But in its own draft standard, the Department of Labor stated the opposite: “existing standards, regulations, and the OSH Act’s General Duty Clause are wholly inadequate to address the Covid-19 hazard.” In its original draft, the agency insisted, “a Covid-19 ETS [emergency temporary standard] is necessary to address these inadequacies.”
Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, National COSH’s co-executive director, says President Biden “is responsible” for the 15,000 workers who have died from Covid-19 since Biden’s March 15 deadline to enact the emergency standard. Biden, she notes, “promised to protect workers in his campaign and on his first day in office, but he neglected them. But workers’ safety needs aren’t over, and we’ll be continuing to demand accountability from the administration.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data out Wednesday shows that life expectancy in the U.S. fell by one and a half years in 2020, a decline fueled in large part by the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
“U.S. life expectancy at birth for 2020, based on nearly final data, was 77.3 years, the lowest it has been since 2003,” reads a new report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “Mortality due to Covid-19 had, by far, the single greatest effect on the decline in life expectancy at birth between 2019 and 2020, overall.”
The new CDC figures indicate that 2020 saw the steepest single-year decline in life expectancy in the U.S. — from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 last year — since World War II.
“I myself had never seen a change this big except in the history books,” Elizabeth Arias, a CDC demographer and lead author of the new report, told the Wall Street Journal.
U.S. life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years in 2020, the biggest decline since World War II.
Life expectancy decreased an average of 0.22 years in peer countrieshttps://t.co/sCYQBWoh7v pic.twitter.com/18A4Mn0Ajk
— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) July 21, 2021
Given that they are more likely to work jobs with a high risk of coronavirus exposure and lack adequate healthcare, Black and Hispanic people have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and the resulting fall in life expectancy.
“Between 2019 and 2020, life expectancy decreased by 3 years for the Hispanic population (81.8 to 78.8),” the CDC found. “It decreased by 2.9 years for the non-Hispanic black population (74.7 to 71.8) and by 1.2 years for the non-Hispanic white population (78.8 to 77.6).”
Other factors contributing to the decline in life expectancy last year, according to the CDC, were drug overdoses, homicide, diabetes, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.
“It’s horrific,” Anne Case, a professor emeritus of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, told the Washington Post. “It’s not entirely unexpected given what we have already seen about mortality rates as the year went on, but that still doesn’t stop it from being just horrific, especially for non-Hispanic Blacks and for Hispanics.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the coronavirus with investigative journalist and author, Nina Burleigh.
“There are many ways to begin to tell the story of why more Americans died of Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, than in any other nation on earth,” Nina Burleigh writes in her new book ‘Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic’. “We could start at the Washington, DC hospital with doctors amputating the lower leg of the White House chief of security, a man who caught Covid in Donald Trump’s mask-free domain. Or we could talk to the families of forty-six veterans who died within days of each other in a Veterans Administration nursing home in Alabama.
The post On Contact: Virus appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
When working parents across the U.S. were sheltering at home during the pandemic, Lucrece Lester had already been working from home — running a small daycare business out of her house in Contra Costa, California. At the same time, her job put her, the kids she cared for, and her own family, on the front lines of the pandemic.
Lester recounted the painful process of shutting down her program twice during the pandemic. First she had to close when she got infected with COVID-19 in September: “A child brought COVID in. I contracted it, of course, and my entire family got COVID, and we were closed for about a month. And I was extremely sick … and it was just an experience that was just horrible,” she told Truthout.
Even while her program was closed, the kids were still on her mind. “I [was] also checking on the families, because I realize that there are some children who live with their elderly grandparents,” she said, “and just [have] that worry.” She eventually reopened after undertaking extensive cleaning of her workspace, she added, but shut down again last February due to a positive COVID test for the family of the same child from whom she contracted the virus originally.
“We’re put in these situations every single day,” she said, “where we’re here, providing care, opening our doors through this entire pandemic with little appreciation.”
When the pandemic swept through California last year, shuttering workplaces and schools across the state, many child care providers like Lester stayed open in whatever way they could. Licensed family child care homes — small neighborhood-based daycare programs located within the provider’s home — care for about 30 percent of the nearly 1 million California children enrolled in formal child care. (The rest are served by full-scale daycare centers.) Although they provide the same kind of infant care, preschool lessons and recreational activities that larger daycare centers do, home-based daycares tend to be less financially stable than conventional centers, yet also tend to have a more intimate relationship with the communities they serve. M of the more than 26,000 licensed individual providers are low-income women of color running tiny businesses serving local families.
After more than a year of lockdowns and temporary and permanent closures, advocates for child care workers fear the network of family child care homes, already badly strained before the onset of the pandemic, is in deep crisis.
The California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, which distributes payments and oversees licensed family child care providers, reports that an estimated 3,665 family child care home licenses have been lost between January 2020 and January 2021 in the state, a roughly 14 percent drop over the course of the year. (That does not include unlicensed family child care homes, which care for a smaller number of kids.) Meanwhile, though many licensed family child care homes that had closed early in the pandemic have been incrementally reopening in recent months, reopenings have lagged well behind closures: In the last half of 2020, the number of child care homes closing each month was well above 200, peaking at 1,330 last September, while the number of monthly reopenings hovered between 141 and 84.
The child care workforce as a whole — comprised of employees of child care programs — has also declined, from about 80,000 pre-pandemic to less than 64,500 as of April. Similarly, national data indicates between last February and October, the child care industry lost some 17 percent of its pre-pandemic workforce.
Many family child care providers are still devastated by the pandemic. Enrollments declined sharply as parents withdrew their kids. Some providers became sick themselves. Many providers faced challenges due to strict health protocols that required them to constantly sanitize their facilities. According to a survey conducted last July by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE), home-based providers across California saw a massive drop in enrollment and were often forced to lay off staff members.
Home-based child care providers, whose enrollment is typically limited to 12 or 14 kids, generally faced more severe financial damage from the pandemic, compared to daycare center operators: about half said they had been “unable to pay themselves at some point” — while only 28 percent of center-based providers did — and were more likely to report taking on personal credit card debt to stay open, or missing a mortgage payment. Of the providers who had shut down in California, 75 percent of family child care providers said they “felt their family’s health was at risk,” more than triple the rate of their center-based counterparts — not surprising, given that they live where they work.
Marcy Whitebook, director of the CSCCE, pointed out that family child care homes face “a double whammy,” because they are not only less financially resilient, but also face unprecedented logistical challenges in the COVID era, including keeping children safely separated in a space that is often just a cordoned-off area within a modest-sized house. “The job has really changed a lot because of the social distancing, because [of] the level of stress children are under,” especially when trying to keep rowdy toddlers separated from both teachers and each other.
Noreen Jackson, who has been running a family child care home serving South Central Los Angeles for about two decades, said that the cost of maintaining her small staff became unsustainable during the pandemic, as she and her staff ran virtual classes while keeping them separated throughout the day. “The children have to be spaced out, and then you have the teacher, that’s [my] employee, going into each section to actually teach … I was only able to give each child 15 minutes of learning at a time.”
Sometimes earning just a few hundred dollars per month, she says the payment collected from her current enrollment is “not allowing me to climb out of the barrel.” She finds ways to eat the rest of the costs herself, like when she shares the group meals with the kids to save money on food. “When the kids eat, I eat,” she said. “And [for] the staff — I can’t financially afford to pay for their food, so when we all eat, we all eat together. So that’s helping us financially.”
Since home-based child care providers are technically considered self-employed, they do not earn regular wages, but rather derive their income from the fees and subsidies paid by parents or by the state. The child care reimbursement rates for a typical family child care home in Los Angeles for fiscal year 2017 ranged from less than $60 per day for an infant to just over $40 a day for a school-age child. After paying the overhead costs like utilities and supplies, child care providers are in many cases left with the equivalent of a poverty wage, which is compounded by a lack of paid sick leave and other benefits.
The child care workers employed by daycare providers are earning extremely low wages as well. Roughly 17 percent of early childhood education workers in California are living in poverty — nearly seven times higher than the rate for elementary and middle school teachers.
Although the state has subsidized supplies for cleaning and infection control during the pandemic, many home-based child care providers have struggled with staffing costs. “Many of us have employees that we have to pay minimum wage and all of these other things too, and yet we don’t make the minimum wage,” Lester said. Her union, the newly certified Child Care Providers United (CCPU), managed to push the state to offer additional paid leave time for home-based child care providers, which kept her from losing compensation for the days she lost when her program was closed temporarily (normally home-based child care providers lack paid sick days, but are allowed only 10 paid “non-operational days” in a year). But, she added, “We should not have to fight for something that should be given to us.”
Long-term economic security is imperative for CCPU members. Without a stable income, retirement savings or even health insurance in some cases, Lester said, “We are definitely on our own … you have a lot of women who are in this profession, minority women, sometimes single women … and they’re working in this profession until they’re beyond retirement age, and it’s because there isn’t another alternative.”
The same system that fails to pay child care workers fairly simultaneously prices out many poor parents. In California, according to Kidsdata.org, licensed family child care homes tend to be cheaper than daycare centers, at about $11,700 a year, but still prohibitively costly for typical working poor families. Even parents who are eligible for subsidies may not be able to find a spot — many programs have long waiting lists. Pre-pandemic, there were no child care slots available for an estimated three-quarters of children aged 12 and under with working parents. According to CCPU’s research, prior to the pandemic, some 60 percent of Californians lived in a “child care desert” with no child care provider that they can afford within their zip codes. For families of color, the child care deficit is even worse at about 70 percent. The union warns that the crisis is likely to deepen now that many providers permanently shuttered during the pandemic.
Yet the early childhood education system in California may be due for a shake-up soon. One of the bright spots of the pandemic was the victory of the CCPU in a landmark statewide union election last year, providing about 43,000 licensed and unlicensed home-based child care providers with an official union. Organized jointly under AFSCME and SEIU — the two leading unions representing homecare workers and child care workers across the country — the CCPU is currently hammering out a first-ever union contract with the state government.
The union recently negotiated immediate relief for members, including extra payments of $600 per child and a $3,500 “stabilization stipend” for licensed providers who have suffered losses due to the pandemic.
In the long term, CCPU is demanding “child care for all” — a system of publicly funded early childhood education from infancy through school age, in which no subsidized parent would need to pay a fee. The union is advocating for a simultaneous dramatic expansion of the child care infrastructure, including programs that operate off-hours and serve kids who have special needs, while providers would in turn receive living wages along with health care, paid leave and retirement plans. Lastly, the union is calling for streamlining the state’s child care bureaucracy so families have a stable source of care, and payments to providers are not delayed.
Additional help may be coming from Washington soon. In addition to a funding infusion from the latest relief package passed by Congress earlier this year, the Biden administration’s American Families Plan promises to invest $425 billion in child care subsidies and early childhood education programs, with the aim of both expanding access and raising wages. Under the plan, most low- and middle-income families would pay no more than 7 percent of annual income for child care. In California, that would cover households earning up to $120,660 a year.
CCPU spokesperson Mila Myles said via email that the promise of a federal funding boost was a hopeful sign for a system “on the verge of collapse” — and that it would be a first step in a longer struggle.
“Family child care providers need transformational change with this funding,” Myles added, “not just bubblegum and scotch tape knitting together disparate programs and networks.”
Jackson thinks many child care providers like her will find a way to stay open despite the damage wrought by the pandemic, because the people who’ve relied on her the most — the hundreds of children she’s helped raise in her neighborhood — know the real value of her work. “Those kids are going to bring their kids back,” she said. “They’re going to seek the quality care provider, and they’ll understand the value that child care providers hold.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: “no one wants to work.” A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed “due to NO STAFF.”
Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.
A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year.
The post Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Don’t Want To Risk Dying appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Following the passage of stimulus packages with aid for workers like expanded unemployment benefits, politicians and business owners have wrung their hands over a supposed worker shortage as people refuse to return to work, as they say. A new report pushes back on that narrative and shows that actually, it’s more likely low wages offered by businesses that are causing workers to want to quit.
The report by One Fair Wage finds that 53 percent of restaurant workers have considered leaving their jobs during the pandemic, and 76 percent of restaurant workers cite low wages and tips as the reason for leaving the industry. Being paid a low wage was the most common reason for leaving by far; COVID-19 concerns were the next highest reason, with 55 percent of workers saying they were concerned about pandemic safety.
The post Report Finds Low Wages Make Food Workers Want To Quit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Last year, as the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers were infected with Covid-19 and the industry pushed claims of a meat shortage, companies in the U.S. exported more than $22 billion in meat products, continuing an upward trend in foreign sales since 2016.
Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2020 the value of American meat exports reached its highest level since 2014. Companies exporting meat products from the Midwest also fared well, increasing sales by about $500 million from 2019 to 2020.
The post As Meatpackers Stoked Fears Of A Shortage, Exports Increased appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Union and charity leaders have joined forces to urge the government to reform minimum wage laws affecting thousands of care workers.
Unison and Mencap have written jointly to the prime minister saying action is needed “urgently” to amend current rules, so sleep-in shifts, where staff have to stay away from home overnight, are defined as working time. The move follows a court decision last month that hours employees are asleep do not have to be paid at minimum wage rates, only the time they are awake and looking after people.
Unison and Mencap were on opposing sides during the long-running case, but in the letter to Boris Johnson both say they’re united in the same vision of a “properly funded care sector”.
They called on the government to ask the Low Pay Commission to investigate the issue of sleep-in pay and reassess the status of shifts, describing the Supreme Court judgment as a “huge blow to care workers”.
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said:
The crisis in social care is a betrayal of the most vulnerable in society.
The whole sector has been broken for years and the Government has ignored this. Proper wages for every hour staff work are a key part of much-needed reform.
The fact Unison and Mencap are united on this issue shows the strength of feeling across the care sector that enough is enough. Ministers must take heed and act now.
A government spokesperson said:
Care workers fulfil a vital role and they’ve worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic to support our most vulnerable.
We are committed to supporting them while delivering a care system fit for the future, and we will bring forward proposals for social care reform later this year.
We are providing councils with access to £1 billion in additional funding for social care in 2021-22, on top of a further package of support worth £3 billion to support local authorities and help address the additional pressures, including on adult social care, during the pandemic.
Mencap chief executive Edel Harris said:
Care workers are among the lowest paid in society, yet they do vital, highly-skilled work supporting our loved ones. They deserve better pay.
Boris Johnson promised to fix social care – paying fairly for overnight support is the first step.
Today, we’re joining Unison to urge the Prime Minister to change minimum wage legislation.
Ultimately, the Government’s reforms must include properly funding social care and improving pay to create a world-class social care system we can be proud of.
Over the past 440 days NHS staff have cared for 460,334 people in hospital with COVID.
Instead of a proper #nhspay rise, the government has thanked health workers with long delays and and insulting 1% offer.#NHS staff deserve better. Contact your MP: https://t.co/AhBpRbnuiu pic.twitter.com/bK8xRF9lGk
— UNISON Health (@UNISONOurNHS) April 15, 2021
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
We’d like to tell you a story of our struggles with Covid and our safety concerns—and how we ended up getting two city councils to enact hazard pay by law.
As grocery store workers, we were called heroes early in the pandemic—but over time, we felt less and less valued. Expendable. Yet we are not victims; we rose up to demand better. To paraphrase Fredrick Douglass, we certainly did not get everything we fought for, but we certainly fought for everything we got.
The two of us work at different companies—one at a Kroger-owned store in Seattle and the other at a suburban store run by PCC Markets, a small independent grocery chain.
The post Grocery Companies Denied Us Hazard Pay—So We Went Over Their Heads appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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At 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, just as the night shift started, 1,100 miners at the Warrior Met mines in Brookwood, Alabama officially went on strike. With the bosses refusing to come to the bargaining table in good faith, the workers are shutting down operations at all of Warrior Met’s mines and facilities to demand a better contract and an end to the company’s unfair labor practices.
Left Voice went to the picket lines at the moment the strike began to speak with the workers waging this inspiring fight. Just days before, we were covering the Amazon unionization drive in Bessemer, about 30 minutes away from the mines. We were on our way back to New York when we heard about the strike at Warrior Met. We turned the car around and went back to support this struggle and to amplify the voices of the workers putting their livelihoods on the line to fight for what they know they deserve.
Warrior Met stretches for miles upon miles of winding back roads in Brookwood — the facilities include every part of the mining process, from cleaning to mining to maintenance to training new miners. Workers at every point are on strike, standing united against a company that is happy to put their lives at risk in order to turn immense profits. They are demanding a new contract that will increase wages and offer workers urgently-needed health insurance and other benefits.
This is the first contract that the union will have negotiated in the five years since the mine declared bankruptcy and Warrior Met bought out the previous owner, Walter Energy, in 2016. The contract the bosses crafted at that time significantly cut the workers’ wages and benefits, including their pensions; the workers were forced to accept it or risk losing their jobs as a result of the buyout. But since then, due solely to the labor of the workers, the company has shipped out even more coal and raked in record profits over the last five years. They even managed to turn a profit in 2020 after forcing the state to classify the miners as essential in order to keep the mines open. Nevertheless, the new contract the bosses are offering today actually aims to lower wages and make further cuts to protections and benefits.
The workers are justifiably disgusted by the bosses’ maneuvers, and it shows. Many of them remember what working conditions were like before Warrior Met took control. An older worker tells us that he made more in 2009 than he does now in 2021. “It’s like we’re just numbers to them,” another worker tells us, shaking his head. He explains that management rakes in million-dollar salaries and bonuses each year while they tell the workers putting their bodies on the line each day that they can’t pay them any more. CEO Walter J. Scheller III made $4,007,049, $1,225,091 of which was made up of bonuses. These miners work six, sometimes seven days a week on 12-hour shifts, just to make ends meet. Miles, one of the miners, tells us that he works anywhere from 155 to 170 hours every two weeks.
Nearly every worker who speaks to us tells us that the hours are insufferable. They’re at the mine from sun up to sun down, with little time to spend with their families or do anything but rest up for their next shift. Some of them commute upwards of 70 miles to get to work and another 70 miles to get back home. As Miles tells us, “I have a four year old daughter, love of my life, and I’ve been with the company five years now. I come off the road and went to work for her here, and I’ve missed her everything. I live at the mine. All we’re demanding is what everyone else is getting: a share of, a piece of the pie. We just want our piece.”
The contract the miners have now offers a pitiful amount of paid time off and just three guaranteed holidays a year: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving. The rest of their days off are taken as “floating holidays.” So while their families are gathered to celebrate, the Warrior Met workers are hundreds of feet below ground, forced to take a day off some other time, if they’re allowed to take off at all — all so that the mines stay open, the coal keeps flowing, and the bosses’ profits keep growing.
As if this were not enough, even with the union these jobs are precarious. The miners work on a “four strike” policy, which means that if they miss four days of work within 15 weeks, they are automatically fired. It doesn’t matter why — even a doctor’s note doesn’t suffice to excuse them from their shift. One worker told us that when he had to stay home to take care of an urgently ill family member, he still got saddled with a strike on his record. He said that if it weren’t for the union, he would have been fired a long time ago.
The four-strike policy even extends to injuries incurred on the job. One worker tells us the story of a coworker who got badly hurt in the mine and was taken to the hospital for stitches; after he was released from the hospital, his boss forced him to go back to work or risk another strike on his record. But this is commonplace; nearly all the workers at the mines — some who have worked there for nearly thirty years and others who have worked there for just seven weeks — have story after story of workplace injuries.
And it’s no wonder: they perform some of the highest-risk jobs around. The Warrior Met mines are two of the deepest vertical shaft coal mines in North America. These miners work 2,000 feet below the ground day after day. The mines also produce a significant quantity of methane gas; this makes them valuable for profit-hungry natural gas speculators, but also more dangerous for the miners. In 2001, thirteen miners were killed in a huge gas explosion. A couple of the workers we spoke to remember the event and the coworkers they lost. They say the company was aware at that time that working conditions were deadly, but after the explosion, not much has changed.
These miners know that they do some of the most dangerous work in the country — and they also know they aren’t being fairly compensated for the risks they take six days a week, 8-12 hours a day. Full of emotion, an older worker speaks about the conditions in the mines and the role the union has played in keeping the miners safe. “We fought for our rights. Because the place we work in is a dangerous place. The union backs us … if it wasn’t for them, that would be a death house. It is a death house.”
The workers at Warrior Met tell us again and again that they aren’t asking for anything but what they deserve: they want a living wage, benefits, and an end to the company’s deathly and exploitative labor practices. But they also know that management doesn’t care about their jobs or their lives — if they don’t stand up for their rights now, the company will just continue with attack after attack until the workers have nothing left. That’s why this contract is so important and why the workers are carrying out this strike. And that’s why they have pledged to continue until their demands are met, even as management does everything it can to break the strike. The workers tell us that the company is getting ready to hire scabs, and has already called in private (and armed) security guards and even Alabama state troopers to patrol the grounds.
Even with the stories of life in the mines and a difficult struggle ahead, the workers are beginning this strike with high spirits and a remarkable sense of unity. Every single worker welcomed us and wanted to share their story. For many of them, this is their first strike, but they come from a long tradition of militant miners. “Everything … all this was all built on mining. This is not something that just popped up, this has been mining over generations. All of our fathers and grandfathers grew up, we grew up with mines, you know,” Miles tells us. Even though all the coal mined there is exported to other places, the community of Brookwood is sustained by the Warrior Met mines and the workers who spend their days and nights working there. The workers know that they have the solidarity of their community in this fight.
They also know they are united in their fight. Worker after worker tells us that they feel like they can win because they’re standing up to Warrior Met together. Workers who have been at the mines for seven months are striking alongside workers who have been there for over 30 years. As one young miner told us, “We got a lot of experienced miners over here, they’ve been here 10+ years, 20+ years, some of them. They got to experience [when conditions were better], and that’s why they’re out here, striking with us.” With that, they are prepared to stay on the picket lines for as long as it takes to reach a fair contract and to win their demands.
The strike at Warrior Met begins as the final results are being tallied for the Amazon union drive in Bessemer. All eyes are on Alabama at this moment as it becomes the epicenter of labor struggle in the United States. Success in these struggles will — and have already — encourage other sectors to fight against the attacks of the bosses and their representatives. From Amazon to Warrior Met, workers are waking up to the fact that they are essential and that the bosses quite literally profit off of their lives. Victories in these struggles will be invaluable examples of how the working class can rely on its own strength to fight back and fight for even a small portion of what it deserves. Solidarity with the miners strike!
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A key group of essential workers in New York State are strangely still unable to get vaccinated: farmworkers.
As of March 10, anyone 60 years and older can sign up for the vaccine in the Empire State. Grocery, restaurant, delivery workers and other “public-facing” employees in various nodes of the food industry have been eligible since late February.
But farmworkers — including those milking cows, feeding chickens and picking tomatoes in close quarters inside greenhouses — are still not among those who may sign up for vaccination. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, an associate professor of food studies and nutrition at Syracuse University, argues that this is nonsensical. “There’s really no job that could be more essential than farm workers,” Minkoff-Zern told Syracuse.com.
Exclusion from vaccine eligibility is just the latest in what New York farmworkers, many of whom are migrants, say is emblematic of how they’ve been treated throughout — but also long before — the pandemic.
“We’re called ‘essential workers,’ but they don’t actually take us into account,” dairy worker Luis Jiménez told Truthout, speaking in Spanish. Jiménez is a co-founder of the worker-led organization of undocumented dairy workers, Alianza Agrícola. He says it’s a hopeful sign that people over 60 years old now qualify for the vaccine. But it doesn’t do anything to help Jiménez, or New York dairy workers in general, whom he estimates are between 40 and 50, on average.
Some farmworkers may technically qualify now on account of certain health conditions unrelated to employment type, like diabetes or high body mass index (BMI). But many farmworkers “don’t know they have a problem with blood sugar, high blood pressure and other conditions,” he said, since many workers have not had access to a medical screening because they have no health insurance or no access to an affordable doctor’s visit. The health disparity is particularly stark at some farms in Upstate New York, where workers may live far from a medical clinic and have no access to transportation.
Jiménez says although he and other dairy workers do not have direct contact with the public every day, they are required to work in close quarters with others when receiving shipments, dealing with chemicals and milking and caring for the cows. The tendency of workers to be housed together on-site poses additional risks, as social distancing in motel rooms and bunkhouses is all but impossible. And workers he organizes with say their bosses don’t have a protocol in the case of an outbreak. “We should know the plan on the ranch if someone gets sick, but it’s not clear,” Jiménez said.
And although cases are falling in many places across the U.S., the virus appears to still be on the rise among agricultural workers in particular. Since Documented reported that farmworkers had been removed from Phase 1B vaccine eligibility in New York on March 2, COVID-19 cases among farmworkers rose from 496,000 to 541,000, as of March 15, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index. Over that same time period, agricultural workers testing positive for COVID-19 in New York State rose from an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 — signaling that as many as one-quarter of agricultural workers in the state may have gotten sick.
By contrast, other states — including California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan and Wisconsin — have already announced plans to vaccinate farmworkers. California and Texas have the highest total number of cases among agricultural workers, according to the Purdue tracker. But the fatality rate in New York State is almost double that of California and Texas, at 2.8 percent.
The risk to New York’s agricultural workers and other essential workers in the food system is likely to increase as the growing season sets in and workers from outside the state head to New York. An estimated 8,000 farmworkers may be bound for New York State farms in the coming weeks, Syracuse.com reports.
Crispín Hernández, a former dairy worker and organizer with the Workers’ Center of Central New York, is in close contact with farmworkers across the state. He says working conditions on many farms aren’t much different from before the pandemic. “The bosses have not taken responsibility,” Hernández said. “Workers are showing up to work and working as if nothing had happened,” without health and safety protocols or education efforts around COVID-19, he described in general terms.
Among the largest outbreaks in the state so far occurred at Green Empire Farms, in Oneida, New York, where 171 of 300 vegetable pickers tested positive for COVID-19 in May 2020. Following an investigation into the outbreak, the U.S. Department of Labor found the company responsible for four “serious” violations of workplace safety, for which they were fined $26,988.
The violations do not make reference to COVID-19 specifically, but describe hazards relevant to an airborne disease like the coronavirus. One violation describes “Greenhouse #1” and “Greenhouse #2” as 820 feet wide by 2,625 feet long with “zero personnel doors.” Green Empire Farms has contested all four violations and the investigation remains open.
As the Observer-Dispatch reported at the time, the produce company implemented social distancing measures on May 5, but no changes were announced regarding the company’s housing of employees in nearby motels, where they were assigned to sleep four to a room. The Department of Labor denied a Freedom of Information Act request for inspection reports detailing the current housing conditions for workers, explaining that it was “information that could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
Meanwhile, as of March 12, neither Hernández nor Jiménez said they personally knew a single farmworker in New York State who has been able to get the vaccine, even taking into account that some may qualify based on age or health conditions.
The New York Farm Bureau has also voiced frustration with farmworkers’ exclusion from Phase 1B, mentioning concerns about risky conditions in worker housing specifically. In January, New York State assemblywoman Donna Lupardo and state Sen. Michelle Hinchey sent a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, encouraging the state to make the vaccine accessible to agricultural workers as soon as possible. The New York State Health Department told WBNG the decision not to make farmworkers eligible was in line with the state’s overall vaccine rollout: “As vaccine supply from the federal government has expanded under President Biden’s leadership, we have opened up eligibility for groups of the 1B population in tranches — just as we did for 1A healthcare workers — however, demand still far outstrips supply, and this is an ongoing process.” The next eligibility wave in New York is on March 17, and the department makes no mention of farmworkers.
Hernández says ensuring agricultural workers are healthy and safe will take much more than including them in Phase 1B, though he says it is an essential first step. Farm owners and rural health clinics will also need to ramp up education efforts around the virus and vaccination in workers’ first languages, he said.
On March 15, workers across New York City launched a hunger strike in support of the passage of a pair of laws known as the Fund Excluded Workers Act that would create a $3.5 billion fund for workers excluded from federal relief, including undocumented workers, by taxing New York billionaires. Hernández says upstate farmworkers won’t be participating in the strike, but they will continue to mobilize in solidarity with essential workers across the state ahead of the state’s April 1 budget deadline.
Agricultural workers are also advocating for the New York Hero Act, which would require more rigorous health standards in workplaces and worker housing across the state to ostensibly prevent outbreaks like what happened at Green Empire Farms. The bill, which advanced to the State Assembly on March 1, would require all workplaces to establish an “airborne disease exposure prevention plan,” including protocols around testing, disinfection, social distancing and personal protective equipment. It would also outlaw retaliation against workers who express safety concerns related to airborne disease, with all protections carrying a $1,000 to $20,000 fine for employers who fail to comply.
At a recent online rally in support of the bill, Karines Reyes, a nurse and state assemblywoman representing the Bronx, said workplaces need protocols akin to those at hospitals, especially since future public health crises loom large. “Other industries in our state who aren’t in the health care industry have no idea how to protect themselves, how to protect their workers and how to protect the community against an airborne communicable disease,” she said. “COVID has shown us that we need to be proactive in protecting our workers.”
As they await vaccine eligibility and push for new state laws, Hernández says farmworkers want the public to know how much they’ve suffered through the pandemic — and before it. “We want people, for example, when they eat a piece of fruit or take a sip of milk, to be aware of who cultivated the nutrients they’re consuming,” he says, and to realize who is paying taxes that help fund rural schools, for instance, all while remaining at risk of contracting the virus. “It’s not new what’s happening during COVID,” Hernández says. “The workers are in the shadows.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Since the start of the pandemic, the most terrifying task in health care was thought to be when a doctor put a breathing tube down the trachea of a critically ill covid patient.
Those performing such “aerosol-generating” procedures, often in an intensive care unit, got the best protective gear even if there wasn’t enough to go around, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. And for anyone else working with covid patients, until a month ago, a surgical mask was considered sufficient.
A new wave of research now shows that several of those procedures were not the most hazardous. Recent studies have determined that a basic cough produces about 20 times more particles than intubation, a procedure one doctor likened to the risk of being next to a nuclear reactor.
Other new studies show that patients with covid simply talking or breathing, even in a well-ventilated room, could make workers sick in the CDC-sanctioned surgical masks. The studies suggest that the highest overall risk of infection was among the front-line workers — many of them workers of color — who spent the most time with patients earlier in their illness and in sub-par protective gear, not those working in the covid ICU.
“The whole thing is upside down the way it is currently framed,” said Dr. Michael Klompas, a Harvard Medical School associate professor who called aerosol-generating procedures a “misnomer” in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“It’s a huge mistake,” he said.
The growing body of studies showing aerosol spread of covid-19 during choir practice, on a bus, in a restaurant and at gyms have caught the eye of the public and led to widespread interest in better masks and ventilation.
Yet the topic has been highly controversial within the health care industry. For over a year, international and U.S. nurse union leaders have called for health workers caring for possible or confirmed covid patients to have the highest level of protection, including N95 masks.
But a widespread group of experts have long insisted that N95s be reserved for those performing aerosol-generating procedures and that it’s safe for front-line workers to care for covid patients wearing less-protective surgical masks.
Such skepticism about general aerosol exposure within the health care setting have driven CDC guidelines, supported by national and California hospital associations.
The guidelines still say a worker would not be considered “exposed” to covid-19 after caring for a sick covid patient while wearing a surgical mask. Yet in recent months, Klompas and researchers in Israel have documented that workers using a surgical mask and face shield have caught covid during routine patient care.
The CDC said in an email that N95 “respirators have remained preferred over facemasks when caring for patients or residents with suspected or confirmed” covid, “but unfortunately, respirators have not always been available to healthcare personnel due to supply shortages.”
New research by Harvard and Tulane scientists found that people who tend to be super-spreaders of covid — the 20% of people who emit 80% of the tiny particles — tend to be obese or older, a population more likely to live in elder care or be hospitalized.
When highly infectious, such patients emit three times more tiny aerosol particles (about a billion a day) than younger people. A sick super-spreader who is simply breathing can pose as much or more risk to health workers as a coughing patient, said David Edwards, a Harvard faculty associate in bioengineering and an author of the study.
Chad Roy, a co-author who studied primates with covid, said the emitted aerosols shrink in size when the monkeys are most contagious at about Day Six of infection. Those particles are more likely to hang in the air longer and are easier to inhale deep into the lungs, said Roy, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine.
The study clarifies the grave risks faced by nursing home workers, of whom more than 546,000 have gotten covid and 1,590 have died, per reports nursing homes filed to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid since mid-May.
Taken together, the research suggests that health care workplace exposure was “much bigger” than what the CDC defined when it prioritized protecting those doing “aerosol-generating” procedures, said Dr. Donald Milton, who reviewed the studies but was not involved in any of them.
“The upshot is that it’s inhalation” of tiny airborne particles that leads to infection, said Milton, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health who studies how respiratory viruses are spread, “which means loose-fitting surgical masks are not sufficient.”
On Feb. 10, the CDC updated its guidance to health care workers, deleting a suggestion that wearing a surgical mask while caring for covid patients was acceptable and urging workers to wear an N95 or a “well-fitting face mask,” which could include a snug cloth mask over a looser surgical mask.
Yet the update came after most of at least 3,500 U.S. health care workers had already died of covid, as documented by KHN and The Guardian in the Lost on the Frontline project.
The project is more comprehensive than any U.S. government tally of health worker fatalities. Current CDC data shows 1,391 health care worker deaths, which is 200 fewer than the total staff covid deaths nursing homes report to Medicare.
More than half of the deceased workers whose occupation was known were nurses or in health care support roles. Such staffers often have the most extensive patient contact, tending to their IVs and turning them in hospital beds; brushing their hair and sponge-bathing them in nursing homes. Many of them — 2 in 3 — were workers of color.
Two anesthetists in the United Kingdom — doctors who perform intubations in the ICU — saw data showing that non-ICU workers were dying at outsize rates and began to question the notion that “aerosol-generating” procedures were the riskiest.
Dr. Tim Cook, an anesthetist with the Royal United Hospitals Bath, said the guidelines singling out those procedures were based on research from the first SARS outbreak in 2003. That framework includes a widely cited 2012 study that warned that those earlier studies were “very low” quality and said there was a “significant research gap” that needed to be filled.
But the research never took place before covid-19 emerged, Cook said, and key differences emerged between SARS and covid-19. In the first SARS outbreak, patients were most contagious at the moment they arrived at a hospital needing intubation. Yet for this pandemic, he said, studies in early summer began to show that peak contagion occurred days earlier.
Cook and his colleagues dove in and discovered in October that the dreaded practice of intubation emitted about 20 times fewer aerosols than a cough, said Dr. Jules Brown, a U.K. anesthetist and another author of the study. Extubation, also considered an “aerosol-generating” procedure, generated slightly more aerosols but only because patients sometimes cough when the tube is removed.
Since then, researchers in Scotland and Australia have validated those findings in a paper pre-published on Feb. 10, showing that two other aerosol-generating procedures were not as hazardous as talking, heavy breathing or coughing.
Brown said initial supply shortages of PPE led to rationing and steered the best respiratory protection to anesthetists and intensivists like himself. Now that it is known emergency room and nursing home workers are also at extreme risk, he said, he can’t understand why the old guidelines largely stand.
“It was all a big house of cards,” he said. “The foundation was shaky and in my mind it’s all fallen down.”
Asked about the research, a CDC spokesperson said via email: “We are encouraged by the publication of new studies aiming to address this issue and better identify which procedures in healthcare settings may be aerosol generating. As studies accumulate and findings are replicated, CDC will update its list of which procedures are considered [aerosol-generating procedures].”
Cook also found that doctors who perform intubations and work in the ICU were at lower risk than those who worked on general medical floors and encountered patients at earlier stages of the disease.
In Israel, doctors at a children’s hospital documented viral spread from the mother of a 3-year-old patient to six staff members, although everyone was masked and distanced. The mother was pre-symptomatic and the authors said in the Jan. 27 study that the case is possible “evidence of airborne transmission.”
Klompas, of Harvard, made a similar finding after he led an in-depth investigation into a September outbreak among patients and staff at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
There, a patient who was tested for covid two days in a row — with negative results — wound up developing the virus and infecting numerous staff members and patients. Among them were two patient care technicians who treated the patient while wearing surgical masks and face shields. Klompas and his team used genome sequencing to connect the sick workers and patients to the same outbreak.
CDC guidelines don’t consider caring for a covid patient in a surgical mask to be a source of “exposure,” so the technicians’ cases and others might have been dismissed as not work-related.
The guidelines’ heavy focus on the hazards of “aerosol-generating” procedures has meant that hospital administrators assumed that those in the ICU got sick at work and those working elsewhere were exposed in the community, said Tyler Kissinger, an organizer with the National Union of Healthcare Workers in Northern California.
“What plays out there is there is this disparity in whose exposures get taken seriously,” he said. “A phlebotomist or environmental services worker or nursing assistant who had patient contact — just wearing a surgical mask and not an N95 — weren’t being treated as having been exposed. They had to keep coming to work.”
Dr. Claire Rezba, an anesthesiologist, has scoured the web and tweeted out the accounts of health care workers who’ve died of covid for nearly a year. Many were workers of color. And fortunately, she said, she’s finding far fewer cases now that many workers have gotten the vaccine.
“I think it’s pretty obvious that we did a very poor job of recommending adequate PPE standards for all health care workers,” she said. “I think we missed the boat.”
California Healthline politics correspondent Samantha Young contributed to this report.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
And my own looming job crisis. Continue reading
The post Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
The American Rescue Plan (ARP) was passed in the House this past week and now heads to the Senate, where it will no doubt be changed before it becomes law some time in mid-March. The current unemployment benefits expire on March 14.
While we don’t know what the final bill will look like, at least now we can get an idea of what is in it. Overall, as expected, the provisions in the bill will help to provide some financial assistance to some people, but they won’t solve the crises we face. And the Biden administration is backtracking on promises made on the campaign trail.
As Alan Macleod writes, Biden has abandoned raising the minimum wage, ending student debt and the promised $2,000 checks. His focus is on forcing people back to work and school even as new, more infectious and more lethal variants of the virus causing COVID-19 threaten another surge in cases and deaths. There is only one promise Biden appears to be keeping, and that is one he made to wealthy donors at the start of his campaign when he said, “nothing would fundamentally change.”
Despite this, people are organizing across the country for their rights to economic security and health and an end to discrimination. These struggles are necessary as we cannot expect either of the capitalist parties to act in the people’s interest. But together, we can demand that one of the wealthiest nations on earth upholds its responsibility to provide the basic necessities for its people. This is consistent with a People(s)-Centered Human Rights approach.
What is and isn’t in the ARP?
The current version of the American Rescue Plan contains provisions that would provide money to people earning less than $75,000 per year. One is the one-time $1,400 check. Another is raising the tax credit for families with children, which will benefit those who file tax returns but leave out the millions of poor people who don’t.
The ARP will also extend unemployment benefits until the end of August and increase the enhanced benefits to $400/week. Unlike the previous bills, this one includes workers who left their jobs because of unsafe conditions and those who had to leave work or reduce their hours to care for children. The benefits are retroactive for some workers who were denied benefits.
While this will temporarily improve the economic situation for many people, it is not a plan to address the poverty crisis in the United States nor is it sufficient to support people through the current recession and pandemic. People will still face barriers to receiving the aid. Instead of making the programs something that people have to apply for, the government could provide monthly checks to everyone with incomes under a certain amount automatically. Numerous examples show that putting money into people’s hands, such as through a guaranteed income or giving unrestricted lump sums, improves their well-being.
An increase in the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, a promise of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, is in the House version of the bill, but it will not be in the Senate version unless the White House or Democrats intervene, which they seem unwilling to do. The minimum wage increase is being blocked by the Senate Parliamentarian, but the Vice President could override the decision or the Democrats could take steps to work around the Parliamentarian, as has been done in the past on other issues. They are choosing not to take this stand.
The ARP also fails to extend the eviction moratorium, which will expire at the end of March. While it does contain funds for rental assistance, they are being given to the Treasury Department to disburse to the states, so it is not clear how these funds will help people directly. A recent study found that corporate landlords received hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks last year but continued to evict thousands of people. When the eviction moratorium ends, those who cannot pay the back rent risk being evicted.
The health benefits in the ARP are not only inadequate but they are set to further enrich the medical-industrial complex, as I explain in “Biden’s Health Plan Shifts Even More Public Dollars into Private Hands.” The ARP is fulfilling a laundry list provided by private health insurers, hospitals and medical lobbying groups. It will subsidize the cost of insurance premiums but leave those who have health insurance still struggling to pay out-of-pocket costs and at risk of bankruptcy if they have a serious accident or illness.
And finally, another group that is being left out is those who have student debt. I spoke with Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice on Clearing the FOG this week. He said the current student loan burden is likely over $2 trillion and that the vast majority of debtors will never be able to repay . Collinge argues that it is imperative the Biden administration cancel student debt using an executive order, which he has the power to do, rather than leaving it to Congress. If the President does it, then the debt disappears (tax payers have already paid for the loans), but if Congress does it, which is unlikely to happen, they would have to offset the ‘cost’ through cuts to other programs or by raising taxes. Collinge also explains that cancelling student debt would be a significant economic stimulus.
All in all, the current ARP is another attempt by Congress to throw more money at a failed system that doesn’t change anything fundamentally. We must demand more.
The case for wealth redistribution
Lee Camp recently made the case for a massive change in the direction of wealth redistribution based on a new study that finds “the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality has grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020.” This amounts to over $1,000 per month per person in wealth that has been redistributed to the top or almost $14,000 per year.
It is time to reverse the direction of this wealth redistribution from one of consolidation at the top to one that creates greater wealth equality. This could be accomplished in a number of ways. In the middle of the last century, it was done through extremely high taxes on the wealthy and government investment in programs for housing and education. Camp advocates for taking all wealth over $10 million and redistributing it to the bottom 99.5% in a way that benefits the poorest the most.
Raising wages is another way to redistribute wealth. Professor Richard Wolff explains there are ways to raise wages without harming small businesses by providing federal support to them to offset the costs. Think of it as a reversal of the hundreds of billions in subsidies that have been given to large corporations, which they use to buy up and inflate the value of their stocks, to the small and medium businesses. It is smaller businesses that are most likely to keep wealth in their communities, unlike large corporations that extract wealth, and are the major drivers of the US economy. Small businesses alone comprise 44% of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
If workers earned higher wages, it would also save the government money that is currently spent on social safety net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps for low-wage workers. These programs enable large corporations to profit off worker exploitation, especially Walmart, Amazon and McDonalds, according to the DC Report.
Robert Urie points out that another price society pays for the gaping wealth divide is state violence and incarceration. He writes, “At $24 per hour, the inflation and productivity adjusted minimum wage in the U.S. from 1968, workers were still being added to employer payrolls. The point: $24 – $7.25 = $16.75 per hour plus a rate of profit is one measure of economic expropriation from low wage workers in the U.S. Maintaining an unjust public order is critical to the functioning of this exploitative political economy. Most of the prison population in the U.S. comes from neighborhoods where the minimum wage affects livelihoods.” Imagine the many ways that greater economic security would positively benefit families and communities.
People are fighting back
In our current political environment, we cannot expect Congress and the White House to do what is necessary to protect the health and security of people without a struggle that forces them to do so. There are many ways people are fighting locally for their rights through resistance and creating alternative systems. Here are a few current examples.
On February 16, fast food workers in 15 cities went on strike to demand $15 an hour. Other low-wage workers joined them. Last Monday, in Chicago, Black owners of McDonalds franchises began a 90-day protest outside of the McDonalds headquarters because of discrimination against them. They say, “McDonald’s has denied the Black franchisees the same opportunities as white operators and continually steer them to economically depressed and dangerous areas with low volume sales.”
In Bessemer, Alabama, workers are conducting a vote to start the first union for Amazon employees. If they succeed, it will be an amazing feat considering that Alabama is a right-to-work state and Amazon is doing what it can to stop them. In Arizona, another right-to-work state, workers at two universities are leading an effort to unionize all higher education employees in the state. They are concerned that federal funding provided to keep universities open will not be used in a way that protects all workers. They cite recent practices that prioritize the financial well-being of the universities over worker health and safety.
Some workers are taking power in other ways. Bus drivers in Silicon Valley organized with the support of community members to stop fare collections and only allow boarding in the rear, moves designed to aid passengers during the recession and protect drivers during the pandemic. They were committed to doing this whether management agreed to it or not. Others are building worker-owned platform cooperatives to challenge platform corporations that exploit their labor such as Spotify and Uber.
Others are working to meet people’s basic needs through mutual aid. Food not Bombs has been feeding people throughout the pandemic in various cities. In Santa Cruz, CA, they are out every day to feed the houseless despite being hassled by the city and moved around. A rural area in Canada that includes 65,000 people pulled together it local resources to make sure everyone is fed through a food policy council of elected officials, organizations and stakeholders. They reallocated their budget from events and travel to food security. They opened their seed banks to support local gardening efforts and commandeered unused buildings as spaces for assembling food boxes that were delivered to those in need.
These examples illustrate the tremendous power people have to force changes and create support networks in their communities when they organize together. While we should continue to expose and pressure Congress and the White House to invest in programs that provide for people’s needs, that is a function of government after all, we also need to organize in our communities to build popular power and create alternative systems that will slowly build the society we need.
The post Small Acts Can Become A Power No Government Can Suppress first appeared on Dissident Voice.Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.
— Howard Zinn
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A field guide to our threadbare social safety net. Continue reading
The post How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
COVID-19 is having disproportionate impacts on our nation’s two million farmworkers, who as essential workers continue to toil in the fields despite numerous deadly outbreaks and no federal COVID-related workplace protections.
COVID-19 has pulled back the veil on the strikingly poor workplace conditions of these essential workers, built by decades of insufficient farmworker health and safety policy, poor immigration policy, and limited health care access. As a consequence, at least 86,900 food workers have tested positive for COVID-19 — but with uneven data collection, exacerbated by businesses’ lack of transparency over workplace outbreaks and workers’ avoidance of testing due to fear of losing income, the figures we have are likely an underestimate.
A new analysis does note that each additional percentage point of farmworkers per overall population in a county was associated with 5.79 more deaths from COVID-19 — but did not contribute to more deaths per 100,000 residents. The researchers concluded, “farmworkers may face unique risks of COVID-19 beyond issues of language, insurance, or economics.”
The Biden Administration must issue a federal standard to protect workers from COVID-19 that includes farmworkers. But beyond COVID-specific actions for farmworkers, the Biden Administration also needs to urgently address the underlying health and workplace conditions that pre-dated COVID.
One key way the Biden Administration can start to correct the course is by enforcing and safeguarding the Worker Protection Standard (WPS), the main federal regulation that protects workers from pesticide exposure. Pesticide exposure weakens the respiratory, immune, and nervous systems — exacerbating farmworkers’ COVID-19 risks.
Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Trump Administration made various efforts to weaken or eliminate key provisions of the WPS, which had been revised and improved at the end of the Obama Administration. The WPS is an outlier in occupational health standards — because pesticides, although they are a workplace hazard, are regulated by the EPA, instead of by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which covers occupational health in every other industry. This is just one example of how farmworkers are exempted from basic protections afforded to other workers.
Many of the Trump Administration’s efforts to weaken the WPS were thwarted by advocacy and litigation by environmental and farmworker groups. However, one of the Trump Administration’s proposed rollbacks of the WPS remains: the gutting of the Application Exclusion Zone (AEZ), which required pesticide handlers to stop applying pesticides if someone is near the area being sprayed. If the final Trump AEZ rule goes into effect, farmworkers in neighboring fields, children in school playgrounds or in their backyards, and rural residents going about their day may be in close proximity to where pesticides are being sprayed, as long as they’re not on the same property, without any requirement that the applicator suspend spraying. More than 1 billion pounds of pesticides, designed to kill insects, weeds, and other pests, are applied to U.S. agricultural fields every year. In addition to acute poisonings, pesticides are also associated with long-term health harms including various cancers, developmental and reproductive harm, and neurological damage, for both farmworkers and community members who are chronically exposed to pesticides.
In December 2020, Farmworker Justice and Earthjustice, acting on behalf of a coalition of groups including Migrant Clinicians Network, sued the EPA to stop these changes. An injunction is currently in place preventing the changes from being implemented as the case proceeds — but the Biden Administration has a responsibility to protect these workers, rather than rely on courts. And the issue of pesticide drift on nearby properties is just one of the many challenges that farmworkers face when it comes to pesticide exposure.
These hard-working farmworkers, upon whom we all depend for the food we eat, deserve immediate and effective protections. The new Administration has a unique opportunity to take advantage of renewed public understanding of the exploitation of farmworkers, to provide long-overdue workplace protections to keep essential workers safe, and to transform our food systems to ensure healthy workplaces, neighborhoods, and the environment, by:
These are just some of the essential steps the new Administration can take to protect farmworkers from the extreme hazards of their workplaces. Much more needs to be done about the myriad factors that negatively impact farmworker health, like poverty, immigration status, language barriers, and fear of retaliation.
COVID-19 has shown that a strong public health system and a functional food system require basic health and human rights for all of our neighbors, especially those typically left out. The Biden Administration has a duty and an opportunity to improve our systems — and consequently improve our nation’s health and well-being.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
During the election campaign that led him to the White House, Joe Biden promised swift reversal of Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies. On his first day in office, President Biden signed executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, reverse the Muslim ban and safeguard DACA, a temporary programme that protects some migrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Only a week into his term, the bold plans for reform began to falter. Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium was barred by a judge. The plan to reunite separated migrant families is delayed. And Biden’s most ambitious proposal, amnesty for most of the 11 million undocumented, is already in doubt. Meanwhile, in the midst of a raging pandemic, Democrats are calling for more targeted relief for undocumented immigrants who act as essential workers.
The precedent for immigration relief for workers on the frontlines of COVID-19 came from the other side of the Atlantic a month earlier. In late December 2020, the French government announced that it was fast-tracking citizenship applications for immigrants working as essential workers during the pandemic, in order to reward them for their special service to French citizens. The naturalisation applications of these immigrants already on the path to citizenship would be expedited, but they would still go through the required steps, including proving their integration into French society.
France’s new citizenship exception would seem to offer a progressive vision for the new Biden administration. The spectacle of white nationalists storming the U.S. Capitol on 6 January, with their belligerent messaging of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, redoubled the calls by liberals to undo or reverse Trump’s immigration policies. Many continued to advocate specifically for immigrant essential workers.
However, it would be wrong to follow this vision of immigration policy. To address the entrenched racism exposed and exacerbated — but not created — by the Trump administration, different tactics are required. The demands for the Biden administration should reach much further than reforms that entrench the system itself, whether a path to citizenship for the most deserving essential workers or protecting DACA, which is just a temporary programme with no path to citizenship.
France’s fast-tracked naturalisation process undoubtedly improves the lives of a few immigrants, providing them with security and benefits that they would not otherwise have. Notably, these are not undocumented immigrants but those already on the path to citizenship. Yet, it is a mistake to uncritically celebrate the French government and its pandemic-era generosity.
While a few hundred, or even, eventually, thousand immigrants may become French citizens in recognition of their “commitment to the nation”, this policy makes no change to the country’s harsh immigration system. By recognising essential migrant workers, the French state is primarily making a statement about how it values the lives of citizens who require care. U.S. observers are pointing to France as an example of inclusive immigration policies when France, like the U.S., is actually waging a racist war against immigrants.
As with the exceptional humanitarian measures the French state has instituted in the past, which simultaneously justify criminalising and deporting a majority of immigrants, these policies draw attention away from the precarious conditions in which the majority of immigrants live — which include an increasing number of informal camps in the heart of Paris.
The French immigration system is increasingly draconian, under pressure from the extreme rightwing populist National Rally party, formerly known as the National Front, and the turn to the right in Europe more generally. President Macron imposed a new law in 2018 that cut the timeframe to legally apply for asylum — with the goal of deporting people more quickly — and doubled the amount of time that immigrants could be kept in detention. In 2018, France detained more migrants than any other EU country.
Like the U.S., France is home to legions of undocumented immigrants who work in exploitative conditions that now expose them to COVID-19, and who have no pathways to legalisation, before or after French government’s new policy. Furthermore, there is the long-standing fear in France that acknowledging race and racism or even the existence of different ethnic communities in its society would lead to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ acceptance of divided communities. But this unacknowledged racism, often expressed as Islamophobia, has been called out by French immigrant rights groups and anti-racist collectives, who say the country’s colonial history is expressed in exclusionary immigration policies, among other practices.
If the U.S. government adopted the policy of fast-tracked naturalisation for essential workers, as some are calling for, it would similarly serve to draw attention away from the difficult and often violent conditions under which so many immigrants live, covering up the fact that both American and French societies primarily value immigrant lives when they are sacrificed. The trend in the U.S. throughout the last two decades of Democrat and Republican administrations has been increased surveillance and criminalisation of immigrants, expansion of immigrant detention and deportation, and extreme militarisation of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rewarding essential workers with citizenship entrenches the idea that most immigrants should not be granted legal status and that the state’s job is to keep its borders closed, protecting limited resources — this is so even as both France and the U.S. are fully reliant on immigrant labour.
Rather than putting in place a standard policy of inclusion, the state decides which few immigrants have proved themselves most deserving of inclusion, gathering accolades for its generosity. Speeding up citizenship for immigrant essential workers in the US — similarly to members of the U.S. military, at least in theory — would serve the same purpose. These policies are designed to build pride in the nation’s benevolence and care, even as they work behind the scenes to legitimise the mass exclusion, detention or exploitation of migrants, based on racist ideas of belonging. They make citizens feel better about the woeful ways in which their governments treat immigrants, giving them a moral pass.
Premising citizenship on exceptional deservingness is a common way of talking about who deserves to become a citizen. Before this pandemic, France gave citizenship to a Malian immigrant who risked his life to scale a building and save a child. But rewarding heroes has also meant implicitly consenting to criminalising everyone who is not a hero.
During the pandemic, the stories of immigrant deservingness in the U.S. shifted from exceptional youth to essential workers — farm labourers, cleaners, medical personnel — who were amply demonstrating their utility to the nation. Some called on the U.S. government to give these undocumented essential workers protection from deportation or even a path to citizenship. This would undoubtedly improve the lot of these immigrants, yet once again lifts up the few, while maintaining a system that criminalises most. Such calls draw attention away from the failures of the government to provide state payments that allow people to stay at home during a pandemic or make their workplaces safer.
The linkage between citizenship and productivity in a capitalist workplace, usually as an exploited worker, has uncomfortable implications. Firstly, it leaves out all those who work outside the narrow definitions of productivity, such as in unpaid care work, and those who are young, elderly, disabled, and otherwise outside the capitalist market. Secondly, immigrants are positioned as deserving of the protections of citizenship by the dint of their labour for others.
After the past year of uprisings against white supremacy in both France and the U.S., it is easy to connect this way of valuing immigrants to the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Indeed, immigrants are being valued for their ability to take the fall, to get sick so “we” do not. To pay this impossible debt — the debt of life, and generations of life, valued as lesser — the state is recognising these immigrants now: quid pro quo. It says: now, we owe you nothing — all histories can be forgotten. We must resist judging the worth of human life and dignity in this way.
What if, in fact, France and the U.S. truly followed the principles upon which their nations were formed — liberty, equality, fraternity; and to be the land of the free? What if they valued everyone’s life equally? Tendayi Achiume, legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, argues that citizenship for all immigrants from the “Third World” to the “First” would simply enact an entitlement to political equality that recognises the interconnections created by past and ongoing forms of imperialism. In other words, French or U.S. citizenship for immigrants — all immigrants — is a form of decolonisation or even debt repayment for past and ongoing imperial projects. Militarised borders, in contrast, are attempts to protect the ill-gained riches of empire.
There should be an immediate amnesty and path to citizenship for all immigrants in the U.S., whether or not they are deemed essential. While Biden’s plan to provide a pathway to all 11 million undocumented immigrants is a start, why should it be delayed for eight years? More urgently, the U.S. border must be demilitarised, through the dismantling of ICE and Border Patrol, as these groups create the need to label some people as “illegal”, enabling violence against them, and will continue to do so, regardless of a one-time pathway to citizenship. These demands tie in with the Black Lives Matter movement’s abolitionist demands to undo the carceral system, and replace it with one that treats all people with care and respect.
With a week left in his presidency, Trump visited the border wall in the Rio Grande Valley, to shore up his legacy of hate. A true break with racist policy would knock down the wall and all its supporting ramparts, including the idea of deservingness.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran an excellent article on Sunday, January 31 about the failure of the California Public Health Department (CDPH) to abide by state law requiring the agency to disclose information about COVID-19 outbreaks in the workplace, and about the failure of county public health departments, including San Francisco, to disclose information about workplace outbreaks.
Of course the Chronicle consigned this article to the business section, when it really belonged on the front page above the fold. And the reporters, Chase DiFeliciantonio and Shwanika Narayan, were a bit hobbled by the need to be “objective” and allow both sides to get their say, as if there is a side that has some reasonable excuse for hiding COVID-19 outbreaks from you and me.
So, let me up the game a bit. What these public health departments are doing is a simple cover-up, designed to protect the corporate elite at the expense of the health and safety of us workers and our families and friends. You know, like former President Richard Nixon pretending to know nothing about the Watergate break-in.
AB685, or Where’s the Beef?
Last September the state legislature passed Assembly Bill 685 (AB685). Among other things, this bill mandated that if there is a “potential exposure” to COVID-19 – for example, a worker testing positive – employers are supposed to tell their workers, their unions if they have one, and their county public health department. They are also supposed to create a “disinfection and safety plan.” Nice law, if you can enforce it.
More to the point of this article, AB685 also requires the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) to post on its website information that “allows the public to track the number and frequency of COVID-19 outbreaks and the number of COVID-19 cases and outbreaks by industry reported by any workplace.”
AB685 became effective January 1, 2021. It is now February. There ain’t nothing on the CDPH website yet. If you don’t believe me, click here.
This reporter sent an email on February 1 to the Office of Public Affairs of the CDPH, and asked if they could explain why there is no information on their website, as required by AB685. Their answer was just as informative as their website. That is to say, they have not answered.
It appears that the authors of Sunday’s Chronicle article got a similar response from the CDPH, as the CDPH would not tell them “when it will begin publishing the AB685-mandated information on its website.” That is journalistic language for they told us to “Go take a hike.” Sorta like Nixon erasing that famous tape. I did say cover-up, didn’t I?
Laws are only pieces of paper if they are not enforced, good for wiping your you-know-what and not much else.
County Public Health Departments
The Chronicle article also included a thorough survey of county health departments in California and what they are doing to report workplace COVID-19 outbreaks. The headline of the online version of this article sums up their findings very well: “L.A. and Oregon disclose workplace outbreaks. Most Bay Area health officers won’t. Why?”
If you wanted to know what businesses in San Francisco have outbreaks, you could search the SF Department of Public Health website all day, until your fingers and your keyboard wear out, but you would come up blank.
On the other hand, if you want to know where there are active outbreaks in Merced County, all you have to do is click here.
The authors of the Chronicle article did the journalistic thing and quoted various experts saying that publicly revealing information about COVID-19 specific workplace outbreaks would make everybody safer. Like, maybe you don’t want to shop at some store, or eat at some restaurant, where there has been an outbreak. Or maybe, if you work there, you might want to demand some changes, or perhaps take a leave.
Of course, being journalists, they also quoted various experts spouting the company line – that such revelations might hurt the business involved. Who can argue with that?
Go to Work, Get Sick, Die
So, like an “essential” worker looking for the vaccine, the public is pretty much on its own, trying to figure out where it is safe and where it is not. As are most workers who might want to know whether or not they are working in a safe worksite.
Here are some numbers that did NOT come from our public health departments, but from a couple of studies reported in an article in David Sirota’s The Daily Poster:
–> Workers deemed “essential” have a 55% higher chance of being infected than those who aren’t working. Their family members and roommates are, of course, also placed at much higher risk. This according to a study from University of Pennsylvania researchers.
–> Looking at it from a different angle, workers who test positive are nearly twice as likely to work in an office or a school than at home, according to a study by the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Those statistics probably come as no surprise. But what workers are at the greatest risk? That might surprise you.
At the top of the list are cooks. Cooks. Take that to your favorite supposedly-safe outdoor dining establishment.
After that come “packaging and filling machine operators,” which includes cannery and food production workers, chemical and pharmaceutical packagers, and even tobacco company workers – the people who put the commodities you buy at the store into all those colorful bottles, boxes and cans designed to separate you from your money.
Next comes agricultural workers (eat your vegetables, dear), then bakers (very sweet), and after that construction laborers.
Here is the full list, based on research from UC San Francisco:
Do you see yourself on that list?
You might notice that I almost got through this whole article about COVID-19 without once mentioning former President “Dark Ages” Donald Trump. Hard to believe. But this is no longer Trump’s pandemic. The people in charge now are politicians like Mayor London Breed, Governor Gavin Newsom and – dare I say it – President Joe Biden.
In fairness, Biden is new to the job and he has his hands full with crazy Republicans and corporate Democrats. But Breed and Newsom and their ilk have been on the job since well before the pandemic. Breed can give orders to the SF Public Health Department and Newsom can give orders to the California Department of Public Health. When will they step up to the plate and tell them to dump the cover-up and come clean? Let’s hope it is soon.
• This is a slightly expanded version of the article first published by 48 Hills on February 1, 2021.
The post Covering up Workplace Covid-19 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.