For more than half a century, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), has worked to improve workplace safety and to study the effects on workers of exposures to toxins such as lead. Its teams of epidemiologists, occupational nurses, specialist doctors, toxins experts, and others do everything from going into…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Trump Administration attacked the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) on April 1, cutting more than 90 percent of the agency’s workforce, including me.
NIOSH is the backbone of worker safety. It’s the small agency you’ve never heard of that has probably saved your life. The agency conducts vital research—testing respirators, certifying protective equipment, investigating health hazards, and providing crucial data to workers and unions.
This is not just a budget cut. It is a direct, calculated assault on the working class. Today is Workers’ Memorial Day, the day when we honor the workers who die every year from workplace injuries and illnesses.
The post Health And Safety Is On The Chopping Block appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
On August 6, 2012, a corroded, eight-inch pipe at Chevron’s oil refinery in Richmond, California, cracked open, sending a white cloud hundreds of feet into the air. The cloud quickly engulfed the 19 refinery firefighters, managers and other workers who had been trying to fix what had been a small leak in the pipe. Some of them went to ground, unable to see past their hands…
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Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs…lots of jobs.
Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians.
What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside the facility went viral, and hundreds of Haitians moved for jobs at the plant.
But less than a year later, Remy—and JBS—were accused of human trafficking and exploitation by the union representing workers at the plant.
“This is America. I was hoping America to be better than back home,” says Tchelly Moise, a Haitian immigrant and union rep. “Someone needs to be held accountable for this, because this is not okay anywhere.”
This week on Reveal, reporter Ted Genoways with the Food & Environment Reporting Network looks into JBS’ long reliance on immigrant labor for this work—and its track record of not treating those workers well. The difference this time is those same workers are now targets of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
For the last two years, Cecilia Ortiz has worked as a passenger service agent at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She typically has to walk 10 to 15 miles a day, up and down ramps, pushing heavy wheelchairs and carrying passengers’ luggage. This summer, temperatures have reached over 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the airport’s jet bridges, and yet she says she’s been denied breaks and water…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced a new rule that, if finalized, would become the first federal regulation specifically designed to protect workers from extreme heat both indoors and outdoors. It would trigger requirements for access to drinking water and rest breaks when the heat index reaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit. At 90 degrees, it would mandate 15-minute breaks every two…
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Current workplace fatality figures, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in December 2023, show that on-the-job deaths in the United States have jumped significantly, reaching their highest level in ten years. The results, obtained as part of the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), analyzed information collected over the course of 2022 — and documented a notable 5.7…
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Natalia, a 58-year old veteran farmworker from Florida, gets paid by the hour to work in a greenhouse, subjecting her and coworkers to a wretched humid heat that grows worse every summer. She gets two 10-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch each day, which recently have been moved from wherever she could find a corner to an air-conditioned lunchroom, a change she said has made a world of difference. No federal laws regulate heat exposure in the workplace, leaving employers free to do whatever they deem appropriate to protect workers; other farms Natalia has worked at lacked a bathroom and didn’t provide drinking water.
Failing to provide such things could soon become illegal. Later this year, a new rule from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, could for the first time provide federal protection to heat exposure and require companies to invest in employees’ well-being during the hottest parts of the year.
Over the past several months, the agency held dozens of public meetings and collected more than 1,000 comments, many from workers but a number from businesses and business associations worried about the impact any rule might have on their bottom line. But new research says employers might want to think twice about opposing a heat standard, because unprotected workers will deliver diminishing returns in an ever-hotter world. Meanwhile, labor advocates are trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to push state and local versions of a rule.
Natalia’s testimony was recorded by Jeannie Economos, who coordinates health and safety programs for an organization called Farmworker Association of Florida. Economos has been using that interview and countless others from the Sunshine State’s field, greenhouse, and construction workers to advocate for local, state, and federal workplace heat standards. An ideal guideline, she said, would at the very least guarantee sufficient access to cold, clean water and “not having to walk a mile down the fields to get water to drink when you’re hot, not having to wait until a break or you’re on the verge of fainting.”
OSHA is considering various components to the proposed standard, which it plans to publish later this year, an agency official told the Washington Post. (When asked about the timeline, OSHA referred Grist to a posting in the Federal Registry, which does not specify a timeline.) Mandatory workplace education programs would teach both workers and managers how to recognize and respond to heat illness and take its risks seriously. The rule also could mandate that employers consider heat stress a medical emergency, and prohibit retaliation against employees who complain or report violations. The measure almost certainly will require that employers provide regular breaks; clean, accessible water; and protective equipment like hats and cooling vests. Another possibility is a requirement that employees be allowed to acclimate to intense heat by working only 20 percent of a typical workday during the first day of a heat wave and incrementally increasing their hours each day.
Over the past 15 years, OSHA received three petitions to implement a federal heat standard. The rulemaking process finally began in 2021 but could stall again if President Biden loses this year’s election. “OSHA has to be balanced and there’s a lot of pressure on OSHA to do something, so we’ll just wait and see,” Economos said. “It could take three to eight years to get a [final] rule.”
She had hoped a state heat standard in Florida could prevent deaths in the meantime. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 387 workers lost their lives to heat illness between 2013 and 2022, and because heat illness is often misattributed as heart failure or stroke, that’s almost certainly an undercount. State-level heat standards already exist in California, Washington, Minnesota, and Oregon, and one has been proposed in Colorado. California’s guideline only protects outdoor workers, but the state is planning to introduce rules for indoor workers this year. However, right-to-work states in the South have shown more opposition to such ideas. Texas preempted municipal attempts to regulate heat exposure last year. In Florida, attempts at a state heat standard were stymied by Republican lawmakers. Miami-Dade County officials were to consider a measure last fall but pushed it to March after amid complaints that it was unfair to local business.
The federal rulemaking process is complicated and crowded, and OSHA is facing immense pressure from all sides. Any regulation must cover wildly varying conditions of a vast labor pool in multiple sectors, from electricians working in stuffy attics to construction workers framing houses to farmworkers harvesting vegetables in the full sun. Meanwhile, an equally staggering array of business interests have largely condemned, and in many cases actively lobbied against, attempts to do something, stating that employers already follow voluntary, and in some cases, state, heat stress guidance and further regulation would be burdensome. Segments of the construction and agricultural industries along with chambers of commerce have opposed the standard. “We firmly believe employers should be responsible or address heat hazards at individual facilities,” representatives of the National Grain Association and the Agricultural Retailers association wrote in a joint public comment directed to OSHA.
Their opposition may be short-sighted, however. In order to weather climate change in the long term without severe economic damage, research shows, governments and employers will have to find ways to protect people from the heat. For agricultural workers, that’s particularly vital. A study released last week in the journal Global Change Biology found that heat exposure doesn’t only impact crop yields – it impairs the productivity of the people who plant and and harvest the crops, and limits their ability to work in the field. Already hot and humid Florida will heat up even more by the end of the century, reducing fieldworkers to around 70 percent of their current work capacity if working conditions do not improve.
Gerald Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the study’s lead author, said that feeding the world in a new and extreme era of climate crisis makes caring for the people who put our food on the table.
“At some point it’s gonna be too hot,” Nelson said, “and you’re going to have to do some kind of remediation.”
That could mean simple rest breaks and water breaks. It could also mean opportunities to work at night, or to find and invest in crop varieties that thrive in slightly cooler seasons. “The challenge is to figure out a system that’s both good today and good tomorrow,” Nelson said.
But in the short term, Economos said a federal heat protection rule is urgent. “While we’re waiting for the federal government,” she said, “people are dying.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As summers grow ever hotter, OSHA appears ready to protect workers on Jan 29, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
After an 11-week investigation into the workplace death of Caes Gruesbeck, a 20-year-old employee at an Amazon distribution center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, safety officials fined the company only $7,000, despite finding that Amazon failed to ensure a workplace “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death,” and issuing a serious safety citation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Sometimes the heat makes you vomit, said Carmen Garcia, a farmworker in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She and her husband spent July in the garlic fields, kneeling on the scorched earth as temperatures hovered above 105 degrees. Her husband had such severe fatigue and nausea that he stayed home from work for three days. He drank lime water instead of seeing a doctor because the couple…
Ever since she became old enough to work, Ariana Lingerfeldt has found cooking jobs in cafes and restaurants. “It’s something I’m good at,” she told Truthout. For the past two years, her workplace has been the Green Sage Cafe in South Asheville, North Carolina. The eatery unionized in February 2023 and is part of Teamsters Local 61; staff are now among the 3 percent of workers in the Tar Heel…
The Biden Administration has announced new protections to keep outdoor workers safe from extreme heat, and instructed the Department of Labor to issue a heat hazard alert and increase enforcement of heat-safety violations. “Millions of Americans are currently experiencing the effects of extreme heat, which is growing in intensity, frequency, and duration due to the climate crisis…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Before Missouri resident Amanda K. Finley had heard of COVID-19 or long COVID, she worked as an archeologist. Although her work schedule was erratic, she was frequently hired by engineering firms to make sure that the development sites they intended to build on conserved the cultural integrity of the land. She did this for 14 years. Then, in March 2020, 10 months before the COVID vaccine became…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The chemical compound ethylene oxide is manufactured and used in hundreds of facilities across the United States. Linked to lymphoma, leukemia, and breast cancer, the carcinogen is used to sterilize about half of all medical devices in the country. Over the last few years, as evidence of its toxicity has become more clear, regulators have attempted to step up enforcement against ethylene oxide…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Before his shift at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Niagara Falls in May 2021, a worker peed in a cup. Before he clocked out, he did it again. Goodyear shipped both specimens to a lab to measure the amount of a chemical called ortho-toluidine. The results, reviewed by ProPublica, showed that the worker had enough of it in his body to put him…
After years of growth, Amazon is now laying off thousands of employees. But with the holiday season underway, the company’s warehouse workers still have to race to fill gift orders. This week, Reveal revisits Amazon’s safety record.
Host Al Letson speaks with Reveal’s Will Evans, who’s been reporting on injuries at Amazon for years. By gathering injury data and speaking with workers and whistleblowers, he has shown that Amazon warehouse employees are injured on the job at a higher rate than at other companies. Evans’ reporting has focused national attention on the company’s safety record, prompting regulators, lawmakers and the company itself to address the issue more closely. This November, members of Congress scrutinized Amazon’s working conditions—and at the state level, lawmakers and safety regulators are taking action against Amazon in ways they never have before.
Then, we bring back a story by Jennifer Gollan that looks at the most common type of injury at Amazon and other workplaces, repetitive motion injuries. Gollan reports that decades ago, the federal government decided to impose safety regulations to try and prevent these injuries, then abruptly changed its mind.
We end with a reprise of a story from reporter Laura Sydell about online reviews of products and businesses and how many of them are not what they seem.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
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This post was originally published on Reveal.
Workers at the New York City Starbucks Reserve Roastery in the Meatpacking District have been on strike since the beginning of last week against unsafe work conditions and the multi-billion dollar corporation’s refusal to bargain in good faith with the union for a first contract. The striking workers note how managers at one of Starbucks’s flagship stores refuse to address work conditions that are proving to be health hazards: the store had a recent outbreak of bedbugs in the break room and there has been black mold in the ice machines for months.
Two workers who spoke with Left Voice under conditions of anonymity described how management instructed them to discard any ice with mold in it and carry on, without addressing the root of the problem. When the bedbug infestation happened, workers were asked to remove their belongings from the break room, but were not told why. It was only days later that they learnt of the bed bug infestation; the fumigation and cleaning for which, workers believe, were substandard.
One worker, Laura Garza, says, “I myself have gotten sick from attempting to clean the mold from the ice machine without proper training, and the bed bugs were just the last straw for us. We cannot risk bringing that home.”
Workers United, the union representative of the workers, filed an OSHA complaint against the facility as well as a national Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the ”failure to bargain” and listed the Roastery and 151 other locations where Starbucks has refused to begin bargaining.
Workers at this Starbucks Reserve Roastery — many of who are young, queer, women — were the first Starbucks shop in NYC to unionize, winning their union election on April 1 of this year. They are one of twelve Starbucks locations to have unionized in downstate New York, and one of seven in the city. Nationally, over 250 Starbucks stores have elected to unionize. With over a 100 workers at this location, this is one of the bigger shops to have unionized nationally.
Although it has been months since they won their elections, workers at the Roastery, like other unionized stores across the country, still don’t have a first contract as Starbucks refuses to bargain in good faith with workers while continuing their union-busting practices. The company is facing over 300 unfair labor practice charges, and NLRB offices around the country have issued Starbucks over 35 official complaints, citing it for coercing, threatening, and firing employees over union activities and withholding wage increases and benefits from unionizing stores. Since the wave of unionization at the coffee giant began, Starbucks has fired over 100 workers who were organizing for a union.
Although the store has over 100 workers, not everyone is out on the picket lines, with many fearing retaliation from management. At the Roastery and every other store that has unionized or is seeking a path towards unionization, management has worked overtime to maintain an air of fear, often even depriving workers of knowledge of their rights and that they have a union. But, since the strike began at Roastery, workers have been picketing outside the facility every day, forcing it to close early the last few evenings. Workers at the picket also spoke about how management was bringing in scabs from the yet-to-open Empire State Building location to work at the store.
Workers at Starbucks make hundreds of dollars worth of beverages every hour, creating value far beyond what they are compensated for. The company’s massive profits are a direct product of workers’ labor. For striking workers, it is essential to expand, mobilize, and use this power of the shop floor to fight not just for safe conditions, but against every injustice suffered under Starbucks’s management and beyond.
The spirit of unionizing is in the air, from Amazon to Starbucks. Now the workers in two frozen food factories in California are getting in on the action. But they’re facing serious union-busting from their employer, Amy’s Kitchen, despite its progressive branding.
Amy’s Kitchen is the sixth-largest maker of organic frozen meals in the United States and the top U.S. producer of organic vegetarian food, according to the North Bay Business Journal. The company employs more than 2,000 workers, a majority of them Central American immigrants who do not speak English.
On June 1, UNITE HERE Local 19, representing the workers of Amy’s Kitchen in San Jose, filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against the food company. The union alleges that the company subjected workers to mandatory anti-union meetings, surveillance, threats, and interrogations, and terminated two employees for their organizing.
Workers at another Amy’s Kitchen location in Santa Rosa, California, are also trying to unionize. Teamsters Local 665 filed a complaint to the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration alleging that the company’s hazardous understaffing forces a breakneck pace and that it fails to provide access to water and regular bathroom breaks.
“Workers are ignored, shamed, and retaliated against when they do use the restroom,” reads the union complaint. “One worker was asked by a supervisor to provide a doctor’s note if they wanted to use the bathroom during their shift.”
Workers are facing similar conditions at the San Jose facility, which employs around 250 people. It opened last year to meet the high demand for frozen pizzas.
Machine operator Hector Guardado was fired on May 19 after leading a group of workers to complain about poor working conditions and the treatment of a co-worker who was penalized for taking sick time. The company claimed he was fired for leaving his machine unattended; however, Guardado said he told the line leader that he was going to speak with the manager.
“We took the initiative and tried to talk to our management about the situation to make our factory a better place, but they showed little interest in working with us,” said Guardado. “Instead, they began to retaliate against us. I am being fired for speaking out in support of my co-worker.”
Amy’s Kitchen did not respond to requests for comment.
Prep cook Raul Vargas said he has witnessed intimidation tactics against workers engaging in union activity. “There is a lot of favoritism,” said Vargas. “If you have a good relationship with the supervisors or leads, then the rule doesn’t apply to those people. But if you aren’t with them, every single rule applies to that person. They are not fair with everybody.”
After the filing of the unfair labor practice charges, he anticipates retaliation from management: “What they’re gonna do, I don’t know, but for sure it will be nothing good.”
Besides Santa Rosa and San Jose, Amy’s Kitchen has two other production facilities in Idaho and Oregon.
Last year the company received the B Corp certification, which is awarded to companies that use profits and growth to positively impact their employees, communities, and the environment. UNITE HERE has filed a complaint to the B Lab Standards Advisory Council asking it to re-evaluate Amy’s Kitchen’s certification.
Amy’s Kitchen has also paid more than $100,000 in OSHA violations, of which the union asserts the company failed to report $95,750 when applying for B Corp certification. The workers who filed those OSHA complaints reported locked fire exits and a lack of proper training for operating heavy machinery.
“The company says they’re not union-busting,” said Maria del Carmen Gonzales, a worker who was unable to get surgery for a work-related shoulder injury until a year after the injury occurred. “So why are they spending so much on these people [union busters] but not on our [health] insurance?”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The past few years have brought profits and growth to Amazon, but it’s come at a cost to many workers. Amazon warehouse employees are injured on the job at a higher rate than at other companies, even as the company has claimed to prioritize safety.
Host Al Letson speaks with Reveal’s Will Evans, who’s been reporting on injuries at Amazon for years. By gathering injury data and speaking with workers and whistleblowers, he has focused national attention on the company’s safety record, prompting regulators, lawmakers and the company itself to address the issue more closely.
Then, we bring back a story by Reveal’s Jennifer Gollan that looks at the most common type of injury at Amazon and other workplaces and why the government chose not to try to prevent it.
We end with a reprise of a story from reporter Laura Sydell about online reviews of products and businesses and how many of them are not what they seem.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter
Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Investigations into Amazon’s safety procedures surrounding the tornado that caused the deaths of six workers in a warehouse in Illinois last year have demonstrated that the company’s safety rules are “wholly inadequate,” Democratic lawmakers say.
On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Cori Bush (D-Missouri) sent a letter to Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy criticizing the company for doing the “bare minimum” to protect its workers from danger.
The letter comes after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found in an investigation, released late last month, that the company’s safety protocols met minimum legal requirements but were still lacking in several key areas that could have helped the employees be more prepared in the event of a natural disaster.
“Although Amazon told us in its January 3, 2022 response that ‘safety is our top priority,’ the OSHA findings revealed glaring gaps in Amazon’s safety procedures, including flawed safety training, inadequate emergency procedures, and the inability of Amazon managers to follow the procedures that were in place,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter.
The lawmakers further went on to say that the company needs to update its safety protocols to better protect its nearly 1 million warehouse workers across the country. “These findings reveal a wholly inadequate safety culture at Amazon, which potentially contributed to the death of six workers and, if not addressed, will continue to put thousands more workers across the country at risk.”
Wednesday’s letter follows up on a note that Amazon sent in January in response to the lawmakers’ first letter to the company, shortly after six workers were killed when a tornado caused an Amazon warehouse to collapse in Edwardsville, Illinois. Workers said that the company’s policy disallowing workers from having their phones at work and the company’s lack of comprehensive disaster safety training may have contributed to the deaths.
In the company’s response to the lawmakers, Amazon Vice President of Public Policy Brian Huseman provided some details about the warehouse and boasted that the company spent $300 million on safety matters in 2021. Huseman also said that the company was conducting an internal investigation into the incident.
But while Amazon has promised to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” reports have found that its warehouses are actually uniquely dangerous places to work in. Last month, a report by the Strategic Organizing Center found that the company’s injury rate increased between 2020 and 2021 and that nearly half of the workplace injuries in the entire U.S. warehouse sector last year happened at Amazon facilities. Amazon employs only about a third of warehouse workers in the country.
According to the lawmakers’ latest letter, Amazon’s response appeared to have stretched the truth on how managers responded to the tornado. While Amazon claimed that managers “immediately implemented the facility’s emergency action plan for a tornado” when the warning was received, the lawmakers note that OSHA’s findings contradict that account of events.
OSHA found that managers couldn’t implement the plan because the megaphone meant to be used for an emergency was “locked in a cage and not accessible.” Managers instead had to communicate verbally with employees, leading to a “chaotic emergency situation.”
“The OSHA inspection and your response to our letter indicate that Amazon will do only the bare minimum – and sometimes less than that – to keep its workers safe,” Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and Bush wrote. They urge the company to comply with a House Committee on Oversight and Reform request for documents in its investigation into the company’s safety practices.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
If a warehouse worker was injured on the job in 2021, there was about a 50 percent chance that they worked for Amazon, a new report highlighting dangerous working conditions at the company has revealed.
Though Amazon employed only about 33 percent of warehouse workers in 2021, it was responsible for 49 percent of warehouse injuries that year, according to a damning new report from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition between four major labor unions. The report analyzes data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Overall, workers sustained nearly 40,000 injuries at Amazon facilities last year, representing a huge jump from the previous year; from 2020 to 2021, Amazon’s injury rate increased by 20 percent.
Despite promises to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the company has shown to be quite the opposite. As SOC’s report and other analyses have found, Amazon’s serious injury rate is far higher than that of other companies. Serious injuries are ones that cause the worker to miss work or be reassigned to less strenuous tasks.
In 2021, the company’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 full-time equivalent workers, the new report found. This is more than double the serious injury rate of other warehouses, which have an average rate of 3.3 per 100 workers. With 7.7 injuries of any type per 100 Amazon workers filed with OSHA last year, Amazon’s workers suffered injuries at a far higher rate than those in the rest of the industry, who experienced 4.0 injuries per 100 workers.
The report’s authors say that the reason for Amazon’s high injury rate is the company’s strict quotas and “obsession with speed,” which it monitors using invasive surveillance systems that track workers’ every move. The company also pushes hurt workers to keep working while they are recovering, even if the work will perpetuate the injury or make it worse.
Musculoskeletal disorders like carpal tunnel or back pain are common among Amazon workers, investigations have found. Repetitive, strenuous movements place strain on workers’ bodies, and symptoms often linger long after the initial injury.
The company’s policies appear to have a direct influence on its injury rate. While the rate increased each year between 2017 and 2019, from 7.5 injuries to 9.0 per 100 workers, the rate dropped to 6.6 injuries per 100 workers in 2020 — the same year that the company temporarily lightened its quotas in response to the pandemic. Although the policies were only in place for a few months, it was long enough to have a tangible impact on the company’s injury rate.
To distract from their poor injury rates — and Washington state OSHA investigations into the Seattle-based company that have found wrongdoing — Amazon said last year that it would be spending millions on increasing safety and that it would halve the injury rate within the next five years. Yet the same year that the company made that pledge, the injury rate increased.
“The facts show that for all of its public relations efforts, Amazon is not doing enough to keep workers safe,” SOC authors wrote. “Amazon could choose to slow the pace of work or ease the pressures of its oppressive monitoring systems. But after doing so in 2020 to accommodate pandemic safety precautions, the company largely returned to its old systems of surveillance and pressure in 2021 — as reflected in the injury data.”
Amazon warehouse workers have been waging union campaigns in part because of working conditions in their facilities. Workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who are organizing with the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union, and Amazon Labor Union, which recently won a union in New York, have said that improving working conditions are a central plank of their campaigns. At BHM1, the unionizing facility in Alabama, the report found that serious injuries increased by a whopping 43 percent last year.
The company can afford to ease its quotas, SOC pointed out in its report. While its policies appeared to push workers to injury, the company’s profits grew by 50 percent from 2020 to 2021, from $21.3 billion to $33.4 billion; meanwhile, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos gained over $52 billion in net worth during the course of the pandemic alone.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Last week, the day after the 111th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a mysterious, smoky gas began filling an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. According to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), workers didn’t know what the gas was; while workers on the third floor were asked to take unpaid time off and leave at around 1:30 pm Central time, people on other floors were kept working at their stations.
At around 4:30 pm, a little over an hour after workers first saw the gas on the first floor and with no word from management, workers evacuated by word of mouth, fearing that the gas was smoke or another dangerous substance, the RWDSU said.
Outside, there were only a few emergency vehicles at the roughly 850,000 square foot facility, and the workers were told to clock out. At 7 pm, with the gas still present, night shift workers were ushered in to work.
The gas was later determined to be vaporized oil from a dysfunctional compressor. It’s unclear if this could cause health issues.
“Everyone was very confused, and the lack of information made us feel very unsafe,” Amazon worker Isaiah Thomas said, expressing shock that employees were kept inside even after the third floor was evacuated. “I don’t know what I was breathing in for that long, and I don’t know if it’s still in the air at work today either. I feel very unsafe and I wish management would treat us like humans and care about our safety in a real way.”
The Amazon workers have contacted the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) over the incident at the warehouse. The fulfillment center, known as BHM1, has been in the midst of a union campaign for nearly two years.
The company has disputed the RWDSU’s account of the incident, claiming that it evacuated workers and is paying them for their whole shift, though Amazon has lied to the public before in order to save face.
“Accidents happen, but there’s no reason why thousands of workers should have had to keep working breathing in what we thought was smoke for hours,” Thomas said. “Why is my health less important than a package getting shipped?”
The smoke filled the Amazon warehouse only one day after the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Thomas pointed out.
The 1911 fire at a garment factory in Manhattan is among the deadliest workplace incidents in U.S. history, killing 146 workers, most of whom were young immigrant women. The casualties were largely the fault of the factory’s owners, who regularly locked workers inside the building without access to stairs and exits; when a major fire broke out, workers were forced to jump out of windows in hopes of saving themselves.
Late last year, OSHA launched an investigation after a tornado collapsed an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing six people and leaving one person injured. Workers said that the deaths were partially due to unsafe policies from Amazon, which banned employees from having a cell phone on them while working.
RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum called for better safety standards in response to the incident. “Amazon knowingly kept workers at their stations for hours during the incident, failed to properly evacuate the facility, and told workers to go back to work before any clarity on the safety of the vapor in the air was known,” Appelbaum said.
“It is unconscionable that Amazon would keep workers at their stations when there is a known health and safety issue,” he continued. “Workers’ lives should never be put in jeopardy for profits, something Amazon has an inexcusable history of doing.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story was originally published January 19, 2022 and was updated May 16, 2022. This story will continue to be updated as new developments occur.
Amazon warehouse workers have long borne the brunt of the company’s obsession with speed.
As Amazon’s business relentlessly expanded and its famously speedy shipping got even faster, workers have been forced to keep up with increasingly aggressive production demands, putting their bodies at risk for the convenience of customers.
As Amazon warehouse workers racked up many thousands of serious injuries each year, government officials haven’t done much about it – but that appears to be changing. Safety officials have been fining Amazon for making employees work at an “unsafe pace.” State legislation popping up around the country targets Amazon’s work quotas. And shareholders will get a chance to vote on Amazon’s workplace practices.
Those developments all have roots in our reporting.
In 2019, our investigation showed for the first time that injury rates in Amazon warehouses were far higher than the industry average. Then, we obtained internal Amazon data and records that revealed the company had been deceiving the public about its safety crisis – even as injury rates got worse. Injury rates were higher at warehouses where robots increased the pace of work, despite assurances from the company that robots made the job safer.
At the same time, the federal government had been refusing to release workplace injury records for Amazon and thousands of other companies.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting sued the federal Labor Department and won, forcing the government to release the injury data it’d been keeping secret. That allowed reporters and other organizations to hold Amazon and other companies across the country accountable for their safety practices. Last year, The Washington Post and a coalition of labor unions used the newly available data to show that Amazon’s warehouses still had a much higher rate of serious injury than competitors.
In April, the labor coalition updated its report, showing that the serious injury rate for Amazon warehouses in 2021 rose to more than twice as high as non-Amazon warehouses.
Still, for years, Amazon didn’t have much to fear from safety regulators. There isn’t a legal limit for how many injuries an employer can have. And there isn’t a federal standard for ergonomic hazards relating to repetitive stress injuries, which are common at Amazon. Companies are legally required to provide safe workplaces. But until recently, safety officials weren’t using their authority to enforce that general requirement to take on Amazon’s high injury rates.
Amazon has declined our interview requests. But CEO Andy Jassy said during an interview on CNBC that the company spent $300 million on safety last year. Amazon, he said, is working on “sophisticated algorithms” to predict when a worker should rotate jobs and “wearables” that detect workers making dangerous moves, and the company issued new shoes with better toe protection.
Jassy’s shareholder letter said that despite these tech advancements, he hasn’t found “a silver bullet that could change the numbers quickly.” But Amazon hasn’t addressed the core issue: the pace of work.
That’s also on the agenda of the Amazon Labor Union, which pulled off the country’s first successful union vote at an Amazon warehouse in April. In addition to demanding better pay and benefits, the union is pushing for longer breaks and more reasonable quotas.
Here are the recent developments:
It remains to be seen whether state lawmakers and regulators can force Amazon to fundamentally change its practices.
Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @willCIR.
Amazon’s Warehouse Quotas Have Been Injuring Workers for Years. Now, Officials Are Taking Action. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
The Supreme Court, in a predictable 6-3 decision, blocked OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) that required employees in businesses with 100 or more employees to either be vaccinated or regularly tested and masked. Dissenting were the three Justices appointed by Democratic Presidents: Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. The majority stated that the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHAct) “plainly” does not authorize the vaccine or masking requirements. Calling the OSHA standard no “everyday exercise of federal power” they labeled it “instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees.” The argued that in a situation where an agency is authorized to “exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,” Congress must “speak clearly.”
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Workers are being asked, once again, to keep working despite a surge in COVID-19 infections. As employers push for a return to “normal,” how should we deal with the risks of returning to work?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Despite the fact that we are in the midst of an unprecedented and deadly pandemic with no signs of abating, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court appears unlikely to stop the carnage. The reactionary “justices” seem more inclined to shield corporate profits and red states’ rights than to protect the health and safety of the people.
Scientists have achieved near unanimity that vaccines and masking are effective in preventing COVID infections. Nevertheless, the high court is being asked to block Biden administration rules that would mandate vaccines and/or masking and testing. On January 7, the court heard arguments in two sets of cases that will have widespread impact on the health of millions of people in the United States.
The high court is not considering whether to strike down the mandates but rather whether to stop them from going into effect while the lower courts consider their constitutionality, which could take several months. Meanwhile, untold numbers of people are getting sick and dying.
Stephen Breyer noted that the day before the arguments, there were three-quarters of a million new COVID cases. “Can you ask us to say it’s in the public interest in this situation to stop this vaccination rule? … To me, I would find that unbelievable,” Breyer remarked to Scott Keller, attorney for the business associations challenging Biden’s vaccine-or-mask mandate.
The first set of cases the court heard are subsumed under the name National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA. Twenty-six business associations and attorneys general from 27 (mostly red) states are suing to stop the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from mandating that companies with more than 100 employees require their workers to get vaccinated or wear masks and submit to weekly COVID tests. As Sonia Sotomayor noted, this is not a vaccine mandate, since it presents a choice between vaccines and masking/testing. OSHA estimated that 40 percent of employers would opt for the mask-and-test policy.
Attorney Keller argued that the vaccine-or-mask mandate was “not a necessary, indispensable use of OSHA’s extraordinary emergency power.” Elena Kagan retorted, “It’s an extraordinary use of emergency power occurring in an extraordinary circumstance, a circumstance that this country has never faced before.”
Keller predicted that leaving the mandate in effect would cause “a massive economic shift” leading to “billions upon billions of non-recoverable costs” for businesses. He said Congress should have clearly given OSHA the authority to promulgate rules to combat COVID.
Pursuant to its authority under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, OSHA issued an “emergency temporary standard” to protect workers from viruses that pose “a grave danger.”
OSHA predicts that the rule would affect 84 million workers and would cause approximately 22 million people to get vaccinated. Estimates project that its implementation would prevent 250,000 people from being hospitalized. There is an exception for workers with religious objections and those who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs or work substantially outdoors.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court, “Workers are getting sick and dying every day because of their exposure to the virus at work. OSHA amassed substantial evidence of widespread workplace outbreaks across industries.” She said unvaccinated workers have a 1-in-14 chance of being hospitalized and a 1-in-200 chance of dying.
During argument, all six right-wing members of the court seemed inclined to side with the corporations and the red states. Conservatives suggested that OSHA exceeded its authority under the statute and the vaccine and/or masking requirements are more properly within the purview of Congress or the states (even though it was Congress that enacted the statute giving OSHA such power). They thought the rule was too broad as COVID is not a distinctly “occupational” danger.
By contrast, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer clearly favored protecting workers from the public health crisis caused by COVID. Kagan said, “I would think that workplace risk is about the greatest, least controllable risk with respect to COVID that any person has.” She added, “You have to be there. You have to be there for eight hours a day. You have to be there in the exact environment that the workplace is set up with. And you have to be there with a bunch of people you don’t know and who might be completely irresponsible.”
Kagan queried, “Why isn’t this necessary to abate a grave risk? This is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died. It is by far the greatest public health danger that this country has faced in the last century. More and more people are dying every day. More and more people are getting sick every day.” Kagan noted that nearly a million people have died from COVID. “We know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” she stated, “and to prevent dangerous illness and death is for people to get vaccinated. That is by far the best. The second best is to wear masks.”
Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that unvaccinated people have a much higher risk of death than those who are fully vaccinated.
Sotomayor noted that some states are forbidding employers from requiring vaccines and certain states are stopping employers from requiring their employees to wear masks.
Breyer made clear he would allow the mandates to continue during the litigation, citing statistics for high rates of infections and deaths from COVID.
Chief Justice John Roberts said Congress did not specifically give OSHA power to impose a vaccine or test mandate and that OSHA had never before mandated vaccines.
Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — notorious opponents of deference to agencies that protect people — said the OSHA statute didn’t clearly authorize the agency to impose the mandate, considering the economic ramifications.
Gorsuch, the only member of the court present during arguments without a mask, said “the flu kills people every year,” and OSHA doesn’t regulate in that area. He erroneously stated that the flu killed hundreds of thousands of people annually. In fact, the flu kills between 12,000 and 52,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC.
Samuel Alito, who, like all of his colleagues on the court, is fully vaccinated, pointed out that there are “risks [of … adverse consequences” from the vaccines. “Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unusual following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination,” the CDC says, however. “The benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks.”
Alito derisively described OSHA’s interpretation as “squeezing an elephant into a mousehole,” strongly indicating he would refuse to allow the protective rule to go into effect.
Amy Coney Barrett thought that OSHA should have adopted a more targeted rule, saying this rule was too broad as it covered both dental employees and landscapers.
Clarence Thomas was not convinced that the mandate was “necessary.”
The second bloc of cases the court considered is Biden v. Missouri and Becerra v. Louisiana. They involve the fate of a directive promulgated by the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which requires vaccinations for more than 17 million health care workers in facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid. The rule contains an exemption for medical and religious reasons.
In these cases, a right-wing majority of the court may well strike down the mandate which would affect nearly half the country. But the votes are not as predictable as they are in the OSHA case.
Lawyers for the states challenging the rule argued that requiring vaccinations would cause health workers to resign from their jobs. “Rural America will face an imminent crisis,” stated Jesus Osete, Missouri’s deputy attorney general.
But Kagan responded that HHS had considered that eventuality before issuing the mandate. “I don’t know very much about the rural market,” Kagan acknowledged. “But the secretary” of Health and Human Services, “that’s his job.” Kagan added that many workers would feel safer coming to work if their coworkers were vaccinated. She noted that some people aren’t going to the hospital for mammograms and colonoscopies for fear of contracting COVID.
“The one thing you can’t do is to kill your patients. So you have to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients,” Kagan said. She called the elderly on Medicare and the poor who receive Medicaid “the most vulnerable patients there are,” adding, “Poverty has a great deal to do with medical outcome.”
Sotomayor noted that this rule was promulgated under the Spending Clause, affording the government wide latitude to impose conditions on the monies it disburses. Roberts appeared persuaded by this argument.
In a likely attempt to appear fair and balanced to protect the legitimacy of the Roberts Court, the chief justice seemed prepared to uphold the Medicare-Medicaid health care mandate. He maintained that it is closely related to COVID’s threat to health so it could be justified in an emergency.
Gorsuch appeared unmoved in his intention to strike down the mandate aimed at protecting Medicare and Medicaid patients. He echoed the states’ argument that the regulation “effectively controls the employment of individuals at these healthcare facilities in a way that Congress specifically prohibited.” Gorsuch characterized this use of money “as a weapon to control these things,” and suggested that it “should be left to the states to regulate.”
Kavanaugh also leaned toward blocking the rule, although he wondered aloud why “the people who are regulated are not here complaining about the regulation, — the hospitals and healthcare organizations. A very unusual situation. They, in fact, overwhelmingly appear to support the … regulation.”
Barrett objected that this was an “omnibus” rule covering ambulatory surgical centers as well as skilled nursing facilities. But she may have been swayed by the argument that Congress explicitly made provisions that the courts found objectionable severable, so those sections could be struck down without dooming the entire mandate. As Sotomayor pointed out, “the vast majority of the regulations across all facilities relate to health and safety.”
Thomas expressed worry about whether the vaccine “could have significant health consequences” and was troubled that the rule could preempt the issue in some states. Alito was concerned about prior notice to the states about the mandate.
Although Thomas and Alito seemed unsympathetic to the mandate, they questioned whether the states of Missouri and Louisiana had “standing” to sue on behalf of their citizens.
It is essential that the Biden administration’s mandates become operable to protect millions of people in the United States from illness and death. The response to the pandemic has fallen largely along political lines, so we cannot rely on the states to safeguard their residents.
Seven of the 10 states that have the highest number of deaths per 100,000 residents as a result of COVID are led by Republican governors.
Unvaccinated people tend to focus on their personal choice and not on the good of the whole. “But the point is that it’s not the risk to the individual that’s at question; it’s that risk plus the risk to others,” Sotomayor noted. “When you remain unmasked or unvaccinated, you put yourself at risk, but you put others” at risk as well.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
At least two of the state officials arguing against the Biden Administration’s federal vaccine mandates Friday were forced to appear in front of the Supreme Court remotely because they had contracted COVID over the last few days, reports said.
Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers and Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill argued their case over the phone, on behalf of Republican state officials and business groups who are seeking to block two Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) vaccine requirements: one for employers who employ more than 100 people and another for healthcare facilities of any size.
Other attorneys who passed the Supreme Court’s strict COVID-19 guidelines were able to appear in front of the court, which had just eight members present, Reuters reported. Justice Sonia Sotomayor participated in the hearings remotely from her chambers, a spokesperson for the court confirmed.
Everyone present had to present a negative PCR test taken at a court-approved facility before entrance, and wear an N95 or KN95 mask while inside. The public, normally allowed to attend oral arguments, is also barred from entering the building.
Many public health professionals pointed out the irony of Friday’s proceedings: The protocols being followed by attendees are far more stringent than the ones required by the Biden Administration — and have so far worked to prevent an outbreak.
“Now, meeting in a safe, controlled environment, the justices may well block OSHA’s requirements that employers protect workers from exposure to a deadly virus,” epidemiologist David Michaels wrote for The Washington Post this week. “This irony illustrates a fundamental inequity that is so normalized it is essentially invisible: Powerful people can choose to work safely, while vulnerable workers must continue to risk their lives to make a living.”
The court has not yet announced a decision on either of Biden’s COVID safety rules, though reports suggest the conservative majority is likely to reject the Administration’s rules pertaining to large employers. It’s less clear what they will decide on the separate vaccine mandate for healthcare facilities — at least some of the justices appeared more open to this rule than the first, according to CNN.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has formally requested that a federal court lift its stay on rules from the Biden administration that require businesses with more than 100 employees to follow certain standards amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked rules published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) earlier this month that would have required companies of that size to have unvaccinated employees get jabbed or undergo weekly coronavirus testing starting January 4. Unvaccinated workers would also be required to start wearing masks in the workplace starting in December.
The court had found that OSHA overreached its authority, saying that the agency only has jurisdiction on workplace safety. Because the coronavirus has spread throughout the country, OSHA couldn’t enforce rules relating to it in workplaces, the court had said.
In its emergency filing, the DOJ said that the court’s ruling was faulty.
“Congress charged OSHA with addressing grave dangers in the workplace, without any carve-out for viruses or dangers that also happen to exist outside the workplace,” the department said in its legal brief to the court.
The case will likely wind up in the United States Supreme Court. The matter is also set to be heard in the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear close to 30 lawsuits against the OSHA rules.
If the Supreme Court takes up the matter, it’s unclear how it may rule on the matter. In October, the High Court let stand a state-based vaccine mandate in Maine. But it may rule in a different fashion when it comes to whether the federal government has such powers.
The emergency filing from the DOJ comes on the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced new figures on the effectiveness of the vaccines. While none of the coronavirus vaccines are 100 percent effective, they do provide a great amount of protection versus not getting vaccinated, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said.
Updated data on COVID Data Tracker show ppl not vaccinated for #COVID19 are:
-6x more likely to test positive,
-14x more likely to die from #COVID19, &
-Have 9x higher rate of COVID-19 associated hospitalization compared to those vaccinated. Get vaccinated https://t.co/bfOV5VRcgY pic.twitter.com/YoXG8G4PG4— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) November 22, 2021
According to the data, those who are unvaccinated are 5.8 times more likely to test positive for coronavirus versus those who are vaccinated. The unvaccinated are also nine times more likely to require hospitalization, and 14 times more likely to die of the virus, than are vaccinated individuals, the numbers from the CDC demonstrate.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It was already clear that meatpacking plants hosted some of the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks. But a congressional investigation released in late October revealed just how dire the situation is. The COVID-19 infection and death toll in slaughterhouses run by the country’s largest meat conglomerates is now nearly three times higher than previously estimated. Considering the hazards cited by the report — crowded assembly lines, lax screening precautions, sweat-saturated masks and barriers made with “flimsy ‘plastic bags on frames’” — it’s little surprise that in some plants, more than half of workers have contracted the virus.
Emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigation paint a picture of executives who aggressively pushed back against safety measures in the pandemic’s early days. The CEO of Smithfield Foods, for example, called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendations “problematic” and lamented that touchless mask distribution would cause each employee to miss 30 seconds of work. Meanwhile, Smithfield workers were filing complaints that they were not spaced six feet apart, were denied breaks and couldn’t breathe through masks saturated with sweat. Others said their production line was so quick, they weren’t able to turn away to cough. “If you’re not in a casket, they want you there,” former Smithfield worker Sonja Johnson told The Washington Post.
“The lack of care and the lack of interest in providing workers with the most basic protections by the companies is shocking,” said Magaly Licolli, director of an Arkansas-based poultry worker organization, in a recent Food Chain Workers Alliance report on frontline worker organizing. “With this pandemic it’s about fighting or dying. There is no other option.”
According to October’s congressional investigation, the biggest meat conglomerates “prioritized profits and production over worker safety,” a practice that is unfortunately all too common in an industry that employs primarily BIPOC workers. Around 44 percent of workers in the animal slaughtering and processing industry nationwide are Latinx and 25 percent are Black, while more than half of frontline meatpacking workers are immigrants. And according to a CDC report, 87 percent of meatpacking workers infected with COVID-19 in summer 2020 were racial or ethnic minorities. In Iowa, another study found that only 18 percent of infected meatpacking workers were white.
Meat processing plants were dangerous places to work even before the pandemic. And while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — the federal agency responsible for ensuring workers’ safety — acknowledges the presence of hazards like noise, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, repetitive motions, hazardous chemicals and exposure to airborne pathogens in slaughterhouses, it provides only limited protections from these dangers through its general standards that apply across industries.
When it comes to air quality, in particular, OSHA has failed to develop standards for any sector — even though meat-processing facilities are notorious for spreading viruses due to temperature and humidity levels that encourage pathogens to thrive. OSHA has also failed to adopt standards to protect workers from musculoskeletal disorders, a particularly severe problem in the poultry industry. Instead, OSHA has largely developed “nonbinding guidance” for employers or unsuccessfully attempted to invoke the OSHA Act’s general duty clause — which requires employers to ensure the workplace is free of “recognized hazards.” It has generally been understood as a backstop in the absence of specifically applicable standards but is difficult for the agency to justify when challenged.
OSHA also issued “nonbinding guidance” during COVID-19 when, as the congressional investigation argues, it should have issued an Emergency Temporary Standard to protect workers. As a result, meatpacking companies were left largely unchecked. Investigators describe this as a “political decision” by OSHA leadership under former President Trump. Yet even under the Biden administration, the agency has still not implemented those sorely needed safety rules — or so many of the others that could help to curb the health hazards and injustices facing workers.
On his first day as president, Joe Biden signed an executive order on advancing racial equity and claimed he would make racial equity and support for underserved communities “the business of the whole government.” Protecting marginalized workers must be central to this strategy for it to succeed. By implementing workplace protections in key industries like meatpacking, OSHA now has the chance to address the disproportionate impact of health hazards and promote racial equity in industries employing BIPOC workers long left unprotected due to the nonexistence of binding regulatory standards.
Fortunately, there are signs of progress. In September, the Biden administration announced new initiatives at OSHA to address heat hazards in the workplace — a dangerous issue that disproportionately impacts immigrant farmworkers, and for which OSHA has never had an enforceable national standard. OSHA launched a rulemaking process on October 27 to finally create such a standard, which will replace its previous “nonbinding guidance.”
This is a significant step in the right direction. It will save lives. But when it comes to remedying the disproportionate impacts of hazardous workplaces, it is just the beginning. Meat-processing workers deserve protection, too.
For years, slaughterhouse workers and their advocates have been calling for a slowdown to increasing factory line speeds, which crowd workers closer together and raise their risk of injury. They’ve asked for strengthened inspection programs that address not only food safety, but worker safety, and allow workers to designate a representative to accompany inspectors. And they’ve demanded that their basic rights — to bathroom breaks, to leave from work due to medical and other emergencies, and to protection from retaliation when filing complaints — be respected. Federal legislation could address many of these longstanding issues to protect workers over the long term, in addition to compelling OSHA to create emergency pandemic standards.
Advocates are also calling on OSHA to keep a record of pandemic-related infections and deaths, including the racial demographics of those affected. Because — as October’s congressional investigation shows — lives are lost when companies aren’t held publicly accountable for protecting their workers. As long as these companies continue to prioritize profits over people, the federal government can no longer stand aside and must step in to uphold safety, equity and justice for the workers our food system depends on.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
At least 59,000 workers at the nation’s five largest meatpackers were infected with COVID-19 and at least 269 died during the first year of the pandemic, a new investigation from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has found. That’s almost three times the number of both infections and deaths known from previous estimates based on publicly available data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN).
The actual number of COVID cases and deaths among workers in these facilities was likely even higher, because the data provided by companies to the subcommittee excludes cases discovered in off-site testing or self-reported by employees.
Tyson Foods, based in Springdale, Arkansas, reported the most worker cases — 29,462 — and deaths — 151 — of the five companies. The others are JBS (12,859 employee infections and 62 deaths), Smithfield (9,666 infections and 25 deaths), Cargill (4,690 infections and 25 deaths), and National Beef (2,470 infections and six deaths). The subcommittee noted that the full extent of infections and deaths at these companies was likely much worse as the data they provided to investigators in many instances excluded cases confirmed by offsite testing or self-reported by employees. Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s shocking for people to realize that companies don’t have to report to anyone how many of their workers tested positive for COVID, or how many workers in their plants died of COVID,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former senior Occupational Safety and Health Administration official under President Obama, told Facing South.
The subcommittee found that infections were particularly high at certain plants, including a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, where 49.8% of the workforce contracted the virus. A memo from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Texas health authorities to Tyson obtained by the subcommittee said that workers at the plant were wearing masks “saturated” with sweat and were separated by only “plastic bags on frames.” The report also said that OSHA staff told the subcommittee that the agency’s decision not to issue a regulatory standard on protective measures for workers was a “political decision.”
Workers and their families called attention to lack of safety measures in poultry plants almost immediately once the pandemic began, as reporting by Facing South and other outlets documented. But, the subcommittee report noted, company executives and even the government spent months claiming that plants weren’t a source of infection — and blaming outbreaks in their workforce on “community spread.” The meat and poultry processing workforce is largely composed of non-white workers, and the industry relies heavily on immigrant labor. In Arkansas, as Facing South reported, two mayors worked with Tyson to tout safety measures inside the company’s plants and claim that the virus’s spread was mostly due to community behavior.
But the data obtained by the subcommittee showed a decline in infections among meatpacking workers as companies began implementing safety measures. “For example, Tyson’s monthly employee infections from its 15 facilities with the highest aggregate team member positive case counts have decreased from counts as high as 1,672 in April 2020 and 1,242 in March 2020 to counts as low as ten and seven in July 2020,” the report states.
The report confirmed what workers and advocates had been claiming all along, said Magaly Licolli, the co-founder of Arkansas workers’ justice group Venceremos. “It was not shocking,” she said.
Berkowitz and Licolli both testified at the subcommittee hearing on the report held Oct. 27. They were joined by Martin Rosas, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 2 in Kansas, and Rose Godinez, the interim legal director of the ACLU of Nebraska and the daughter of former meatpacking workers. Three representatives from Southern states serve on the subcommittee: Chairman Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, and Republicans Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Mark Green of Tennessee. None of the states they represent are in the top five for meat or poultry processing by number of workers.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, a physician, was the subcommittee’s only Republican member to use their speaking time to address the substance of the report. Scalise, the ranking member, spent his time calling for a hearing into the origins of COVID-19 and talking about inflation and the Biden administration’s economic policies, as did the remaining Republicans.
“They were purposely, obviously trying to deviate from the subject, to not pay attention to it,” Licolli told Facing South.
In her testimony, Licolli recalled the early days of the pandemic, when she said she was “receiving many daily calls from workers, letting me know how terrified they were to see how fast their co-workers were getting infected with COVID.” The subcommittee’s report did not break down cases and deaths by state, but incomplete FERN data collected through Sept. 2 shows nearly 7,000 cases and more than 20 deaths in Arkansas meat and poultry processing plants.
Three testimonies submitted to the committee by Tyson workers in Arkansas using pseudonyms also recalled the consequences of being exposed to COVID on the job. “My life has changed completely after I contracted COVID,” wrote a former Tyson mechanic who says he contracted COVID while working in the plant. “I currently only have 45% of my lung capacity. I lost my job and I’m unable to find other jobs because of my health condition.”
Another worker at Tyson’s plant in Green Forest, Arkansas, wrote that the dividers installed by the company didn’t do much to protect workers. “The reality was that we were still working shoulder to shoulder. Our head came out of those dividers to be able to process chicken properly,” she wrote. She contracted COVID and came to work while symptomatic, she said, because she was afraid she would be fired. Her husband also contracted the disease and died.
Witnesses called for policy changes at the federal and state level to protect workers and provide more avenues for employees to combat unsafe working conditions.
“We really need to look at passing state laws that give workers a way to take employers into court when they just willfully decide that they’re not going to protect workers,” said Berkowitz. “There needs to be better protection in state laws, and federal laws, from retaliation for workers who speak up.”
A major focus of the report was OSHA’s absence during the pandemic, from conducting inspections to levying fines. The agency did not issue an Emergency Temporary Standard for meatpacking plants, which the report says OSHA staff called a “political decision.” Such a standard would have required companies to take specific steps to protect workers and given OSHA greater enforcement power. In 2020, as thousands of meatpacking workers were sickened and hundreds died, the agency issued just nine citations to meatpacking plants. The agency received hundreds of complaints in that time period.
“OSHA under Trump was really hollowed out, was sort of shut down,” said Berkowitz. “And it’s going to take a while to turn the agency back on.” She called for major budget increases to the agency that would allow it to rebuild.
“We need OSHA more than ever to function as it should be functioning,” said Licolli.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.