US Department of Agriculture Study Shows Working Conditions in Meatpacking Plants Likely Drove Coronavirus Outbreaks by Amanda Perez Pintado and Madison McVan
October 6, 2021
(Investigate Midwest) The analysis supports what many meatpacking workers and advocates suspected during the early months of the pandemic — working shoulder-to-shoulder coupled with high line speeds contributed to the virus’ spread.
Working conditions in meatpacking plants likely led to the spread of COVID-19 in rural areas of the U.S. in the early months of the pandemic, new U.S. Department of Agriculture research shows.
The space between workers, who stand close together on production lines as they make the same cut over and over, was probably the main factor that caused the outbreaks, according to the USDA’s report published last month. Overall, meatpacking plant workers were much more likely to be exposed to the virus than workers in other manufacturing jobs.
“It is a strong possibility that specifically the physical proximity of the workers in meatpacking plants is directly linked to the outbreaks that we saw in the spring and summer of 2020,” said Thomas Krumel, one of the paper’s authors and now an assistant professor at North Dakota State University.
The paper, according to the researchers, could be the first effort to empirically identify conditions that caused coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants at an industry-wide level.
(Common Dreams) An estimated 10,000 unionized John Deere workers are officially on strike Thursday after a midnight deadline failed to yield an agreement to satisfy the organized workforce of the well-known tractor and farm machine company.
"Our members at John Deere strike for the ability to earn a decent living, retire with dignity and establish fair work rules," said Chuck Browning, vice prresident and director of the UAW’s Agricultural Implement Department, in a statement released just after midnight. "We stay committed to bargaining until our members' goals are achieved."
According to CNN:
The UAW had reached a tentative agreement on a new six-year contact with the company two weeks ago, only to see 90% of the rank-and-file members of the union reject it in a ratification vote that concluded this past Sunday. Union and management negotiators talked into the night Wednesday trying to reach a new deal but were unable to do so.
This is the nation's largest private-sector strike since the UAW waged a costly six-week strike against General Motors (GM) two years ago. And it continues a recent trend of workers flexing more muscle as the dynamics of the labor market tip more toward them and away from employers. Businesses have been struggling to find the workers they need to fill a recent record number of job openings. There has also been a record high number of workers quitting jobs.
UAW president Ray Curry said the union's almost one million retired and active members "stand in solidarity" with the striking John Deere workers and their families.
Waitering and waitressing can be good jobs, but recent developments may be causing your waiter or waitress to be getting a little grumpy in their attitude.
Wage Theft at Restaurants Is Getting Worse
by Andrea Guzman
October 23, 2021
(Mother Jones) As if restaurant workers weren’t already suffering enough during the pandemic from lost hours and angry customers, many of them have also had to contend with not being paid for all of the hours they’ve worked.
Tipped workers, most of them restaurant workers, have experienced increased wage theft this year compared to last, according to a recent report by nonprofit restaurant advocacy group One Fair Wage. In a Facebook Live event last month, the group’s President Saru Jayaraman said: “We are seeing a real uptick in violations of workers’ rights in this industry.”
Wage theft—when employers fail to pay workers what they’ve earned—has a disproportionate impact on the tens of millions of minimum wage and subminimum wage workers. That’s in part because the Department of Labor, the agency responsible for investigating those violations, is under-resourced. The report notes that in 2015, even though the workforce had undergone massive growth, the number of investigators in the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division has remained nearly the same as it was 70 years ago. As a result, people of color, women and immigrants, who make up a large share of low-wage workers, have missed out on earnings.
This is especially problematic for tipped workers. By law, restaurants in 43 states can pay workers a lower hourly minimum wage, down to $2.13 an hour, as long as the worker’s tips get their earnings up to the state’s minimum wage. If tips are inadequate, employers are supposed to make up the difference. But in a September survey of 238 tipped workers, more than a third of workers reported that their tips and additional wages fail to bring them up to the state’s minimum wage. And while almost half of tipped workers reported not being fairly compensated for overtime, women were 10 percent more likely to report not being paid time and a half.
Even when employers that underpaid workers pay back stolen wages, they’re often only required to pay back a portion of them.
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
(Alternet) So many people with COVID-19 sought treatment at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in recent months that the hospital triaged patients in a tent outside the facility and set up a makeshift ward in the main lobby.
Many workers put in 14- and 16-hour shifts to keep the Southern California facility operating during the crisis, with some comforting the dying and others volunteering to use their Spanish skills to help communicate with bereft family members over the phone.
But instead of recognizing workers who risked their lives and pushed themselves to exhaustion, the hospital compounded the strain by demanding concessions and dragging out contract negotiations for more than a year.
Around the country, hospitals continue to stretch workers to the breaking point and put the entire health care system at risk.
"The fact is that without us, the hospitals have no one," observed Alma Garzon, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 183, which represents hundreds of workers at Providence St. Mary.
(The Verge) Janneke Parrish, a leader of the #AppleToo movement, has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging the tech giant fired her in retaliation for organizing.
Parrish created the #AppleToo platform to help colleagues air their concerns with Apple’s culture of “pervasive sexism” and pay equity, according to the complaint. Then, in October, she was fired, allegedly for failing to comply with a workplace investigation into leaks.
Parrish says the company terminated her based on “false and pretextual reasons” — namely because she “spoke up regarding her personal experiences regarding workplace concerns and helped give voice to her co-workers’ concerns in a workplace where such issues have been systematically siloed, suppressed, and unaddressed.”
“It seems like all the tech companies are using the same playbook,” says labor attorney Laurie Burgess. “They get rid of outspoken organizers by asserting they are responsible for a leak without any proof or documentation that that person was indeed responsible. My client denies having leaked this information.” Burgess is also representing the fired and suspended Netflix organizers, as well as prominent Google organizers.
This is the seventh unfair labor practice charge that has been filed against Apple since August. Last month, former senior engineering program manager Ashley Gjøvik accused Tim Cook of violating the National Labor Relations Act when he warned employees that “people who leak confidential information do not belong here.”
(Mother Jones) Two weeks ago, New York City taxi drivers and their supporters launched a hunger strike. Their goal was to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city to guarantee the loans they took out to purchase medallions required to operate Yellow cabs.
On Wednesday, they achieved a near total victory.
In a course reversal, de Blasio has agreed to have the city serve as a backstop for the debt past administrations loaded onto drivers. That will allow the cabbies, many of whom still owe more than $500,000, to reduce their debts to $170,000 at most. Their loan payments will also be capped at about $1,100 per month. So far, the agreement covers drivers who owe money to Marblegate, which became the largest holder of medallion loans after the bubble burst.
As I wrote last month at the start of the strike:
A Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation established in 2019 [that] lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by owner-drivers in recent years.
(Mother Jones) L.H. worked for McDonald’s—or so she thought. The 14-year-old put on her McDonald’s uniform before her shifts, handed McDonald’s bags through the drive-through window, and, at the end of the day, trudged out through doors beside the golden arches.
But earlier this year, after her new manager started touching her inappropriately, told her he wanted her to be his “happy meal,” and then raped her in a restaurant bathroom, L.H. learned that technically, she didn’t work for McDonald’s at all, according to a legal complaint. Instead, she worked for Rice Enterprises—a franchisee that owns eight McDonald’s locations in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs.
That seemingly technical distinction will matter immensely as the 14-year-old’s parents pursue a lawsuit accusing both Rice Enterprises and McDonald’s, the corporate entity, of negligence: for hiring the shift manager, Walter Garner, to oversee teen workers despite his past criminal conviction of sexual assault, for not adequately supervising him, and for failing to address complaints about harassment. According to the complaint, filed in September, even after L.H. (whose name has been concealed in court records because she is a minor) and her co-workers spoke to a hiring manager about Garner’s behavior, nothing was done to stop it; when other managers viewed surveillance video showing Garner groping L.H., they neither disciplined nor fired him. Only after he showed an intimate photo of her to another young worker, who reported it to her school, did anyone call the police, says Alan Perer, L.H.’s lawyer. Garner was arrested in mid-April and pleaded guilty this last week to statutory sexual assault of a girl age 11 or older, along with other charges.
…
In October, McDonald’s workers outraged over L.H.’s story went on strike for a day. And on Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, McDonald’s workers in five California cities will stage more walkouts and a series of rallies to shore up support for a bill that would make it clear that McDonald’s is on the hook for employment law violations in franchise restaurants, including sexual harassment. “The franchisee being a separate business from the franchisor—I think of it as a legal fiction,” says Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s author. “We allow that to absolve the franchisor of their responsibility.”
(Common Dreams) Starbucks employees in the Buffalo, New York area are casting ballots in a union election which, if successful, would result in the first U.S. bargaining unit at the international coffee chain.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Wednesday began sending out ballots to workers at three store locations which filed for an election in August, setting off an effort by the Seattle-based corporation to "intimidate" the employees out of organizing, according to critics.
The company has attempted to delay the election and has sent high-level corporate employees to the area in recent weeks, as well as former CEO and powerful shareholder Howard Schultz, who held a meeting for workers at a Buffalo-area hotel last weekend ahead of the vote.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler tweeted on Tuesday that the corporation has used a number of tactics in the anti-union playbook, including "holding anti-union meetings framed as listening sessions" and telling workers, "Our benefits are already good."
"Starbucks will do everything it can to stop Workers United's organizing drive in Buffalo," Shuler tweeted, referring to the affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which more than 100 Starbucks workers in the Buffalo area are voting on whether to join.
(Vox) Workers are fed up and fighting back against low pay, poor conditions, and the general idea that work is the center of their lives.
That fighting back is taking on many forms, from the performative to the transformative. Posts about standing up to abusive bosses have become their own genre on TikTok, Reddit, and other platforms. Some workers are participating in collective actions, and approval of unions is at its highest rate since 1965. Others are finding alternative sources of income or committing to getting by on less. Perhaps, most directly, people are quitting their jobs at record rates in what’s become known as the Great Resignation.
…
There are still more than 4 million fewer people in the workforce than there would be if labor force participation were at pre-pandemic levels. There are 10.4 million open jobs and just 7.4 million unemployed, according to the latest data. Of course, many of these open jobs are bad: They have bad pay, dangerous working conditions, or just aren’t remote (remote positions on LinkedIn get 2.5 times more applications than non-remote, according to the company).
The result is a situation where many employers — especially those in industries with notoriously bad pay and conditions — are having difficulty finding and retaining workers. To counter it, they’re raising wages, offering better benefits, and even altering the nature of their work. Depending on their strength and duration, these various actions could have long-lasting impacts on the future of work for all Americans.
(Common Dreams) Sen. Bernie Sanders, joined by seven Democratic colleagues, sent a letter Friday to Kaiser Permanente chair and CEO Greg Adams in support of tens of thousands of healthcare workers planning to strike on November 15 unless negotiations for a fair contract improve.
Monday's strike is set to include 32,000 Kaiser workers, though another 8,000 have authorized a strike, the letter notes. They are represented by various unions and work at facilities across California, Colorado, D.C., Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington.
…
According to the eight senators:
Instead of treating these workers with the dignity and respect they deserve you have demanded that they accept just a 2% wage increase and a two-tier system that allows you to pay new workers lower wages. Considering your recent profit margins, we find this offer to be demeaning and unacceptable. These dedicated workers deserve a fair wage increase, and the new generation of Kaiser Permanente workers should have the same pay structure as those who are longer-term employees.
…
Noting that the healthcare giant made $2.2 billion in operating profits last year, the letter to Adams says that "now, at a time when Kaiser is sitting on $44.5 billion in cash reserves and your insured membership has grown to 12.5 million, the company wishes to diminish the safety, security, and well-being of its workers, rather than improve them
(The Verge) A major Hollywood union has voted to ratify a pair of contracts to improve labor conditions for production workers — though narrowly — after previously voting to authorize a strike over stalled negotiations with major studios.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced today its members narrowly voted to ratify both the Basic Agreement and the Area Standards Agreement, three-year contracts that included provisions for things like meal times and breaks, increased base pay for the union’s lowest-paid members, and better terms for productions from streaming services. Both votes were extraordinarily close, and the vote around the Basic Agreement, in particular, is contentious.
IATSE uses an electoral college-like voting system (delegates are assigned to IATSE’s local unions based on their number of members). Delegate votes leaned yes for both contracts, and 52 percent of members voted in favor of the Area Standards Agreement (48 percent voted no). But the popular vote for the Basic Agreement shook out to 50.4 percent no to 49.6 percent yes.
(Axios) Pressure from new publishing platforms has finally pushed newsrooms to create programs that give writers more pay, autonomy and flexibility. Those changes are attracting some independent writers back to traditional news companies.
Why it matters: The Substack threat to newsrooms was overblown. Newsrooms have been quick to react to the idea of the independent-operator model while journalists have been sharing its challenges or detailing why they decided to return to newsrooms.
Driving the news: The Information is in early stages of launching "The Information Newsletter Network," a platform to power independent newsletter writers on The Information's tech stack.
"Everyone in publishing knows the hard part happens after you hit send," says CEO and founder Jessica Lessin.
"We are the only solution I've seen that gets that. We've got eight years of experience about how to scale premium subscription publications. No tech platform has that in their DNA, and it shows in their products."
(MSN) Amazon is facing strikes by warehouse workers and delivery drivers across Europe as its busiest weekend of the year begins.
Labor unions in Germany, Italy and France are calling for the company to pay its workers fairly and respect their right to join unions. The strikes have been called to coincide with Amazon's annual Black Friday event, which kicks off a four-day shopping bonanza that culminates in Cyber Monday.
The action is part of a wider global protest organized by a group called Make Amazon Pay. The coalition of unions, environmentalists and tax campaigners has called for protests in 22 countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.
The international coalition is also demanding that Amazon "pays its fair share of taxes and commits to real environmental sustainability."
An Amazon spokesperson said that the groups represented a variety of interests, and while the company was "not perfect in any area" it was taking its role and impact seriously.
(The American Prospect) There are landslide elections, and then there are LANDSLIDE elections. The Teamsters just had the italicized all-caps version.
By a margin of two-to-one, Sean O’Brien, who headed a slate of candidates opposed to outgoing president Jim Hoffa, defeated Hoffa’s preferred successor, Steve Vairma. (The vote counting was completed on Friday.) Even more impressive, the candidates on O’Brien’s slate also won the union’s number-two position (secretary-treasurer), and every other one of the 28 contests on the ballot.
Election outcomes like this are rare. I’d say “rare in union elections” but for the fact that the vast majority of unions don’t elect their leaders through rank-and-file balloting, but rather through the votes of elected delegates at their conventions. Three decades ago, when the Teamsters were glaringly mobbed up, the federal government put the union under governmental supervision, one element of which was a switch to the rank-and-file election of its leaders for five-year terms. The union has since been cleaned up and the feds’ trusteeship lifted, but the one element of the trusteeship that the union has opted to continue under its own aegis is the rank-and-file voting. (It has also continued to have New York attorney Richard Mark, who served as the court-appointed trustee, supervise the elections.)
Incoming president O’Brien is an insider turned outsider. The longtime leader of a Boston local was a member of the victorious Hoffa slate five years ago, in which capacity he was in charge of the union’s dealings with the union’s largest employer, United Parcel Service, for which roughly 300,000 Teamsters are employed as drivers and warehouse workers.
(Mother Jones) Bessemer, Alabama, who tried unsuccessfully to unionize earlier this year, will likely have another shot at a union election thanks to an order by a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board. The order said the company acted with “flagrant disregard” for certain policies that keep elections fair.
In April, after an aggressive anti-union campaign from Amazon, warehouse workers in Bessemer overwhelmingly voted not to authorize a union. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, people voted not to unionize in part because Amazon provided relatively solid wages and benefits in economically depressed areas. But that wasn’t the only reason:
On top of those economic realities, Amazon fought unionization at every turn. It forced employees to attend anti-union meetings on company time, hired union-busting consultants, sent out barrages of texts urging workers to vote no, and launched a website called doitwithoutdues.com.
All of that is legal. We live in a country long wedded to union busting. But one of Amazon’s actions crossed a line.
During the election, Amazon had the Postal Service install a post office in the parking lot to make voting in the union election “convenient, safe and private.” Labor organizers disagreed, arguing that the box’s location near a security camera—and inside of an Amazon-branded tent—tainted the election. The regional NLRB agreed and granted a do-over.
(Other Words) As a writer, I get stuck every so often straining for the right words to tell my story. Over the years, though, I’ve learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction. Instead, I step back and rethink where my story is going.
This process is essentially what millions of American working families are going through this year as record numbers of them are shocking bosses, politicians, and economists by stepping back and declaring: “We quit!”
Most of the quits are tied to very real abuses that have become ingrained in our workplaces over the past couple of decades — poverty paychecks, no health care, unpredictable schedules, no child care, understaffing, forced overtime, unsafe jobs, sexist and racist managers, aggressively rude customers, and so much more.
Specific grievances abound, but at the core of each is a deep, inherently destructive executive-suite malignancy: disrespect.
The corporate system has cheapened employees from valuable human assets worthy of being nurtured and advanced to a bookkeeping expense that must be steadily eliminated. It’s not just about paychecks. It’s about feeling valued — feeling that the hierarchy gives a damn about the people doing the work.
(Mother Jones) A few years ago, Erica Prather, the national outreach representative for Defenders of Wildlife, and her partner allowed every piece of plastic they used for an entire year to pile up in their living room, spilling over into their garage. It was a reminder that their waste is permanent. They called the mound of Styrofoam containers, dog bags and other trash their “Pile of Petroleum Past.” As someone who cares about the state of the planet, it was an example of Prather trying to live her values.
She wants others, including her own employer, to live their values too. But it wasn’t until Bernie Sanders ended his candidacy for the presidency in 2020 that Prather moved to a different, more drastic form of action: “I remember this moment when I was weeping during his concession speech, and he was like, ‘There are ways that the progressive movement can move on,’ and he literally said, ‘Unionize your workplace.’”
And unionize she did. Prather used the organizing skills she’d honed for years as an advocate for endangered species and applied them at her own workplace, Defenders of Wildlife. Quickly, other employees jumped on board; they voted to form their union in September.
And they are not the only ones. Employees at several other green groups have successfully formed unions over the last year, including Greenpeace USA, the Sunrise Movement, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
Environmental organizations have long sought to affect change outwardly—to promote biodiversity and stave off extinctions or to curb the impacts of the climate crisis. Now the organizations’ employees are turning to unions to change their workplaces from within, by fighting for higher wages and better benefits, and by forcing their organizations—whose leadership is predominantly white—to be more diverse and inclusive.
^^^I'm not sure that spamming job applications isn't being a bit rude. Still, if threatening a sympathy boycott is prohibited despite freedom of speech...
