Daily Labor Update: COVID-19 Crisis
Representing manufacturing, production, maintenance and sanitation workers in the baking, confectionery, tobacco and grain milling industries.
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03 Apr Daily Labor Update: COVID-19 Crisis

Posted at 11:14h in Coronavirus, COVID-19 Daily Labor Update by

Frontline workers in food manufacturing, in distribution centers, stocking shelves at grocery stores and delivering food have become a lifeline for millions of working people who are staying home during the COVID-19 crisis.

Jobs Report

Payrolls dropped by 701,000 in March, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent from 3.5 percent.

  • Businesses who receive federal funding from the CARES Act have a legal and moral responsibility to put their payroll before profits.
  • We will overcome this pandemic because of workers, but for the economy to recover workers need to stay on the payroll.

Chris Smalls and Amazon

Chris Smalls was fired by Amazon one day after he helped organize the strike at the companyโ€™s Staten Island, New York facility. This is retaliation, plain and simple.

Amazonโ€™s spin campaign about Smalls is a blatant lie. Vice News acquired
an email from General Counsel David Zapolsky, which exposed the companyโ€™s shameful strategy. Zapolsky wrote:

We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizerโ€™s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safetyโ€ฆMake him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.

As is often the case with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, the rhetoric does not match the reality. Conditions in Amazon warehouses were a disgrace before coronavirus, and now weโ€™re seeing once again the dangers of corporations that put bottom lines over workers’ lives.

Workplace Conditions: How We Got Here

The Obama administration had a contagious disease standard in the works, requiring companies like Amazon and Whole Foods to have a plan in place to protect workers. That standard was scrapped by the Trump administration.

OSHA needs additional resources to ensure workplaces are safe right now. As workers are risking our own lives and pulling longer hours, there are fewer workplace safety inspectors than ever in the history of OSHA.

There is only one inspector for every 79,000 workers. At the federal level, the agency has enough inspectors to inspect workplaces only once every 165 years.

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