Labor & Workers
Despite growing pressure from labor groups and worker advocates on Capitol Hill, the Biden Administration continues to delay an emergency COVID-19 worker safety protection that was supposed to launch March 15—and it’s still unclear when (or even if) the measure will be enacted…
‘Essential’ Workers Still Endangered by COVID-19
The Progressive
More than a year into a pandemic that has killed nearly half a million Americans, millions of workers still toil in dangerous infection-spreading conditions, in hospitals and clinics, nursing homes, factories, supermarkets, and fields—perilously providing America’s food and health care in hazardous conditions.
KILLING WORKER SAFETY
THE PROGRESSIVE
For at least ten hours a day and “sometimes twelve hours or more,” Maria Ramirez packed hamburgers at the Strauss Brands meatpacking plant in Franklin, Wisconsin. The job, which she held for thirteen years, was tough. Then came COVID-19, which made her work “more dangerous,” says the forty-one-year-old single mother of four, originally from Mexico.
Amputations, fractured fingers, second-degree burns and head trauma are just some of the serious injuries suffered by US meat plant workers every week, according to data seen by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Overshadowed by the high-octane wars over the Affordable Care Act and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the confirmation of Labor Secretary nominee Alexander Acosta is cruising toward a March 30 Senate committee vote with little fanfare. Yet Acosta’s acquiescence to President Trump’s labor agenda holds frightful if unheralded consequences for America’s workers, millions of them Trump supporters.
TRUMPING LABOR: THE REPUBLICAN PLAN TO GUT WORKERS' RIGHTS
THE PROGRESSIVE
In 1989, during the transition from Presidents Reagan to George H.W. Bush, the rightwing Heritage Foundation expressed dismay that “free market” reforms were not moving fast enough. The group weighed in with a burly 900-plus page “Mandate for Leadership,” urging Reagan Revolutionaries to more aggressively dismantle government regulations.
STREETCORNER, INCORPORATED
MOTHER JONES
Providing workers to do the dirtiest, riskiest jobs has become a big business. One corporation has cornered the market and is squeezing millions from its day-labor temps.
TEMPS DEMAND A NEW DEAL
THE NATION
Amid Silicon Valley’s torrid dot-com boom, stories abound of peach-fuzzed college graduates pulling down six-figure salaries and, in short order, securing their American dream. For them there is no shortage of opportunity–for new business ventures, luxury cars and seven-figure homes. Yet beneath this gilded veneer a class war is brewing.
LOSING LIFE AND LIMB ON THE JOB
THE PROGRESSIVE (AWARD WINNER)
The doctors “had to go down to the second knuckle,” says Terry Feeny. They cut off the tops of three of his fingers, leaving quarter-inch stubs with nerves so tender they reacts as if they are twenty degrees colder that the actual temperature. Even with special Neosporin gloves, “I can’t go outside in the cold for more than five minutes of my hands turn blue,” he says. “I can’t really hold nothing or grip nothing.”
In the nation’s poultry plans, brutality to workers as well as to bird.
REVOLT OVER CONDITIONS AT POULTRY PLANTS
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
When Michelle Galvan heard the radio announcing job openings at a Case Farms' poultry plant in Ohio, she rushed to meet with recruiters in her hometown - McAllen, in southern Texas. The deal sounded good: She would pack boneless chicken breasts for $5.50 an hour, and the company would provide free furnished housing and transportation.
HOG-TIED: MIGRANT WORKERS TRAPPED ON THE PORK ASSEMBLY LINE
THE PROGRESSIVE
After five days of cutting pig fat in northern Missouri, Sergio Rivera is ready to go home. So is his sixty-year-old father, who joined him on the Greyhound from El Paso in a desperate sojourn for work. Now they are broke in Missouri—financially and physically—and as eager to leave as they ever were to cut up pigs for Premium Standard Foods.
PLUCKING WORKERS: TYSON LOOKS FOR A CAPTIVE LABOR FORCE
THE PROGRESSIVE (AWARD WINNER)
Government and business officials in Missouri have developed an efficient way to slash the welfare rolls: order recipients to gut chickens or pigs for Tyson Foods, ConAgra, or Premium Standard Farms, or else lose their benefits. Under an initiative called Direct Job Placement, the companies have hired hundreds of former welfare recipients. But turnover has been high, and many—balking at the prospect of gutting fifty chickens per minute—have disappeared or been dropped from the welfare rolls by the state.