The working class and coronavirus (Part IV): The pressure to go to work when sick

Here's a report by Holly Bailey, out of Lone Tree, in southeast Iowa, for the Washington Post.  The story centers on a 64-year-old woman with COPD, who was working in a convenience store when the coronavirus news caused her to seek an unpaid leave in early March, before there were many cases in Iowa.  Her doctor didn't provide a note excusing her from work, so her request was denied.  Not long afterwards, though, she was furloughed, as coronavirus moved to center stage in mid March.  The question now is whether vulnerable workers like her will be required to return to work or lose their unemployment benefits, as Iowa seeks to reopen. 

Last week, Iowa joined a growing number of states that have started to reopen amid the pandemic. Although there was never an official statewide stay-at-home order, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) eased restrictions in 77 of the state’s 99 counties, allowing restaurants, gyms, churches and other businesses to open at limited capacity, even as coronavirus cases in the state continue to rise.

On Wednesday, Reynolds signed a public health order allowing the partial reopening of businesses beginning Friday in the state’s 22 remaining counties, including retail stores and enclosed shopping malls, as long as they operate at 50 percent capacity

* * *

Iowa Workforce Development, which oversees the state’s unemployment system, has announced some exceptions to the policy, including for those who have been sickened by the coronavirus or have been advised by a doctor to self-quarantine because they face a higher risk of becoming ill.

But in a news conference last week, Beth Townsend, the department’s executive director, said the onus would be on workers to prove that their employment situation would put them at risk of getting sick. “It takes more than a mere assertion by the employee to establish this to be true,” she said.

The working class and coronavirus (Part III): Meatpacking

This is not actually a "rural" topic, nor is it one limited to the white working class, so I have avoided treating it as such and writing about it on these blogs.  But after weeks of following outbreaks of coronavirus in meatpacking plants, I've decided to collect many of those stories here, along with datelines, in no particular order.  Well, no particular order except that I have to start with this Washington Post coverage of comments by the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this week.  Justice Patience Roggensack, in the middle of an oral argument about the constitutionality of the governor's stay-at-home order, responded to data about the high rate of infection in Brown County (whose county seat is Green Bay):

These were due to the meatpacking, though. That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.

Many people on Twitter are calling this racist, though I've not seen any data on the racial make up of those who work at the JBS meatpacking plant in Brown County.   Others called Justice Roggensack's comments "elitist" and "classist," which they no doubt are.  My favorite comment on Twitter came from Prof. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas Law School who commented that the Chief Justice said "the quiet part out loud."  Ahem.

Here's a great overview of what is happening in this coronavirus era, with the meatpacking industry overall, from Adam Clark Estes for Vox/Recode, from May 8:

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.

Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.

Here's a Politico story about how Alex Azar, Secretary for Health and Human Services, blamed the high incidence of coronavirus in meatpacking plants on workers' "home and social" conditions.  An earlier Buzzfeed story reported similar blame-shifting by Smithfield re: the Sioux Falls outbreak.

A Smithfield pork processing facility, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, population 154,000, was one of the earliest meatpacking outbreaks reported.  Reports on the outbreak there are here, here and here.  Don't miss NYT's "The Daily" Podcast interviewing a woman, born in South Sudan, who worked at the plant and was diagnosed with coronavirus after she was quarantined following a co-worker's diagnosis.  But one poignant aspect:  when she was put on quarantine, she was told she would be paid for 40/hours a week during that period.  But she could not get by on just 40/hours week wages because she'd been working and earning an average of $500/week in overtime.

A Cargill pork and beef processing plant in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, population 25,340, is the subject of this Bloomberg story and this NYTimes story from a few days ago.

A Tyson plant in southwest Georgia was featured in this post from early April.

Meat and poultry processing plants in Nebraska (Grand Island), Colorado, and on the DelMarVa peninsula have also been closed temporarily.

Today, The Oregonian covered an outbreak of coronavirus at a seafood packing plant in Astoria, Oregon, population 9477.

There are no doubt many more outbreaks I've not picked up on or am not highlighting here, such as in Dodge City, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and "deep East" Texas.  As with nursing homes and jails/prisons, these packinghouse outbreaks show up as dense spikes on charts and tables tracking where the coronavirus hotspots are.  They look particularly "oversized," if you will, when they occur in areas with small populations.

Post-script:  Big New York Times feature May 10 out of Black Hawk County, Iowa, population 131,090, which includes Waterloo.  Here's the lede, which has the county sheriff playing a role I would not have expected, while Tyson Foods plays the villain part just as expected:

On April 10, Tony Thompson, the sheriff for Black Hawk County in Iowa, visited the giant Tyson Foods pork plant in Waterloo. What he saw, he said, “shook me to the core.”

Workers, many of them immigrants, were crowded elbow to elbow as they broke down hog carcasses zipping by on a conveyor belt. The few who had face coverings wore a motley assortment of bandannas, painters’ masks or even sleep masks stretched around their mouths. Some had masks hanging around their necks.

Sheriff Thompson and other local officials, including from the county health department, lobbied Tyson to close the plant, worried about a coronavirus outbreak. But Tyson was “less than cooperative,” said the sheriff, who supervises the county’s coronavirus response, and Iowa’s governor declined to shut the facility.

A week later, Tyson sent a text message to employees:

Waterloo Tyson is running.  Thank you team members! WE ARE PROUD OF YOU!

Please read for yourself the rest, reported by Ana Swanson, David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Postscript from ProPublica on June 12, by Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung.  The headline is "Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants."

The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.