Articles (Essential Workers)
“Protections are urgently needed. While Americans have been instructed to maintain 6ft from others, food workers labor shoulder-to-shoulder in the country’s mega-processing plants. Farmworkers pack into buses to and from orange groves and other harvest sites. They share cramped rooms, even beds, with strangers, and lack ventilation or access to sanitation. “The company isn’t doing anything to give workers space. We’re close to each other all the time,” a Tyson poultry worker in Arkansas stated. She’s a member of Venceremos, a group of poultry workers petitioning companies to provide sick leave.
Yet for many food workers, absence from work due to illness risks termination. And these workers have high rates of hypertension and respiratory impairments – conditions linked to severe Covid-19 disease – because of their proximity to chemicals known to be lung irritants. Essential food workers are paid minimum wages while enduring perilous conditions. They face an agonizing choice: stay home without income for rent or go to work and risk infection.
“We’re in a country where people want our labor but don’t care about our lives. Our human rights have been denied, but our work is being deemed essential. The injustice of the system is laid bare,” explained Enrique Balcazar, an organizer with Migrant Justice, a dairy worker-led organization pressing the state of Vermont to include workers’ needs in its crisis response.”
– The Guardian, US food workers are in danger. That threatens all of us.
“Whole Foods workers across the US are planning to hold another sickout protest on 1 May, as the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus infections at the supermarket chain continue to rise and workers charge the Amazon-owned company is doing too little to help them.
Workers complain too little is being done to enforce social distancing in stores; it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to qualify for sick pay; and some are not given masks or training on cleaning. In the meantime, Whole Foods is reportedly recording record sales.
Dan Steinbrook, an employee at Whole Foods in Boston, said: “The bottom line is we don’t think Whole Foods or Amazon is doing nearly enough as they could be to protect both employees and customers at the store in terms of personal safety and public health.””
– The Guardian, Whole Foods staff protest against conditions as coronavirus cases rise.
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Download the 18″x24″poster (.pdf), World News #37 – Risking Their Lives (Essential Workers).
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World News
World News is a poster project by Ihanktonwan Dakota artist David Bernie that promotes issues and stories worldwide.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
