How COVID-19 has affected essential retail workers
Workers face the daily risk of infection to help keep people fed, supplied with prescriptions
TORONTO — As an associate manager at a No Frills supermarket, Helen Stathopoulos rarely had to confront existential worries on the job. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
For two months, she and colleagues in north-end Toronto have faced daily risk of infection in one of the few environments where a lockeddown populace routinely congregated in large numbers.
“When you go to work, you don’t know what you’re going to come up against,” said Sathopoulos, 41. “It would be a lie to say it doesn’t weigh on us. It does. You think about it all the time … Absolutely the fear is there.”
Indeed, the legions of grocery and pharmacy workers like her across Canada have been the unsung frontline workers of the pandemic, and their quotidian exposure to the public has had an impact.
As the epidemic slows and other retailers begin to open, the anxiety has lessened. Meanwhile, health-care workers have definitely been the hardest hit by the coronavirus, with thousands sickened.
But based on union estimates and statistics provided by some companies, at least 500 food-retail and pharmacy employees throughout Canada have tested positive and several have died from the disease.
For many shoppers, as well, doing the groceries has been a stressful activity, with some pointing to such stores as the source of their own infections.
One Toronto man posted on Facebook that the only place he could have caught COVID-19 was a supermarket that’s been closed for several days because of an outbreak among staff. He says his immune-compromised wife also contracted the disease, eventually winding up in intensive care.
But it remains unclear to what extent supermarkets have contributed to the community spread of COVID-19, frustrating experts trying to track how the virus disseminates.
“The data are not being collected in a systematic way to be able to determine many potential sources of transmission in the community,” said Dr. Jeff Kwong, a family physician and public-health professor at the University of Toronto. “We have the category ‘Close contact of a confirmed case’ but that doesn’t tell us if the contact occurred at home or at work, and the type of work involved.”
Union and company representatives argue that protective measures implemented early on in the pandemic — from limiting the number of customers in stores to installing Plexiglas shields for cashiers — have been generally effective in keeping both employees and customers safe.
In some ways, the pandemic has even been a boon for a workforce that earns relatively little and has seen full-time jobs dwindle, said one union leader.
This COVID-19 has allowed us to highlight the importance of these workers
More than 80 per cent of grocery employees work parttime, but demand in the nowbooming sector has brought full-time hours for many, said Chris MacDonald, assistant to the president of Unifor, which represents about 13,000 supermarket employees.
“All of a sudden, retail workers are making decent money,” he said. “There are things that change the game for retail workers. They all got more hours … This COVID19 has allowed us to highlight the importance of these workers, the necessity of their work.”