Workers turn into amateur sleuths to track coronavirus cases.
Some companies have been keeping their employees in the dark on just how prevalent COVID-19 is in their warehouses, offices, stores and plants
Jana Jumpp spends eight hours a day updating a spreadsheet — not for work, but a recent hobby: figuring out how many of Amazon’s 400,000 warehouse workers have fallen sick with the coronavirus. Amazon won’t give a number, so Jumpp tracks it on her own and shares what she finds with others. She relies on Amazon employees at more than 250 facilities who call, text or send her Facebook messages with possible cases. She asks for proof, like messages or voicemails from Amazon, and tries to make sure she doesn’t count the same case twice.
It’s time consuming, but Jumpp says workers should know if there’s an outbreak and just how risky it is to head to work.
“Amazon is not going to do it, so it’s up to us,” says Jumpp, 58, who lost her job in July at an Amazon warehouse in Jeffersonville,
Ind., after she went on leave for fear of contracting the coronavirus and ran out of paid time off.
Major companies are keeping their employees in the dark on just how prevalent the virus is in their warehouses, offices, stores and meatpacking plants. That has left workers like Jumpp to become amateur sleuths in their spare time. Unions and advocate groups have taken up the cause, too, creating lists or building online maps of stores where workers can self-report cases they know about.
The numbers are publicized by the unions and labor groups and used to organize worker protests. But mainly, the reason for collecting them is so that workers can make decisions about their health.
No names are included, and those keeping track say their numbers likely reflect far fewer cases than there actually are. Companies typically notify employees if they may have been exposed to the virus by a co-worker but critics claim they won’t reveal the totals because it could spook workers and turn off customers. Marc Perrone, the president of the the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents grocery and meatpacking workers, called it “stunning” that this many months into the pandemic “some of America’s largest companies still refuse to release this information.” Companies have no legal obligation to publicly reveal how many of their workers have contracted the virus, and few are doing so.
Employers do have to provide a safe working environment, which means they must alert staff if they might have been exposed to the virus without revealing the •