Grocery workers seeking protections
Unions seek workers comp for front-line employees
There’s a fear of the unknown that pervades in the supermarket, Brian Simmons said.
With every customer who walks through the door there are questions: Has that person been social distancing? Will they respect the 6-feet recommendation? Do they have the virus?
“It’s a tense time,” said Simmons, a 39-year-old Waterbury resident who works at the Newtown Stop & Shop. “I have to worry who you’ve been around, then who those people were around. Everyone’s on guard.”
Simmons and other grocery workers in the state have continued to clock in day-after-day amid a pandemic, despite risks to their health and that of their families.
The knowledge that grocery workers throughout the state have contracted the coronavirus, and that some have died, is enough to trigger anxiety. Adding to that stress is the understanding that, despite the efforts of advocates, they are not guaranteed, and have been denied, workers’ compensation by the state after falling ill.
The AFL-CIO and other labor groups are urging Gov. Ned Lamont to issue an executive order creating a
“I personally think it’s nonsense. If we’re considered essential, which means we’re being put on the front line, there should be coverage.”
Brian Simmons, Stop & Shop employee
workers’ compensation presumption that front-line workers contracted the virus on the job. But Lamont has not acted on the request and, other than stating hospital workers should be protected, has said other essential workers must go through the normal process. Critics say it places an unfair burden on essential workers, including grocery store employees, who would have to prove they weren’t infected elsewhere in order to qualify.
“I personally think it’s nonsense,” Simmons said. “It’s nonsense to tell someone to go walk into the fire and then ask them to prove how they got burned. If we’re considered essential, which means we’re being put on the front line, there should be coverage.”
A question of cost
For those opposed to the presumption, including the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, any extension of the program would be too expensive and put further stress on businesses.
Eric Gjede, vice president for government affairs with CBIA, cited recent projections from New York that the presumption could cost more than $10 billion and collapse the workers’ compensation system.
“All of that falls directly on the backs of businesses that are already struggling right now,” Gjede said.
Some states, like Illinois and Kentucky, have already expanded the presumption to grocery store workers. Others, like New York, are mulling the change. But in Connecticut, Lamont has not signaled any interest in expanding access.
“My understanding is for hospital workers, that’s something they deserve,” Lamont said during a press briefing last week. “I think for most everybody else, we have a workman’s comp process. It’s pretty clear, if you’re in a facility where there’s a lot of COVID and you think you caught it there, you go through that process and you get your workman’s comp.”
According to Gjede, the presumption might also too liberally award compensation to employees who may not be observing social distancing.
“We have no clue what employees are doing during the weekends,” Gjede said. “I’ve talked to employers that find out their employees take a couple of days off and were traveling out of state. So how can you presume it came from a business?”
Simmons, however, feels asking grocery workers to prove where they contracted the disease is an unreasonable request.
“I don’t even know how you would, because you would have to retrace your steps,” Simmons said. “To me, it’s an impossible feat. If you’re a front-line worker and you come down with COVID, we come in contact with a lot of different people on a daily basis, so we don’t know.”
Still, many grocery stores in the state have taken measures to protect employees who have fallen ill or are otherwise unable to work.
According to Keri Hoehne, executive assistant to the president of UFCW Local 371, all union employers — including Stop & Shop and ShopRite and other independent grocers — are offering two weeks of sick pay for employees who have tested positive. They’ve also allowed employees fearful of returning to work to take unlimited unpaid days off.
The union, which is based in Westport, is comprised of about 8,000 members, primarily grocery store workers.
Whole Foods, whose employees are not unionized, has offered the same protections.
But still, Hoehne said, there are many employees who slip through the cracks. Many don’t have the financial standing to take unpaid days off. And at least some grocery store workers who have contracted the virus have symptoms that have persisted longer than 14 days. After their two weeks pay is up, they’re still unable to return.
“The larger issue is we don’t know what the future really holds as far as what long-term issues people may have after becoming ill with COVID,” Hoehne said.
Taking a toll
The fight for the presumption comes during a time of continued uncertainty for grocery store workers, many of whom are confronted with a difficult choice: Continue to show up to work and risk one’s health? Or stay home and risk joblessness and financial hardship?
One employee of Fairfield Stop & Shop who spoke on the condition of anonymity made the choice to continue working and, in early April, began feeling ill and tested positive for the virus. Her condition quickly deteriorated — the woman had preexisting conditions, including asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure — and she was admitted to the hospital, where she stayed for two weeks.
The woman said in the weeks leading up to her illness, she only went backand-forth between work and home, where she lives with her husband and a disabled daughter. She feels certain she contracted the virus at the supermarket, but outside of the two-weeks pay granted her by Stop & Shop, she did not qualify for workers’ compensation.
“I don’t think I was around any co-workers who had it. Hopefully, I would’ve been warned,” she said. “But God knows who came in. All these customers next to you, beside you, coughing on you with no masks.”
As a result of her illness, her husband missed two weeks of work at his factory job. To do so, he dipped into personal time he’d been saving for a series of surgeries he’d planned for later this year. And, though she has insurance, the co-pays from her hospital stay are significant.
A month-and-a-half later, she’s still on oxygen and unable to return to work. Her own personal days that she’d accrued over the course of her more than 30 years with the company are starting to dwindle. Unless she’s able to return to work soon, financial hardship could be on the horizon.
“My pay is a big part of my household,” the woman said. “It’s not like I just work for fun. I need my work.”
And across the country, as well as throughout the state, large numbers of workers are opting to stay home entirely.
Whole Foods employees nationwide staged a sickout March 31 in protest of working conditions and demanding paid leave for those who choose to stay home. Better protections have been added , but paid leave is still not being offered to employees who elect to stay home.
Mark Espinosa, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 919, which is based in Farmington and represents roughly 7,000 members, the vast majority of whom work at Stop & Shops, said about 600 are opting to stay home from work for fear of becoming infected. Another 100 have been directly impacted by the virus and there have been two reported deaths.
One 52-year-old Stamford man who spoke on the condition of anonymity works at Greenwich Whole Foods, and opted to take several weeks off work as the curve of the pandemic continued its ascent in early April and stress mounted for him.
“Personally, I just don’t want to be there,” the man said, recently. “It’s not making me feel good. I can see the depression of team members.”
When he returned on May 11, he was met by news that a longtime co-worker, who he said had been quarantined, died with the coronavirus.
The news shook the man and his co-workers when they were called to a team meeting and informed of the death.
“That moment, I felt like, ‘Oh my God, the whole world is coming down,’” the man said. “It’s scary and it’s sad. A lot of the people, we are from different departments, but we know him. A lot of the people started crying.”
The death of his co-worker is making the man consider whether he should take additional time off, despite the financial hardship that missed work has already caused.
Complicating matters even more, the workforce at grocery stores is also largely comprised of immigrants and other historically lowincome groups who often have relatively few job prospects and live in high-density areas where transmission is most rampant.
The Stamford man came to the U.S. in 1987 from El Salvador, which was then in the throes of a bloody civil war. He said many of his co-workers — including the man who died and a supervisor who he said tested positive — are foreign-born, like him.
“It’s mostly immigrants — from Peru, from Ecuador, Haitian guys,” he said. “We all come from other countries. It’s hard. We need the money.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, immigrants comprise roughly 14 percent of the United States population, but account for about 22 percent of those in the food supply chain, including grocery stores.
Also according to MPI, immigrants make up roughly 17 percent of all grocery workers nationwide, or about 483,000 people in total. The wages are low — just over $16 an hour for food and beverage store workers in February, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — but are often crucial to a group that statistically has limited, or no, access to things like health care and unemployment benefits.
“Our community works to keep society going. So a lot of people are still out there working every day, that increases exposure,” said Camila Bartoletto, co-founder of Connecticut Students for a Dream, a Danburybased immigrant advocacy group.
Compared to other immigrants, the Stamford man knows he’s lucky. He has access to health insurance through Whole Foods and is due to receive a stimulus check — many immigrants are ineligible.
And still, every day he clocks in and worries whether he or his co-workers will get sick — or even die from the virus.
“I don’t think that my feeling is unique,” he said. “I think many of my team members are going through a lot and feeling depressed being there. I might just step away again, because it’s just not making me feel good being there.”