In this bleak season of COVID-19, the protections we have are all the familiar ones: masks, social distancing and the avoidance of large indoor gatherings.
But now another protection has appeared, rooted in a fundamental value: the value of empowering workers.
This winter, worker committees, the first in the nation, will come on line in Los Angeles County, which contains 10 million people, 88 incorporated cities and 244,000 businesses. Operating in four sectors (food manufacturing, apparel manufacturing, warehousing and storage, and restaurants), the committees – known as “public health councils” – will be empowered to report coronavirus-related problems and violations to the county’s Department of Public Health. These violations can result in fines and license revocations for businesses.
The mandate to create these councils was a result of several acknowledgments: that workplace transmission was significant in the spread of COVID-19; that a disproportionate number of low-wage workers were being exposed at their worksites; and that the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, overstretched for a region of this size, could not adequately monitor the problem.
At one workplace, a frozen-food processing plant in Vernon, Calif., workers reported to their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 770, a host of violations, including a lack of plexiglass dividers on the production line, a failure in the early days of the pandemic to provide masks, and a failure to enforce social distancing. From April through August, 26 workers came down with COVID-19; one died. The company, Overhill Farms, along with its temporary employment agency, was hit with the largest fines for coronavirus violations yet meted out by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
It has been cited as a model … that will soon be set up countywide.
As a result, the workers, backed by their union, formed a safety committee with the company’s management that began meeting in July. The committee has been authorized to halt production if a serious problem is noticed, and it has been cited as a model for the public health councils that will soon be set up countywide.
The mandate to create the public health councils was authorized by a recent vote of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and, as councils begin to be formed at worksites, workers will be trained by certified organizations – labor unions or nonprofit organizations – about health orders and reporting processes. Worker participation on the public health councils is expected to be voluntary, and employers are encouraged to allow workers to meet at their worksites and on company time.
Needless to say, the mandate to create the public health councils did not come about without a struggle. Many business leaders complained about what they saw as unnecessary bureaucracy, and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce flatly opposed the creation of the councils. Another business organization, the Los Angeles County Business Federation, claimed that the county should have deferred establishing the councils, saying that by its vote it has “chosen to apply a fundamentally flawed process to target business owners with increased county scrutiny and frequently changing regulations at the most challenging time.” In response, both labor leaders and public health officials have pointed to the councils as an essential, cost-effective way of controlling COVID-19.
But perhaps the most telling criticism was expressed in an interview by Sarah Wiltfong, the policy manager of the Business Federation, who said that the Supervisors’ motion to approve the councils would result in a “de facto unionization of businesses.”
Wiltfong raised a fundamental question of value and power. In a pandemic that has already taken a quarter of a million lives, what does it mean for workers to take on voice, to assume power, over the very conditions affecting their lives and the lives of those dear to them? If unionization is the means to such an end, then COVID-19 may well be pointing to the broader struggles for economic justice that lie just ahead.
Andrew Moss is an emeritus professor of English and nonviolence studies at the California State Polytechnic University.
