-Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.
-Reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time and seasonal workers.
-Increased FSA funds to cover coronavirus testing and treatment for all team members, including part-time and seasonal.
-Guaranteed hazard pay in the form of double pay during our scheduled hours.
-Implementation of new policies that can facilitate social distancing between workers and customers.
-Commitment to ensuring that all locations have adequate sanitation equipment and procedures in place.
-Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19. In such an event, all workers should continue to receive full pay until the store can safely reopen.
I generally have mixed feelings on unions, but overall these seem like pretty reasonable demands and it seems like a good thing for Whole Foods to do from a PR standpoint anyway. They would make me more confident if I were a Whole Foods shopper if nothing else.
The one thing that I can't help but question, just thinking in terms of microeconomics (which I'm fairly basic on), is this concept of hazard pay. I've heard that some places are increasing wages already. Doesn't this sort of account for the increased risk? Or to put it another way: If you got a 2x raise but they didn't call it "hazard pay", would you still demand hazard pay?
I don't think "hazard pay" has any legally defined meaning in the US. it might imply that they are only demanding the 2x pay for the duration of the crisis.
> -Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.
This should be required by law of all employers.
> -Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19.
This seems like overkill. How about having all employees wear masks (not N95) and cleaning the store thoroughly if someone tests positive? Or do they mean a few-hour or one-day shutdown?
>> -Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.
> This should be required by law of all employers.
All businesses should be required to tell every employee "You don't have to come in to work for the duration of the crisis, unless you feel like it. But you'll get paid regardless."?
No. All employers should be required to tell employees “if you believe you have a communicable disease that could infect your coworkers or customers, then you MUST NOT come to work, and we or the government will find a way to take care if you.”
This should be the case regardless of any pandemic. Allowing an employee with a mild flu to come to work is irresponsible.
-Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19.
This seems likely to shut down the majority of Whole Foods stores in short order. An unreasonable request, IMO. Grocery stores are genuinely essential to society and the death rate for < 40yo is very small. Put some masks on them and keep working.
I do think high-risk employees should basically be allowed to stay home, though.
I didn't imply they should shut down. I just wanted to point out that the risk that the workers are taking is significantly higher if you take into account how likely they are to get seriously ill. Their protection should be prioritized.
We don't know the hospitalization rate. That site counts confirmed cases; epidemiologists seem to think total cases are greater by a factor of at least 10x. It also doesn't break out by age group.
Taken together, these considerations imply hospitalization rate for < 40yo should be far below the 10-20% figure. (On the flip side, many of the currently infected who have not yet been hospitalized will be hospitalized in the future.)
I don't know the hospitalization rate for < 40yo, but the death rate is thought to be around 0.1%. It would be very surprising if the hospitalization rate were more than a couple percent.
You are correct. The estimates are taken from the confirmed cases. I just wanted to point out that it is easy to dismiss the risk service workers are taking if you only look at the fatality rate. The hospitalization rate seems to be one or two orders of magnitude higher.
> I do think high-risk employees should basically be allowed to stay home, though.
Employees in states where a shelter in place order is in effect can stay home and collect unemployment backed by the federal government [1]. One might argue everyone is high risk, as you might have a risk factor you're not aware of, leading to an unexpected death. [2]
this fails to consider that if an employee of the store tests positive that has an implication for the store itself as well as all the food and products being sold to the public.
How will you track every product a cashier touched while ringing up customers during a shift? Every product touched while restocking shelves? Every cart touched while collecting them from the parking lot? Will you sanitize the store nightly or weekly? Will you communicate when you do to customers? Will you communicate when the last confirmed case was in your store? How often are workers replacing PPE and is enough available to them (if critical medical staff can't get it, how will you?)? Or are they handling everyone's products and payment methods with the same set of gloves during their entire shift? All important questions.
At this point I assume everything I buy might have coronavirus sitting on the outside packaging. I wipe every item down with a soapy cloth after getting home, wash fruits with soap, reheat meats that are not completely sealed, etc.
I think everyone should be doing this, there's no way to track possible infection through the entire supply chain but since the virus dies after some time, inner packages are probably safe if they've been untouched for a while.
right well to solve that problem, you close down one store and not all of them. only the one where someone tested positive and only until that store can be cleaned. There are no towns on the planet that have only a Whole Foods and not 350 other food stores. you open the store again once it's been deep cleaned. nobody starves and that's a total straw man argument.
I'd bet that if Amazon agreed to all demands but that one that the workers who organized this would be ECSTATIC.
There should be negotiation, back-and-forth. What's frustrating, as somebody not affiliated with the organizing here but has been in similar circumstances, is when the company won't even come to the table to bargain.
> I'd bet that if Amazon agreed to all demands but that one that the workers who organized this would be ECSTATIC.
Yeah, except item 1 is "Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work."
I imagine that if Amazon agreed to that one demand, the workers would be ECSTATIC, because it allows them to get paid whether or not they decide to keep coming to work.
I'm not diminishing the seriousness of the pandemic or saying people don't deserve sick leave or allowances for quarantine- but offering unrestricted full pay to everyone who chooses not to come to work is madness. Why would the employees care if the store gets shut down - they can simply stay home. Why would the employees care about sanitation? They can simply stay home. Etc etc etc.
My employer is allowing us to use our paid leave for this purpose, and we haven't seen this. You still only have a limited amount of paid leave per year and so you can use it for this but it means if you get sick later you can't use it for that.
Not sure why you added the word "unrestricted." Seems like bad faith.
There is a fair amount of good faith that would be involved with that, yes. Given testing is still scant, how does one remedy this? I think we can all agree that if someone is sick they should stay home, and ideally everyone who needs should get a test, but I just don't know how to separate the ill from the faking.
My last job offered unlimited paid sick leave, no questions asked, and in all my time there I never heard of anyone abusing it. Your assertions are not based in fact.
One example is enough to disprove the assertion that paid sick time would necessarily be abused any time it is given, which is what the original post asserted. If you’re going to be pedantic at least be correct. What you’ve done is move the goalposts.
If the workers in question really are taking this kind of risk, and if their jobs really are essential for the functioning of society, then.. maybe they should be really well paid?
Also, to suggest that in the middle of a pandemic, if a person gets sick they should still have to go to work or lose their job flies in the face of logical reason and the recommendations of the cdc.
No one example only proves it is POSSIBLE for paid sick time to not be abused.
It does not ELIMINATE the possibility or even imply it is unlikely.
And in a plague where working puts healthy employee and their families at risk, there is an enormous incentive to not go to work, regardless hazard pay incentives.
BUT I agree:
Paying workers hazard pay is a fair thing to do, assuming the company is capable of doing so.
And paid sick leave for sick people will save lives, again assuming the company is able to.
We can assume Amazon is capable of both.
To eliminate the incentives to abuse that system I would explain to all employees:
(1) You think they deserve hazard pay for staying
(2) You will conditionally offer it to them (or be up front why the business can't)
(3) You think they deserve paid sick leave
(4) You will conditionally offer it to them (or be up front why the business can't)
(5) If you are offering either/both hazard pay and paid sick leave, make it conditional:
Each employee signs a form noting they understand the benefits but also understand they can only work if healthy employees show up, and commit to showing up if healthy.
People tend to act honorably when they feel respected, they have given their word, and see the company is doing everything it can for them.
Despite all that, the incentive for healthy workers to avoid a plague are huge and legitimate, so the hazard and sick pay could still muck everything up. But there is not risk free solution.
If you are being paid well, being treated well by your employer, you might not abuse paid sick leave. Or have a very low rate of it.
If you are not being paid well, maybe people would abuse the policy more often. I don't think you can really compare one company to another, even in the same industry. Company cultures can lead to vastly different outcomes with the same policy.
And, unless you are in HR, there is no way for you to know if people were abusing this perk. I would be willing to bet at least one person was abusing it, but maybe the company never found out, or, more likely, they didn't broadcast the abuse to everyone in the company.
There may have been someone abusing it, I can only say for sure that it wasn’t anyone I worked with on a daily basis.
I’m one of those who believes that every person, regardless of what the job is, should be well paid and well treated- how much constitutes “well” is a complicated question of course, but as a matter of principle I do find that if the people taking on all these risks is making close to minimum wage, then we are incorrectly pricing their value.
If we were talking about sick leave only, then I misinterpreted the comment I replied to. I saw "isolate and self-quarantine" as not only sick leave, but also "feels like staying home for any reason at all as long as you work the word 'coronavirus' in".
> no questions asked, and in all my time there I never heard of anyone abusing it
Was your last job entry-level with no college requirement, and paid by the hour? Have you ever worked through a deadly pandemic before? Your defense is based on an extremely narrow experience that might not exactly apply to grocery store workers during a health crisis..
> I imagine that if Amazon agreed to that one demand, the workers would be ECSTATIC, because it allows them to get paid whether or not they decide to keep coming to work.
I don't think you're going to see a lot of that because most people are decent and honest human beings.
If they're essential to society, do you support free medical care for all the employees who get sick during this time? Do you support paying for the ongoing costs of an employee that suffers the rest of their life due to complications or after effects from COVID-19?
Yes (granted I'm a Canadian who supports countries covering medical expenses for all citizens), but are we also going to close hospitals if any of their employees test positive?
Of course not, but companies need to be smart about it. Make sure the same people work the same shifts together, that way if one of the employees in a shift tests positive, you can isolate and test the others in the shift while continuing work in the meantime.
And of course, for things like grocery stores, focus heavily on pickup versus having customers come into the store.
I certainly support universal solutions for universal problems like healthcare which everyone needs and can benefit from sharing the risk, and the rewards of a healthy community.
But ignoring the balance sheet of the insuring entity (company, pool, whatever) will only insure that people don't get that healthcare. It still has to be paid for.
I just dont know whawt it means. So someone at the store tests positive, okay. Take precautions to ensure workers arent also at risk. Okay. Shut down the whole store and reopen... when?
>Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.
Does anyone have any idea how they're supposed to operate their business if they have to pay workers who don't work? I mean, they would have to hire replacement workers - who also don't need to come to work? Or are the replacement workers supposed to be second-class vs. the original workers?
While I am sure he can, I personally like to see reasons that are more general than picking on particular people.
Amazon can spare a billion or two.
What would be even better is a country-wide system for essential workers, but I imagine that negotiating that at the political level won't be timely.
EDIT: Even a recommended essential worker policy from the top would be helpful guidance for both companies and workers trying to quickly resolve these critical nation-wide issues.
Paying people to not (come into) work is pretty much critical to not getting a huge number of people (not necessarily the same people!) killed in a pandemic.
If it's pandemic, the infected workers have to be sent home to avoid infecting others. This is actually even more important for the essential workers. Otherwise you end up with them all off sick at once.
There's literally no-one here disputing that sick workers should get to stay home. What's being discussed is the proposition that healthy workers who decide to self-isolate should be paid to do so.
... which is limited; often pro-rated in the first year of employment; and has to be scheduled in agreement with your employer so that not all critical staff go out on vacation at once.
My take on the linked demand list was the included terms were broad and generic for public consumption, not the actual demands submitted to WF. Maybe they are the actual demands, in which case, it's like they are just be the employee's first ask, fully expecting to negotiate back to something more reasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#In_negotiations
Either way, PTO that allows workers to take enough time off to clear a quarantine order isn't unreasonable. All this chit-chat about all the workers staying home and grocers shutting down is missing the forest for the tress.
How would one go about obtaining prior permission for sick leave? You don't know you're going to get COVID, or break an arm, or whatever.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for an employee to be able to call in and say "Hey, [I have | my kid has] [condition], I need some time off" (and get that time off without fearing for their job, house, and food supply).
That's how it's offered in much of the US. Vacation and sick are rolled into a single block of time (which is usually too little for any major health issue).
I'd love for everybody to get 3 (or more) weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of sick leave. But, the chances of American employers jumping from literally nothing (in many cases) to anything resembling a reasonable policy is next to zero. Because stock market. Or profits. Or reasons.
> -Guaranteed hazard pay in the form of double pay during our scheduled hours.
I too would like to double my pay. :-)
I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but I've worked far more dangerous jobs for a lot less money.
Beyond that, what's up with the writing? "Guaranteed" hazard pay? As opposed to "un-guaranteed"? What does that even mean? Guaranteed by whom? And "during our scheduled hours"? ??
Wonder if grocery store workers will largely be forced to unionize and fall under similar terms as airline industry with regards to limitations on a strike. "Essential work"
Yes. It would make sense for existing grocers unions to assist in the efforts of these Whole Foods workers, and eventually expand to Amazon Fulfillment workers (perhaps working with other unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella).
They already are unionized - at least in my neck of the woods (Ohio). If the Whole Foods employees are not, well, then that should be their first order of business.
My understanding is that a lot of their in-store employees are at-will and part time, and largely not covered by the unions... of course companies and states will vary.
No? They're not drafted, you can't compel grocery store workers to work. It just turns out that we rely more than people thought on some of the least protected of our citizens, and this is a pretty good chance to have their voices be heard.
Being drafted isn't relevant to the question. The NLRA does indeed specify that strikes can be illegal in certain situations, such as if doing so would cause a national emergency. I don't know if this particular strike falls under that or other criteria.
I'm sure that one of the long term outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic will be a (potentially short-lived) resurgence in unionization and a general leftward shift in global politics. This move to the left will coincide with governments continuing to exercise greater authority over the population and economy. Our reality after COVID-19 will look more like 1970s Britain.
I live in a blue state and the pendulum is swinging the other way unfortunately. Unions are an easy scapegoat and openly demonized in media, academics, and on social media. They took away everybody's pensions.
We're hearing a lot of stories about labor activism now because every employer allowed to stay open needs as many workers as it can get. When the rest of the economy reopens, and the millions of unemployed people start looking for jobs, that's unlikely to weigh on labor's side of the bargaining table.
I don't understand. WF charges 2-3x as much as a "regular" grocery store and prides itself on "ethics" and "sustainability". Why are we even having this discussion? Why aren't those employees fairly compensated and protected?
Where do these “2-3x as much” figures come from? Their prices are not much different from Vons in my experience, they just sell a lot of premium items they you won’t find in your local vons - but for stuff you find in a regular supermarket - they charge around the same. And their 365 products sometimes are even cheaper than non organic alternatives
I also find many of the 365 products are made differently in some subtle ways vs. other store brands or big-label items. One example I came across recently was ginger ale; the 365 version has less carbonation and is sweetened with cane sugar (vs corn syrup), so it had a substantially different taste than the name brand (Seagram's) I picked up when the 365 brand wasn't available.
Not person you're responding to, but I think it's fair to say that they sell pricier products - in some cases, yes, even 2-3x, than where some get their groceries. My parents do a lot of their shopping at dollar stores and they're just far less expensive.
But of course you're comparing here different products of the same "type," a box of cereal versus an entirely different box of cereal by an entirely different manufacturer, so I think they were misleading without that context. Also, pricier products doesn't necessarily mean bigger margins.
There's no such thing as ethical consumerism. That image of "ethics" and "sustainability" is just branding to appeal to woke liberals who have the disposable income to buy their groceries at Whole Foods.
We agree to many unfair things day to day. It's not clear to me that accepting a contract means that the contract describes a fair arrangement. Fairness is also highly subjective; the employer, for instance, likely has a different opinion as to what is or isn't fair compared to the mass of employees. It's quite possible that even you and I have different ideas of what is and isn't fair. This is precisely why philosophers across the political spectrum have criticized the structuring of society on the basis of the abstract idea of 'fairness'.
They are agreeing to work there because the alternative would be the streets/moving back with parents/enlisting in the army.
They are agreeing to work an essential front line job most likely without health insurance, which means that they will have to purchase health insurance off of the state or federal exchange which may or may not be a garbage high deductible plan with a $2-5k deductible. What will most likely happen is that the same workers if not offered insurance from their employers will just forgot insurance and hope/pray that they don’t get sick. In which case for a mild Covid case (80%mild in the younger adult workers that typically occupy these jobs) then they come to work sick and infect the whole place workers and customers both.
I remember in Seattle checking out at a Trader Joe’s in January in Seattle and the checker looking like absolute death and obviously had a cough but was still working, understandably some people have rent to pay but to suggest this isn’t happening everywhere that doesn’t at least offer decent insurance/hmo coverage would be nuts.
The solution is at the very least to force decent health insurance for all retail workers, or emergency subsidies for all grocery workers health insurance until Covid is over.
The only people who need to consider the fairness of a transaction are the parties involved. With their consent to the contract, and the determination that no force was used, we can objectively consider the transaction to be fair. The inherently subjective nature you describe of extending judgement to the masses will never be as true a reflection of fairness as is the parties' own judgement.
>The only people who need to consider the fairness of a transaction are the parties involved
I disagree, and my disagreement is shared by contract and employment law in many places which places restrictions on what can be arranged through a contract. I'm skeptical that the only inputs that "need" considering is the mutual 'consent' of both parties.
While grocery stores are essential, any individual employee is not. These are not skilled positions. Grocery store employees can and should be easily replaced. The alternative is the potential for a group of unskilled laborers to hold our nation's food supply hostage at time when many people who are out of work would gladly take their place. If they don't feel safe working right now, go home. Someone else will. Doubling their pay during a crisis won't make them any safer.
I empathize with the workers, but isn't striking while there are >3 million people out of work a bad idea? Whole Foods could fire the strikers and replace them. It's not like they need particularly rare skills, just about any of the current jobless could take a shift.
It's only a one-day strike. Unless you're openly an organizer, you're not taking much risk. The biggest thing you're thinking about in that situation is going without pay. But also, this is why strikes are only successful when you've got everyone taking part in them. The cost to replace an entire workforce is actually huge, and would shut down operations for a period of time. There would also be a campaign aimed at preventing folks from crossing their picket line: customers, new staff, etc. Enlisting elected leaders, etc.
More generally-speaking, it's illegal to fire NLRA-covered workers for striking. Granted, the penalties are minimal (penalties are backpay MINUS what the worker earned while they waited for the case to resolve itself... no punitive damages). Also, you have to actually win in court, of course -- and I'm guessing Amazon has good attorneys that can win a tough case. But if you're firing the entire workforce, no attorney is that good. It's clearly retaliation.
It's true that during economic downturns it can be hard to successfully organize, people in all industries feel more replaceable. But it's also true that at times when workers are feeling more pain, there can be tremendous activism. Additionally, there have been times in our country's past when workers were far worse off than today and yet risked far more than their jobs (in some cases, their lives) to win the protections we have now.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] thread-Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.
-Reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time and seasonal workers.
-Increased FSA funds to cover coronavirus testing and treatment for all team members, including part-time and seasonal.
-Guaranteed hazard pay in the form of double pay during our scheduled hours.
-Implementation of new policies that can facilitate social distancing between workers and customers.
-Commitment to ensuring that all locations have adequate sanitation equipment and procedures in place.
-Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19. In such an event, all workers should continue to receive full pay until the store can safely reopen.
The one thing that I can't help but question, just thinking in terms of microeconomics (which I'm fairly basic on), is this concept of hazard pay. I've heard that some places are increasing wages already. Doesn't this sort of account for the increased risk? Or to put it another way: If you got a 2x raise but they didn't call it "hazard pay", would you still demand hazard pay?
This should be required by law of all employers.
> -Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19.
This seems like overkill. How about having all employees wear masks (not N95) and cleaning the store thoroughly if someone tests positive? Or do they mean a few-hour or one-day shutdown?
> This should be required by law of all employers.
All businesses should be required to tell every employee "You don't have to come in to work for the duration of the crisis, unless you feel like it. But you'll get paid regardless."?
This should be the case regardless of any pandemic. Allowing an employee with a mild flu to come to work is irresponsible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_leave#Germany
This seems likely to shut down the majority of Whole Foods stores in short order. An unreasonable request, IMO. Grocery stores are genuinely essential to society and the death rate for < 40yo is very small. Put some masks on them and keep working.
I do think high-risk employees should basically be allowed to stay home, though.
Edit: source https://covidtracking.com/data/
Taken together, these considerations imply hospitalization rate for < 40yo should be far below the 10-20% figure. (On the flip side, many of the currently infected who have not yet been hospitalized will be hospitalized in the future.)
I don't know the hospitalization rate for < 40yo, but the death rate is thought to be around 0.1%. It would be very surprising if the hospitalization rate were more than a couple percent.
Edit: grammar.
Employees in states where a shelter in place order is in effect can stay home and collect unemployment backed by the federal government [1]. One might argue everyone is high risk, as you might have a risk factor you're not aware of, leading to an unexpected death. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package...
[2] https://www.insider.com/spanish-coach-francisco-garcia-21-di... (A 21-year-old Spanish soccer coach died from the coronavirus after finding out he had undiagnosed leukemia while he was in hospital)
I think everyone should be doing this, there's no way to track possible infection through the entire supply chain but since the virus dies after some time, inner packages are probably safe if they've been untouched for a while.
If you want to argue for less extreme measures, I will probably support them.
There should be negotiation, back-and-forth. What's frustrating, as somebody not affiliated with the organizing here but has been in similar circumstances, is when the company won't even come to the table to bargain.
Yeah, except item 1 is "Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work."
I imagine that if Amazon agreed to that one demand, the workers would be ECSTATIC, because it allows them to get paid whether or not they decide to keep coming to work.
I'm not diminishing the seriousness of the pandemic or saying people don't deserve sick leave or allowances for quarantine- but offering unrestricted full pay to everyone who chooses not to come to work is madness. Why would the employees care if the store gets shut down - they can simply stay home. Why would the employees care about sanitation? They can simply stay home. Etc etc etc.
Not sure why you added the word "unrestricted." Seems like bad faith.
It's YOUR paid leave. They are "allowing" you to.... have what they promised you when you took the job. That has nothing to do with the pandemic.
> You still only have a limited amount of paid leave per year
Then what's the concession? If you have 3 sick days in the bank, and you get coronavirus, then what is the "protection" we're even talking about?
> Not sure why you added the word "unrestricted."
Because no one mentioned any restrictions.
> Seems like bad faith.
Sounds like you're about half a step above cussing out a stranger because you disagree with them.
-Guaranteed hazard pay in the form of double pay during our scheduled hours.
Did the situation you reference have similar urgent hazardous conditions?
Even if that is the case, your counter-example does not produce a counter-fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts#Logical...
If the workers in question really are taking this kind of risk, and if their jobs really are essential for the functioning of society, then.. maybe they should be really well paid?
Also, to suggest that in the middle of a pandemic, if a person gets sick they should still have to go to work or lose their job flies in the face of logical reason and the recommendations of the cdc.
It does not ELIMINATE the possibility or even imply it is unlikely.
And in a plague where working puts healthy employee and their families at risk, there is an enormous incentive to not go to work, regardless hazard pay incentives.
BUT I agree:
Paying workers hazard pay is a fair thing to do, assuming the company is capable of doing so.
And paid sick leave for sick people will save lives, again assuming the company is able to.
We can assume Amazon is capable of both.
To eliminate the incentives to abuse that system I would explain to all employees:
(1) You think they deserve hazard pay for staying (2) You will conditionally offer it to them (or be up front why the business can't) (3) You think they deserve paid sick leave (4) You will conditionally offer it to them (or be up front why the business can't) (5) If you are offering either/both hazard pay and paid sick leave, make it conditional:
Each employee signs a form noting they understand the benefits but also understand they can only work if healthy employees show up, and commit to showing up if healthy.
People tend to act honorably when they feel respected, they have given their word, and see the company is doing everything it can for them.
Despite all that, the incentive for healthy workers to avoid a plague are huge and legitimate, so the hazard and sick pay could still muck everything up. But there is not risk free solution.
If you are not being paid well, maybe people would abuse the policy more often. I don't think you can really compare one company to another, even in the same industry. Company cultures can lead to vastly different outcomes with the same policy.
And, unless you are in HR, there is no way for you to know if people were abusing this perk. I would be willing to bet at least one person was abusing it, but maybe the company never found out, or, more likely, they didn't broadcast the abuse to everyone in the company.
I’m one of those who believes that every person, regardless of what the job is, should be well paid and well treated- how much constitutes “well” is a complicated question of course, but as a matter of principle I do find that if the people taking on all these risks is making close to minimum wage, then we are incorrectly pricing their value.
If we were talking about sick leave only, then I misinterpreted the comment I replied to. I saw "isolate and self-quarantine" as not only sick leave, but also "feels like staying home for any reason at all as long as you work the word 'coronavirus' in".
> no questions asked, and in all my time there I never heard of anyone abusing it
Was your last job entry-level with no college requirement, and paid by the hour? Have you ever worked through a deadly pandemic before? Your defense is based on an extremely narrow experience that might not exactly apply to grocery store workers during a health crisis..
I don't think you're going to see a lot of that because most people are decent and honest human beings.
Of course not, but companies need to be smart about it. Make sure the same people work the same shifts together, that way if one of the employees in a shift tests positive, you can isolate and test the others in the shift while continuing work in the meantime.
And of course, for things like grocery stores, focus heavily on pickup versus having customers come into the store.
The only ones it's an economic downer for are the insurance companies.
But ignoring the balance sheet of the insuring entity (company, pool, whatever) will only insure that people don't get that healthcare. It still has to be paid for.
Does anyone have any idea how they're supposed to operate their business if they have to pay workers who don't work? I mean, they would have to hire replacement workers - who also don't need to come to work? Or are the replacement workers supposed to be second-class vs. the original workers?
Amazon can spare a billion or two.
What would be even better is a country-wide system for essential workers, but I imagine that negotiating that at the political level won't be timely.
EDIT: Even a recommended essential worker policy from the top would be helpful guidance for both companies and workers trying to quickly resolve these critical nation-wide issues.
How are these things the same?
Either way, PTO that allows workers to take enough time off to clear a quarantine order isn't unreasonable. All this chit-chat about all the workers staying home and grocers shutting down is missing the forest for the tress.
also PTO is usually subject to approval, not just choosing to stay home whenever.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for an employee to be able to call in and say "Hey, [I have | my kid has] [condition], I need some time off" (and get that time off without fearing for their job, house, and food supply).
I'd love for everybody to get 3 (or more) weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of sick leave. But, the chances of American employers jumping from literally nothing (in many cases) to anything resembling a reasonable policy is next to zero. Because stock market. Or profits. Or reasons.
With unemployment skyrocketing, it seems to me very unlikely that this would be granted. What is the purpose of putting it on the list?
I too would like to double my pay. :-)
I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but I've worked far more dangerous jobs for a lot less money.
Beyond that, what's up with the writing? "Guaranteed" hazard pay? As opposed to "un-guaranteed"? What does that even mean? Guaranteed by whom? And "during our scheduled hours"? ??
http://www.ufcw.org/grocery/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_strike_of_1959#Invocatio...
No but organizing to not work as a group is something else.
But of course you're comparing here different products of the same "type," a box of cereal versus an entirely different box of cereal by an entirely different manufacturer, so I think they were misleading without that context. Also, pricier products doesn't necessarily mean bigger margins.
I think we all know why.
They are, otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to work there. Not one person who works for Whole Foods is employed by force.
They are agreeing to work an essential front line job most likely without health insurance, which means that they will have to purchase health insurance off of the state or federal exchange which may or may not be a garbage high deductible plan with a $2-5k deductible. What will most likely happen is that the same workers if not offered insurance from their employers will just forgot insurance and hope/pray that they don’t get sick. In which case for a mild Covid case (80%mild in the younger adult workers that typically occupy these jobs) then they come to work sick and infect the whole place workers and customers both.
I remember in Seattle checking out at a Trader Joe’s in January in Seattle and the checker looking like absolute death and obviously had a cough but was still working, understandably some people have rent to pay but to suggest this isn’t happening everywhere that doesn’t at least offer decent insurance/hmo coverage would be nuts.
The solution is at the very least to force decent health insurance for all retail workers, or emergency subsidies for all grocery workers health insurance until Covid is over.
I disagree, and my disagreement is shared by contract and employment law in many places which places restrictions on what can be arranged through a contract. I'm skeptical that the only inputs that "need" considering is the mutual 'consent' of both parties.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22736512
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729819
More generally-speaking, it's illegal to fire NLRA-covered workers for striking. Granted, the penalties are minimal (penalties are backpay MINUS what the worker earned while they waited for the case to resolve itself... no punitive damages). Also, you have to actually win in court, of course -- and I'm guessing Amazon has good attorneys that can win a tough case. But if you're firing the entire workforce, no attorney is that good. It's clearly retaliation.
It's true that during economic downturns it can be hard to successfully organize, people in all industries feel more replaceable. But it's also true that at times when workers are feeling more pain, there can be tremendous activism. Additionally, there have been times in our country's past when workers were far worse off than today and yet risked far more than their jobs (in some cases, their lives) to win the protections we have now.