A spokesperson for the hospital said it has provided protective equipment throughout the pandemic. He added that the hospital screens employees for symptoms daily, provides additional pay and is “proud of the exceptional work happening every day.”
Gonzalez, a cancer survivor who is diabetic, said she wears masks and gloves religiously on the bus, at work and on her way home. She strips off her clothes when she walks in the door and cleans her phone and keys with alcohol.
“I follow all the rules,” Gonzalez said. Staying home isn’t an option for her or her co-workers, she said. “If we don’t come to work, nobody pays us. The government sent us $1,200, but it’s not enough.”
“And they need us, too,” she said of her hospital. “If we don’t come to work, who is going to do the job?”
The meatpackers
Hard work was part of Saul Sanchez’s culture, his daughter Beatriz Rangel said. That’s why her father kept clocking in to his job as a meatpacker at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, even after his 78th birthday. He had worked there for more than 30 years. Last month, he was among six workers at the plant to die of COVID-19 — the highest number in any of the nation’s meat and poultry facilities, the CDC reported.
Like many of the nation’s plants, the Greeley facility is powered by immigrants. Over 80 percent of the workers who do the hard, messy job of butchering, processing and packaging meat in the U.S. are black or Latino, data show. More than half of them are immigrants, as opposed to just 17 percent of all U.S. workers.
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The facilities have proven to be breeding grounds for the coronavirus. Employees work elbow to elbow in sealed-off sections of the plant on lines that move swiftly, gloved hands touching the same pieces of meat one after another. Social distancing is nearly impossible.
Nearly 5,000 workers have tested positive for COVID-19, temporarily shuttering several facilities, including the JBS facility in Greeley, which recently reopened. Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to keep them open to protect the food chain.
The order overlooks a key fact, said Kim Cordova, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 in Colorado. “The critical part to the food supply chain is the worker,” she said.
JBS said that it is screening all employees in Greeley for fevers as they come to work and that it is providing testing for those who have symptoms. “The health and safety of our team members is our number one priority,” a spokesperson told NBC News in an email. “We are doing our best to safely provide food to the country during a challenging time.”
Cordova said JBS isn’t doing enough. The company still hasn’t tested all workers, and she said it needs to retrain employees on how to work safely in the age of COVID-19.
“They signed up for a job to work for a company and to make ends meet,” Cordova said. “These workers didn’t sign up to die.”
The emergency responders
At the peak of New York City’s pandemic, sirens wailed throughout the city. Ambulances fielded more than 6,500 calls. It felt like nearly every one was a suspected COVID-19 case, said Anthony Almojera, a paramedic with the Fire Department of New York.
At one point, about half of the 4,200-person EMS workforce was out sick. At least four workers have died from COVID-19, according to the FDNY.
“Then we see our co-workers dropping, and the fear is real. You take it home,” said Almojera, who is vice president of the FDNY’s Emergency Medical Services Officers Union Local 3621.
More than half of New York City’s EMS workers and paramedics are non-white, and about a quarter are women. They are the lowest-paid among the city’s first responders. They make about $50,000 base pay after five years, according to the city. Some have second jobs. Turnover is high.
That financial stress can add to what is already punishing work, Almojera said, particularly in a pandemic, when many are choosing to isolate from their families to keep them safe.
“I have members who sleep in their cars because they don’t want to go home,” Almojera said. The FDNY told NBC News that the city has had a 25 percent increase in workers seeking help through its counseling unit in recent weeks.
The separation took a toll on FDNY Rescue Paramedic Joshua Rodriguez. At the height of the epidemic, he couldn’t spend time with friends and family to talk about what he was seeing on COVID-19-related calls.
“It’s a lot of alone time when I get home,” he said. Rodriguez wanted to keep his mind off things, so he did what he knows best. He picked up more shifts.
The farmworkers
Farmworkers “live check to check,” Armando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers, told NBC News. “They don’t have the safety net that others do. And it can’t be done from home.”They can’t digitally pick an apple.”
Occupational health experts worry about farmworkers because of not only the job but also the conditions. Workers often live in communal housing, sit close on vans and buses to get to the fields and have limited access to health care. Half are undocumented, according to union estimates, making them ineligible for unemployment or stimulus programs. Many others are in the U.S. on temporary work visas and may feel less able to speak up or demand time off if they get sick, experts said.
That could threaten not just individual workers but also the country’s food chain.
“These punishing policies push people into the shadows,” said Suzanne Teran, associate director of the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s not going to get the country back on its feet.”
The corrections officers
Nowhere in the country may the virus be spreading faster than behind bars. Last week, more than 1,200 staff members and prisoners at a Tennessee prison came up positive. More than half of the prisoners in a California facility tested positive, with at least 10 staff members infected. In Ohio, more than 2,000 prisoners and 175 staff members at the Marion Correctional Institution have contracted COVID-19.
As difficult as it might be to practice social distancing in a prison, it’s particularly hard in facilities as overcrowded as Ohio’s, said Christopher Mabe, statewide president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represents corrections officers.
“You have 2,000 inmates in a facility built for 1,500. Where do you put them?” Mabe asked. “We can’t just transfer them all and infect other institutions.”
While the majority of the country’s correctional officers are white, the spread through correctional facilities may still have a disproportionate racial impact. Black Americans, who make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, comprise nearly 25 percent of the nation’s corrections officers.
In New York City, where about 1,000 officers have tested positive, nearly 90 percent of uniformed officers in the city’s Correction Department are non-white, and 40 percent are women, according to 2017 statistics. A spokesperson for the city’s jails said that masks are now mandated for staff and detainees in all public areas and that common spaces are cleaned and sanitized daily.
The virus has taken a particularly heavy toll on black Americans, who have died at disproportionately high rates in at least 17 states, initial data show. Experts worry that the jobs people hold mean the racial and economic inequality will only grow as the country reopens.
“Those who can’t work from home include more low-income workers, more women and more people of color,” said Marissa Baker, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. “We’re just creating more of a divide in our society.”