NOTEBOOK

Workers Making COVID Test Kits Exposed to COVID

At Access Bio in New Jersey, mostly Latina immigrant temp workers lacking protections on the job face hazardous conditions.

BY LUIS FELIZ LEON

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY – Late in the afternoon of February 19, more than 50 temporary workers disembarked from 15-passenger vans, bearing signage like “The Beginning Transportation LLC” and “Eagle Cleaning Services.” Clad in heavy layers of clothing, the workers were about to begin their second shift at the Access Bio plant. The facility specializes in producing test kits for COVID-19, malaria, and dengue fever, part of a global supply chain that includes the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the company’s website.

Workers assemble six-by-six boxes for COVID-19 and antibody tests, pack them with a swab stick, 2.74-gram liquid vials, and instructions. They sit in tight clusters at tables, packaging boxes and placing them on an assembly line to be stacked on pallets for delivery. The repetitive motions are physically exhausting and sometimes require prolonged periods of standing, resulting in swollen legs and backaches.

As snow wafted gently in the biting winter air, another 50 workers left from Access Bio’s loading dock and boarded the same vans after finishing up their first shift, which runs from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“Either we die of COVID or we die of hunger,” says Karen Romero, who has been driving workers to the biomedical plant for over ten years.

“We all got COVID,” Romero says, her voice muffled by two masks covering her mouth. She points to the passenger seat to illustrate where one worker who got the virus spread it to everyone else in the van in March of last year.

Since then, she’s taken extra precautions. She shows me bottles of Microban sanitizing spray, flasks of sanitizer, and bundles of masks. Masks were scarce in March, so she keeps a supply in the van’s glove compartment, handing them out to workers if they leave theirs at home.

The vans serve as a perfect vector for the spread of the virus, with people huddled tightly together on halfhour trips between Plainfield and the biomedical plant in New Brunswick. The round trips cost $6 daily. As we speak, workers are settling their accounts with Romero, who scribbles in a composition notebook, as if running a numbers racket.

“It’s what everybody does. They get sick, and they return,” says a passenger riding in Romero’s van, who asked for anonymity because she’s undocumented. She contracted the virus last year, and returned to work in November. She was unable to collect unemployment insurance or even use three paid sick days she had accrued.

“I like the job,” she says, adding she’d prefer to work permanently at the plant, where she’s been employed off and on as a “temporary” worker for over ten years.

Workers across the country are on the front lines of the pandemic, sacrificing their lives for the safety of others while lacking the most elemental labor protections. For temp workers, with fewer protections than full-time employees, the hazards are even more acute. And the fact that

Workers inside the Access Bio facility in Plainfield, New Jersey. Managers don’t enforce social distancing, provide staggered breaks, or schedule routine cleaning, workers allege.

workers at Access Bio are producing test kits to keep other people around the world safe from COVID adds a cruel irony.

Workers and advocates allege that the plant doesn’t enforce social distancing, provide staggered breaks, or schedule routine cleaning to disinfect bathrooms and work areas. The temporary employees are left at the mercy of Access Bio supervisors, who ignore their responsibilities for workplace safety and point fingers at the temp agencies. The workers, caught between this punting, continue to report to work, while Access Bio insulates itself from the consequences for violating labor law, advocates say.

“The ‘triangular’ employment relationship, which means that temp agencies serve as temp workers’ employer even though the onsite or client company supervises and controls most of the working conditions, allows onsite companies to avoid responsibility,” says Laura Padin, a senior staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project. Padin believes Access Bio, which controls virtually every aspect of working conditions—including determining and supervising temp workers’ assignments, hours, and break schedules— should be treated as a joint employer, making it responsible as an employer along with the temp agency.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is clear in its guidance on joint responsibility for worker health and safety on worksites. But staffing agencies and the companies they contract with dodge them at every turn.

FIRST-SHIFT WORKERS drive off in Romero’s van, and others head for JM Staffing Solution’s office in downtown New Brunswick to collect their weekly paychecks. JM Staffing is one of the temp agencies that employ most of the 200 workers at Access Bio.

The line on the sidewalk outside JM Staffing stretches past the T-Mobile store on the corner. Most are Latinas from Central American countries. At first, they are reluctant to speak with a reporter, but when offered anonymity, they open up, using the names of famous telenovela actresses as pseudonyms.

A 23-year-old worker, “Thalía,” says she got the job through her aunt, who has worked at Access Bio for over a decade as a “temp.”

Others complain of plant supervisors preventing them from using the bathroom, shoving them, and screaming at them.

“They yell at us in front of everybody,” says another second-shift worker. “They think they are working with animals. They are racist. They are bad.” She adds that it is routine for supervisors to tap workers on the shoulder to signal that they should go home. These summary dismissals occur even after workers have clocked in.

“Who’s going to pick us up?” she asks. The vans don’t return until the end of a given shift.

But she’s remained at Access Bio because, since the pandemic began last March, the work has been steady. A single mom, she’s endured the mistreatment and disrespect for $12.25 an hour, to support her four children.

Other complaints I hear include management forcing workers to clock in under one name for one shift and under another if they stay on for the next shift, to circumvent the laws requiring overtime pay.

Inside JM Staffing’s office, more than a dozen people crowd the entrance, as agency clerical workers stand maskless behind a plexiglass shield, with signs that read “Face Mask Required Prior to Entry” and “Attention: Please Maintain Social Distance.”

JM Staffing didn’t respond to a request for comment.

JM Staffing is one of the temp agencies employing most of the 200 workers at Access Bio. Workers here wait for their paychecks.

ON FEBRUARY 9, New Labor, a workers’ rights group, and groups in the Protect NJ Workers Coalition delivered a complaint letter to Access Bio, demanding that management improve health and safety conditions at the plant in response to workers’ complaints. The demonstration quickly grew tense.

The action followed up on a complaint New Labor filed with the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development in December, charging that Access Bio was violating Gov. Phil Murphy’s Executive Order 192, issued last year to mandate workplace health and safety standards during the pandemic.

That complaint was supposed to trigger an investigation by the state Department of Health, followed by sanctions for employers found to be violating the executive order, including even shutting down facilities. But

New Labor executive director Louis Kimmel says neither the Health nor Labor Department has the bandwidth to enforce the rules against employers. “Currently, there are around 600 cases that haven’t been resolved,” Kimmel tells me.

Labor Department spokesperson Angela Delli Santi said in a statement that the complaint is currently under investigation, adding that the department “does not comment on pending investigations.”

With government action lagging, New Labor and coalition partners have brought the pressure. At the action, organizers demand that Access Bio enforce social-distancing guidelines, and provide personal protective equipment and COVID-19 testing for workers (the same type of tests made inside the plant).

A Facebook video shows organizers handing a supervisor a copy of Executive Order 192 and the complaint letter. At one point, a supervisor attempts to slam the door shut as organizers are speaking. Moments later, another supervisor steps in and asks if the organizers have proof of their allegations. They respond that they do.

Photos from inside the plant show workers packed together, much closer than six feet apart, as they enter and exit the facility. They assemble the COVID kits while sitting practically shoulder to shoulder.

The supervisor says he didn’t receive the complaint or notification from the Department of Labor, to which organizers respond that the department tried reaching them via phone multiple times. After multiple supervisors materialize at the doorway into the plant, talks soon stall, and the police arrive on the scene.

One employee told me that the New Labor action, despite the lack of resolution, had a positive effect. “Now they are giving us gloves, filling the sanitizer dispensers with liquid,” the employee said. But there’s no guarantee that will continue.

IN JANUARY ALONE, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, temporary jobs rose 80,900 to a total of 2.7 million, highlighting explosive growth.

“Typically, temp work bounces back,” says Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, explaining the typical pattern during recessions. Temp jobs are traditionally the first to go, but also the first to return once the economy improves.

Temp workers have fewer rights on the job, and therefore face greater risks that employers will steal their wages or force them into unsafe work conditions. The arrangement “allows both temp agencies and client companies to degrade workplace standards,” according to Padin, “and create divisions in their workforce, which hurts permanent workers as well.”

David DeSario, director of the national advocacy organization Temp Worker Justice, told me his organization surveyed 500 temp workers nationally during the pandemic, finding that temp workers often must “put their financial needs above their health,” making decisions that put themselves, their families, and their communities in harm’s way. “This is even worse overall for immigrant temp workers,” DeSario added.

The findings from Temp Worker Justice reveal that 90 percent of temp workers lack access to paid sick leave, while 50 percent lack health insurance and expected to lose their job if they quarantined per CDC guidelines of 10 to 14 days.

In 2015, JM Staffing’s predecessor Olympus Management Services was forced to pay back $131,000 in wage theft claims brought by temporary workers at Access Bio and other companies. The owners of the staffing agency were charged with fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in an effort to squirrel away more than $30 million in income.

As The Progressive reported, workers protested in June 2020 outside JM Staffing’s office because the agency refused to pay workers for time off due to quarantining at home with the virus, despite federal legislation like the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, requiring them to provide up to two weeks off.

In January, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Department of Labor to issue guidance that, as a fact sheet states, clarifies: “[W]orkers have a federally guaranteed right to refuse employment that will jeopardize their health and if they do so, they will still qualify for unemployment insurance.”

Kimmel, from New Labor, responds that it’s not enough, as it’s a mere “suggestion and not a mandate.” New Labor and its coalition partners are advocating for a statelevel Bill of Rights for Temp Workers, as part of a Responsible Employer Pact. The proposed Bill of Rights would eliminate the second-class status of temp workers, and require equal pay for equal work, among other protections.

Along with a new executive order with the right to refuse, created in partnership with Protect NJ Workers Coalition, the Responsible Employer Pact would be a game-changer, Kimmel explains. Critically, it would provide a co-enforcement mechanism through the creation of workplace and health and safety committees driven by workers themselves, rather than relying on management oversight alone.

“Trained workers are the experts of their own realities, the eyes and ears of the workplace, and have built community trust as part of respected community organizations,” Kimmel says. Because the formal process hasn’t led to results at Access Bio, workers are trying to get justice on their own. n

Temp workers face greater risks that employers will force them into unsafe work conditions.

Luis Feliz Leon is an organizer, journalist, and independent scholar in social-movement history.