Job Insecurity & Vaccinations during the Pandemic

Difficult work situations continue, even after vaccinations

By Theresa Ho

Political leaders, news outlets and corporations like Amazon and Walmart have taken to calling service workers heroes for continuing to work during the pandemic. But many retail and service workers are worried about lack of job security, financial support, and protection from unsafe work conditions caused by abusive customers and poor management.

For more than two years, Daniel Pineda was a server at a movie theater where customers could have dinners, desserts and cocktails brought to their table while they watched movies. Then the public became more aware of the threat COVID-19 posed, and theaters began to close their doors.

“This was early March. It was before masks became a big thing,” Pineda said. “They were starting to tell people not to shake hands. Wiping down was kind of a big thing, so we started wiping down menus all the time. But then we just shut down.”

After losing his job, he was on unemployment benefits for a while. Then he worked as an Instacart shopper. After that, he was an Uber Eats driver. He also worked for the Jefferson County elections office as an IT guy making sure that election judges had internet access.

He always knew he was going to get vaccinated, but he struggled finding a place to get the vaccine.

“I called probably 15 different places, and then no spots, no spots, no spots. Then I found this place in Colorado Springs where I could get in the next week,” Pineda said.

He received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The side effects he felt afterwards were unpleasant, but what concerned him was getting the vaccine two days before the CDC and the FDA recommended pausing the use of the vaccine due to six reported cases of blood clotting. For a while, he worried that it was an ineffective vaccine.

When it came to COVID-19, he said that he had more concerns for the people around him than for his personal health.

“I was worried about catching something and passing it onto somebody older or who had health issues,” he said.

Two weeks after being vaccinated, he started working as a server for an Irish bar and restaurant. According to Pineda, people would complain about regulations all the time. They would ask him when they would be able to take their masks off and when he and his fellow coworkers would take their masks off.

But now the CDC has changed the mask guidelines so that individuals who have been fully vaccinated for two weeks or more do not have to wear masks in indoor spaces. At first, he thought working mask-less felt strange.

“The first couple of days it felt scandalous going without a mask. But as far as personal health concerns, I hadn’t really thought much,” he said. Customer Abuse and Sexual Harassment during COVID-19

Alicia, an employee of a large market chain who requested her last name be withheld, felt that the company acted quickly when COVID-19 became a concern.

“It felt like I had literally heard about COVID, and then that same week they were like, ‘Pull all the samples, pull everything back.’ And then two days later, everyone was required to wear masks,” she said.

But she also felt that the company failed to maintain many of its promises about protecting and taking care of employees during the pandemic. According to Alicia, her employer provided paid time off for workers to quarantine the first time they suspected they had COVID-19 or were exposed to someone that had the virus. She was concerned that she and her coworkers would not have financial support if they were to get COVID19 or were exposed to someone that had COVID-19 and had to quarantine again.

At the start of the pandemic, she said several coworkers didn’t have enough paid time off accrued. Employees could inform leadership of their dire financial situation while sick. Management would then ask team members to donate their paid time off (PTO) to coworkers. But she felt that such practices were unfair considering the PTO fund removed responsibility from the employer having to provide adequate paid sick leave for their employees. She knew of several coworkers who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and had to resort to asking for the PTO fund.

The company pays employees $80 to get COVID-19 vaccines. While she thought that the paid incentive did encourage some employees to get vaccinated, she felt that the prospect of not wearing masks was an even bigger incentive than payment for many coworkers. She was concerned about the company’s vaccine verification methods.

“(They) didn’t require verification if you were vaccinated or not to obtain that money or to not wear masks – you just had to tell them dates. They didn’t have to see your vaccine card or see proof of scheduling or anything else. I believe there are people in our company who have abused this process,” Alicia said.

She and everyone on her team so far has received their COVID-19 vaccines. Still, it was a struggle for employees to maintain social distancing when the number of customers in the store seemed to double overnight due to the pandemic. She also didn’t feel that her store’s management kept their employees safe from abusive customers.

“I felt like overnight a lot of these interactions were hostile,” she said. “These customers just became immediately alienating to staff. It was that they didn’t want to wear a mask, they wanted you to wear a mask, they wanted you to do more, they wanted you to forget about COVID completely. It was like one minute I’d be dealing with a customer arguing with them about wearing masks to the next person just screaming at me because someone else isn’t wearing a mask and that I’m not doing enough.”

She also said that the sexual harassment she and other coworkers experienced from customers increased after mask regulations. One such customer continued telling her that if they didn’t have to wear a mask in the store, they might as well start kissing everyone.

“A lot of it stopped with COVID, and now it feels like it’s ramped up to compliments, being intrusive, and asking things that are inappropriate … One of our other co-workers got her butt touched by a customer because he thought that she was pretty,” Alicia said. “Our assistant manager handled the situation and threw the customer out, but I can tell you that some of the other management there would probably not have done anything serious enough because they don’t understand it, and it’s happened before.” Unsafe Work Environment Caused by Poor Retail Management

According to Caitlin Ohler, a previous employee at the large

market chain, the company would only provide paid time off if the employee provided proof that he or she contracted the virus from working at the market. She also said that the company stopped paying their employees the extra two dollars for hazard pay back in July 2020, during the height of COVID last summer.

Ohler now works for another retail company, which she believes has better support for their employees during COVID19 than her previous employer. According to Ohler, her workplace pays employees that have been infected with the virus regardless of where they got it. The company continued to pay their employees hazard pay until the vaccines were released. And when an employee reports that they have COVID-19, the store has the department where the employee worked disinfected. The store also provides the COVID-19 vaccines for their employees free of cost.

“You just had to go to the pharmacy and make an appointment to be vaccinated,” she said.

Many employees in her store received the Pfizer vaccine, but she received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because they ran out of the Pfizer.

While Ohler feels that her employer tries to protect their employees as a company, she is concerned about how management within individual stores takes care of their customers and employees. She said that at her location, everyone wears their masks in the front where the cashiers are. When she first started working at the store, she was at the front and always wore her mask. But while customers were only allowed in if they had a mask, she noticed that there were customers who would take off their mask once inside.

“I did a couple of days of working at the door. We were supposed to ask people to keep their masks on, but then as they got further into the store, they would take off their masks and no one would say anything until they got back to the front end,” she said.

Then she was sent to the fresh food departments – the back of the store where the meat and deli departments are – and saw that not all of her coworkers wore a mask either.

“In the fresh department, no one sees and no one cares, and it’s the manager’s job to say something, but they didn’t,” she said.

She also said that at her location’s deli department, a supervisor contracted COVID-19 and was showing visible signs of coughing and sneezing on people. Still, she kept showing up to work while other employees had families with autoimmune diseases. She said the supervisor finally tested positive for COVID-19 and was sent home, but was promoted once she returned to work.

While Ohler was working in the bakery department before she had gotten her COVID-19 vaccine, her bakery manager told her that because she was young, she “would probably survive” if she ever got infected with COVID-19.

“The manager in the bakery kept pulling his mask down along with a lot of other employees. Then he got COVID, another person back there got COVID, and then I got COVID,” she said.

When the manager returned to work, he told Ohler and the rest of the department that everything would be fine because now they all had immunity from COVID-19. Ohler had intense flu-like symptoms for several days. She lost her sense of taste and smell for months.

“He just acted like nothing could touch him,” Ohler said..

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The Biden Administration fell short of its Fourth of July target to have at least one shot to 70% of adults.

U.S. Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark

Authors:

Elisa J. Sobo Professor and Chair of Anthropology, San Diego State University;

Diana Schow Visiting Assistant Professor of Community and Public Health; Executive Director, Southeast Idaho Area Health Education Center, Institute of Rural Health, Idaho State University, Idaho State University;

Stephanie McClure Assistant Professor of Biocultural Medical Anthropology, University of Alabama

Editor’s note: This article is republished from the Conversation (https://theconversation.com) under a Creative Commons license; https://theconversation.com/usblack-and-latino-communitiesoften-have-low-vaccination-ratesbut-blaming-vaccine-hesitancymisses-the-mark-163169 By early July 2021, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. residents 12 years and older had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; 55% were fully vaccinated. But uptake varies drastically by region – and it is lower on average among non-white people.

Many blame the relatively lower vaccination rates in communities of color on “vaccine hesitancy.” But this label overlooks persistent barriers to access and lumps together the varied reasons people have for refraining from vaccination. It also places all the responsibility for getting vaccinated on individuals. Ultimately, homogenizing peoples’ reasons for not getting vaccinated diverts attention away from social factors that research shows play a critical role in health status and outcomes.

As medical anthropologists, we take a more nuanced view. Working together as lead site investigators for CommuniVax, a national initiative to improve vaccine equity, we and our teams in Alabama, California and Idaho, along with CommuniVax teams elsewhere in the nation, have documented a variety of stances toward vaccination that simply can’t be cast as “hesitant.”

Limited access hampers vaccination rates

People of color have long suffered an array of health inequities. Accordingly, due to a combination of factors, these communities have experienced higher hospitalization due to COVID-19, higher disease severity upon admission, higher chances for being placed on breathing support and progression to the intensive care unit, and higher rates of death.

CommuniVax data, including some 200 in-depth interviews within such communities, confirm that overall, those who have directly experienced this kind of COVID-19-related trauma, are not hesitant. They dearly want vaccinations. For example, in San Diego’s heavily Latino and very hard-hit “South Region,” COVID-19 vaccine uptake is remarkably high – about 84% as of July 6, 2021.

However, vaccine uptake is far from universal in these communities. This is in part due to access issues that go beyond the well documented challenges of transportation, internet access and skills gaps, and a lack of information on how to get vaccinated. For example, some CommuniVax participants had heard of non-resident white people usurping doses that were meant for communities of color. African American participants, in particular, reported feeling that the Johnson & Johnson vaccines promoted in their communities were the least safe and effective.

Our participant testimony shows that many unvaccinated people are not “vaccine hesitant” but rather “vaccine impeded.” And exclusion can happen not just in a physical sense; providers’ attitudes towards vaccines matter too.

For instance, Donna, a health care worker in Idaho, said, “I chose not to get it because if I were to get sick, I think I would recover mostly or more rapidly.” This kind of attitude by health care providers can have downstream effects. For example, Donna may not encourage vaccination when on duty or to people she knows; some, just observing her choices, may follow suit. Here, what appears as a community’s hesitancy to vaccinate is instead a reflection of vaccine hesitancy within its health care system.

More directly impeded are community members who, like Angela in Idaho, skipped vaccination because she couldn’t risk having a negative reaction that might require intervention. Although a trip to the doctor is a highly unlikely outcome after a vaccine, it remains a concern for some. “My insurance doesn’t cover as much as it possibly, you know, should,” she noted. And we have encountered many reports of undocumented individuals who fear deportation although, according to current laws, immigration status should not be questioned in relation to the vaccine.

Christina, in San Diego, illustrates another type of practical barrier. She cannot get vaccinated, she said, because she has no one to care for her babies should she fall ill with side effects. Her husband, similarly, can’t take time off from his job –“It doesn’t work that way.” Likewise, Carlos – who made sure that his centenarian father got vaccinated – says he can’t take the vaccine himself due to his dad’s deep dementia: “If I took my vaccine and I got sick, he’d be screwed.”

Indifference, resilience and ambivalence

Another segment of unvaccinated people obscured by the “hesitant” label are the “vaccine indifferent.” For various reasons, they remain relatively untouched by the pandemic: COVID-19 just isn’t on their

radar. This might include people who are self-employed or working under the table, people living in rural and remote places, and those whose children are not in the public school system.

Such people thus are not consistently connected to COVID-19-related information. This is particularly true if they forego social or news media and socialize with others who do the same, and if there are significant language barriers.

We also learned that, among some of our participants, the initial messaging about prioritizing high-risk groups backfired, leaving some under 65 and in relatively good health with the impression it wasn’t necessary for them to get the vaccine. Without incentives –travel plans, being accepted to a college or having an employer that mandates vaccination –inertia carries the day.

The indifferent are not against vaccination. Rather, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “you do you” tend to typify their views. As Jose from Idaho reported, “I’m not worried because I’ve always taken care of myself.”

We also saw a modified form of indifference in those who believed that the protective steps they already were taking would be enough to keep them COVID-19-free. A janitor said, “I am an essential worker… So from the beginning we took … all the precautions … face masks, taking [social] distance [and using] natural medicines and vitamins for the immune system.” He had, indeed, so far avoided contracting COVID-19.

The view of vaccines as not immediately necessary is magnified among some Latino people by the cultural value placed on the need to endure –“aguantar” in Spanish — to bear up, push through and avoid complaining about daily struggles. This perspective can be seen in many immigrant or impoverished populations, where getting sick or injured can be a precursor to household ruin through job loss and exorbitant, unpayable medical bills.

Yet another dynamic we learned of is what we term “vaccine ambivalence.” Some participants who view COVID19 as a significant health threat believe the vaccine poses an equivalent risk. We saw this particularly among African Americans in Alabama – not necessarily surprising given that the health care system has not always had these communities’ best interests at heart. The perceived conundrum leaves people stuck on the fence. Given the legacy of unequal treatment in communities of color, when balancing the “known” of COVID-19 against the unknown of vaccination, their inaction may seem reasonable – especially when coupled with mask-wearing and social distancing.

Attending to blind spots

At this point in the pandemic, those with the means and will to get vaccinated have done so. Providing viable counternarratives to misinformation can help bring more people on board. But continuing to focus solely on individual mistrustfulness toward vaccines or socalled hesitancy obscures the other complex reasons people have for being wary of the system and bypassing vaccination.

Moreover, an overly narrow focus on the vaccine leaves a lot outside the frame. A wider view reveals that the problems leading to inequitable vaccination coverage are the same structural problems that have, historically, prevented people of color from having a fair shot at good health and economic outcomes to begin with – problems that even a 100% vaccination rate cannot resolve..

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The bank known for “banking for good” has a program that is good for us.

FirstBank’s new PATH Grant Program gives African American buyers up to $20,000 for down payment and closing cost By Barry Overton

While we are in an everincreasing real estate market, where it is challenging to purchase a home, one Colorado Bank is making a difference in the African American Community. On June 1st, in recognition of Juneteenth, FirstBank released a unique down payment assistance grant program coined PATH (Providing Access To Homeownership) . The PATH program aims to help more African Americans become homeowners.

FirstBank has a long history of building up the black and brown communities. I had the pleasure of working with many of their African American staff that hold the title of Vice President or President. Many of their current employees of color have been with FirstBank, since the mid to late 90’s.

Danielle Vaughan, the President of Compliance for FirstBank, sat down with me to discuss PATH, an amazing new program that the bank has started. Danielle started with FirstBank as an intern in 1999. “I was able to receive an internship through an organization called INROADS.” INROADS’s focus is to create pathways to careers for ethnically diverse high school and college students across the country. “FirstBank began engaging with INROADS over 20 years ago, with two of our Presidents starting as INROADS interns and progressing with FirstBank throughout our management careers.” As Vaughan put it “FirstBank was involved in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, long before it was a thing.”

FirstBank has an established background of ensuring fair and just treatment for all Colorado communities. It has developed a Multicultural Banking Initiative, which focuses on expanding their relationships in Hispanic, Asian, And African American communities. The bank currently has several bank branches throughout Colorado that serve as banking centers focused on communities of color and it launched Colorado’s first Multicultural Banking Center in 2020.

FirstBank’s latest PATH initiative is likely to be their most profound effort in making an impact, particularly in the African American community. During our interview Vaughan shared with me FirstBank’s passion behind this project. “This program is meant to provide African American families, with opportunity to become homeowners without carrying the financial burden of paying the entire down payment and all closing costs.” According to Vaughan, FirstBank’s Chief Operation Officer, Emily Robinson, took notice of the growing wealth disparity in our Colorado Communities. Robinson wanted to make some changes and thought FirstBank was in a position to be at the forefront of leading in the change. Because of her position as President of Compliance, Vaughan was charged with structuring the program.

The results of the energy and efforts by Vaughan and the FirstBank Team, established a loan grant that provides firsttime home buyers with up to $20,000 or a maximum of 20% of the purchase price, that can be used for down payment and closing costs. With this being a Grant Program it is not required that the borrower pay the funds back. This opens the door for many buyers who want to become homeowners but were challenged with the lack of reserve funds.

So, who qualifies for the PATH Grant? Here is the list of qualification criteria: •Available to income eligible Black and African American borrowers. •Who are first-time home buyers and have completed a First-Time Home buyer Course. •When paired with a FirstBank Mortgage. •For the purchase of a primary residence in Colorado. $500,000 in funds have been contributed by both FirstBank and CHFA. That’s a $1 million fund available for eligible Colorado home buyers to use. To apply for the grant program the first step would be to apply for a FirstBank mortgage loan. A FirstBank Loan Officer will explain the grant process, and get the process in motion. For terms and more information on this groundbreaking lending product go to efirstbank.com/path.. Editor’s note: Barry Overton is a licensed Real Estate with New Era Group at Your Castle Real Estate. He has been an agent since 2001, and started investing in real estate in 1996. For more information email: barrysellsdenver@msn.com or call 303-668-5433.