Upfront

CONTENTS DECEMBER 2-8, 2020 • VOL. 52 NO 14

Upfront .......................................6 Feature ..................................... 10 Film ..........................................25 Eat ............................................ 27 Music ........................................ 31 Savage Love .............................. 33

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UPFRONT

REPORT ON CLEVELAND’S RECYCLING DEBACLES EXPECTED NEXT MONTH

THE FRANK JACKSON

administration provided scant information on the city’s lapsed recycling program Monday, updating an anxious Cleveland City Council about the work of an environmental consulting firm which has been tasked with assessing the city’s waste collection and disposal operations from top to bottom.

A draft report of that assessment, which will include analysis and recommendations for the curbside recycling program as well as other topics, is expected to be completed by the end of December.

The city’s Chief Operations Officer, Darnell Brown, told council that the administration will then review recommendations and prioritize them by the end of January. In response to a question from Council President Kevin Kelley, Brown estimated that residents might begin to see changes in waste collection operations by the middle of 2021, but said he was only speculating.

The presentation Monday did not include concrete information collection routes. or recommendations about the Brown reiterated that the Jackson recycling program. Council and administration believed it was “good residents have been hoping for environmental policy” to have a answers ever since it was revealed city recycling program, but that earlier this year that due to global the aim of the consultant’s work markets and the city’s high rate was to “right size” recycling in the of contamination, the city had context of a larger waste collection suspended its curbside recycling framework to ensure that it remains program. When its most recent efficient and feasible. -Sam Allard contract expired, the city issued two RFPs for a new contractor to handle recycling services but received only DENNIS KUCINICH SAYS HE’S one, exorbitantly priced, bid. All Clevelanders’ recyclable material has been disposed in a landfill, alongside “SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING” RUNNING FOR CLEVELAND MAYOR IN 2021 garbage, for months. In an interview last week with

Whether or not the City will Channel 3 News ostensibly about resume its curbside recycling, and a new memoir, former mayor, what form a new program might congressman and presidential take, will presumably be outlined in candidate Dennis! Kucinich next month’s report. confirmed what has long been

Brown said that the consultant rumored: He is “seriously had been hard at work on “due considering” running once again for diligence”: gathering data, collecting Cleveland Mayor in 2021. resident feedback and going on Unmentioned is that Kucinich ride-alongs with route supervisors has been laying the groundwork for to assess routes, garbage bin set-out a mayoral campaign since at least rates, mileage, vehicle maintenance, early 2020. The Ward 11 resident staffing levels and more. Brown has maintained, while writing opsaid it had been 20 years since the eds about the West Side Market for city of Cleveland modified its waste- cleveland.com and issuing press 6 | clevescene.com | December 2-8, 2020 releases about Cleveland Public Power and other topics, that he is merely a “concerned citizen.”

Earlier this month, he sent a press release to local media in response to the soaring violent crime rate. He called for the city to double the number of its homicide detectives, to launch a new community relations approach targeting high-crime areas, and to provide mental health counselors in those areas.

Scene asked Kucinich this summer why the media should pay these press releases any mind. If Kucinich was merely a concerned private citizen, after all, why would these policy proposals rise above the level of Facebook posts?

The answer is and has always been that these are campaign materials, designed not only to establish policy priorities for Kucinich’s potential platform, but to generate publicity (and mystery!) about his run. He has not personally admitted his intent to seek the office until now, i.e., when the presidential election is in the rearview mirror and residents can focus on city matters in an undivided way.

Like Frank Jackson, Kucinich is shrewd enough to understand that declaring one’s candidacy means one headline; teasing reporters for months about a potential candidacy means continuous headlines.

There’s no sense denying that Kucinich remains far and away the most gifted campaigner of all the potential mayoral candidates in Cleveland. First-time challengers would do well, in fact, to pay close attention to how he operates. His strategy involves regular contact with the media and specific policy proposals on hot-button issues.

Kucinich is sometimes mischaracterized as a pure opportunist and a kook. I think that misses the mark. He is, however, very smart about pairing his decades-long commitment to progressive causes (his brand, for lack of a better word), with the issues on most folks’ minds during a given election season. Have a look at how central gun legislation was in his platform during the 2018 gubernatorial primary, in the wake of the Parkland shooting. The current disaster at Cleveland Public Power and the statewide scandal at FirstEnergy is the stuff of divine

bequeaths. For the former Boy Mayor who staked his career on saving Muny Light, the campaign narrative is writing itself.

Crucially, Dennis! also has the luxury of operating outside City Hall and can therefore call out the incompetence and dismal track record of current city leaders without risking personal relationships.

That’s important, because the incompetence and track record of current leaders need to be called out. Candidates like City Council President Kevin Kelley, and indeed, Mayor Frank Jackson, will have to convince voters to keep them in power despite the misery and poverty over which they’ve presided.

Some will say that Kucinich is a curious candidate to call out incompetence, that given the storied tumult of his lone mayoral term, (1977-1979), he is playing pot to Jackson’s kettle. Far more depressing, though, is that a Kucinich campaign likely means a strengthened Frank Jackson campaign, which will drain resources from new, younger candidates.

Scene reported earlier this year, and confirmed again recently, that many of Jackson’s donors are still very much behind him and would prefer to see him run again. They are expected to redouble their commitments should Kucinich mount a serious challenge. Jackson himself reportedly remains undecided. He has said he has not ruled out running next year.

Incidentally, for Cleveland history buffs, Kucinich’s memoir appears set for publication at last. (Another nice campaign publicity boost.) It›s been in-progress for years. Getting Kucinich›s interpretation of what went down during the epic Muny Light battle in the late 70s, especially given Kucinich’s penchant for drama and his flair with prose, should make for a page-turner. -Sam Allard

WE HAVE ENTERED SERIOUS INJURY SEASON AT

NORTHEAST OHIO AMAZON WAREHOUSES

During November and December, Amazon warehouse workers across the country log more hours than during any other time of the year. Before, during and after “Cyber Monday,” which this year fell on Nov. 30, the 3,000-plus workers at the Northeast Ohio Amazon distribution centers in North Randall and Euclid scramble to fill an explosion of online orders. And they are subjected to the rigors, risks and workplace injuries that disproportionately arrive during the holiday season.

An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting exposed the staggering rates of injury at more than 150 Amazon fulfillment centers nationwide from 2016 to 2019. The investigation concluded that Amazon’s obsession with speed and automation had turned their warehouses into “injury mills.”

“Amazon doesn’t want any longterm workers,” an employee at an Amazon facility in Portland told his local alt-weekly last year, when a portion of the Reveal data had been collected. “They want you to work hard and fast and get rid of you when your body can’t take it anymore. That’s their business model.”

Reveal’s new trove of data showed that Ohio’s North Randall location, “CLE2” in the Amazon code, was among the worst for serious injuries. The sortable robotic warehouse at the former Randall Park Mall site employs roughly 2,200 people and received substantial state and local tax breaks to locate where it probably would have anyway, given the mall’s massive footprint, the site’s proximity to a dense population center (Cleveland), and Amazon’s need for more distribution warehouses to accommodate its oneday delivery guarantee for Prime members.

CLE2 had 15.3 serious injuries per 100 workers in 2018, which was 11th-worst among all Amazon locations. It improved to 12.8 serious injuries per 100 workers in 2019, but remained in the bottom 10% of all Amazon facilities. These serious injury numbers, which include injuries that result in days away from work, job transfers or some other work restriction, far exceed the national average. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average rate of serious injury in the warehousing and storage industry is only 4 per 100 workers.

The Euclid facility, “CLE3,” is also a sortable robotic warehouse that handles small and mediumsized packages. Employees began working there in June, 2019. By the end of the year, it had seen 117 total serious injuries, a rate of 9.8 per 100 workers. That’s more than double the national average and was among the 40 worst Amazon facilities in 2019.

Reveal provided site-specific data to Scene, which showed not only the number and rate of serious injuries week-by-week, but the breakdown in hours worked, illnesses, other injuries and days away from work. The data also recorded fatalities. Neither CLE2 nor CLE3 had a

UPFRONT

fatality in 2018 or 2019, though a worker at the North Randall location died after testing positive for Covid-19 in May of this year.

Among other things, the data showed a massive uptick in hours worked in the months of November and December, corresponding with holiday gift-buying season. Fourteen

DIGIT WIDGET

90,000 Customers of Cleveland Water who were delinquent on their bills (as of 11/9), as the City of Cleveland prepared to end its moratorium on water and power shutoffs Dec. 1. The average overdue bill: $481.

28,500 Customers of Cleveland Public Power (more than 35% of CPP’s total customer base) who were delinquent on their bills (as of 11/9), as the City of Cleveland prepared to end its moratorium on water and power shutoffs Dec. 1. The average overdue bill: $281.

680 Total performances that Playhouse Square has canceled since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered live events. (Playhouse Square announced this week that the Broadway Series is scheduled to return in the fall of 2021).

700,000

Square feet of space at the IX Center that the Akron-based GOJO Corporation – makers of Purell hand sanitizer – has leased for inventory storage. The news arrives two months after the IX Center announced it would close after 35 years in operation as an exposition facility. of the 15 weeks with the most hours logged at either location occurred between the second week of November and the third week of December. Four of those weeks resulted in serious injury rates higher than 20 per 100 workers, which happened only 12 times in total through 2018 and 2019.

The highest weekly rate of serious injury on record in either 2018 or 2019 was the week of Feb. 4, 2019 at CLE2, where 33.7 serious injuries per 100 workers were recorded.

But these next several weeks will be grueling and dangerous for Amazon workers in Northeast Ohio, human beings who function as extensions of robotic equipment for the world’s leading e-commerce giant. They will pick up items, scan them, and dump them into receptacles on large racks controlled by mobile robots. They will do so continuously for the duration of their lengthy shifts. In the final two weeks of 2019, workers at CLE2 worked more than 200,000 hours performing this punishing work. That was 2-3 times the weekly hourly totals through the winter and spring.

Amazon spokesperson Andre Woodson told Scene that nothing was more important to the company than the health and safety of their associates. He said that during the holiday season, Amazon is “anything but complacent.”

“We continue to invest in safety training and education programs, technology and new safety infrastructure,” Woodson said, “and we see improvements through programs focused on improved ergonomics, delivering guided physical and wellness exercises to our associates at their workstation, mechanical workstation assistance equipment, improving workstation setup and design, forklift telematics, forklift guardrails to separate equipment from pedestrians, and parking lot improvements—to name a few.”

Woodson added that workplace injury data often requires additional context. In many of Amazon’s newer facilities, he said, injury rates tend to skew higher because of an influx or hires who may not have experience working warehouse jobs and who, in many cases, don’t have appropriate footwear. He said that Amazon has created a “robust wellness training program” for their employees that focuses not only on workplace safety but on nutrition and mind and body health. -Sam Allard