PHOTOS BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
Rosario said his coworkers received emails from Amazon recommending the use of protective gear: “We will have facemasks in limited quantities for anyone entering the building to wear as a recommended preventative measure, and if you prefer you may bring your own mask, including fabric masks... If you would like a mask, please ask a manager or designated ‘Hand-out [point of contact]’ at the start of your shift.” He said the Skokie warehouse delivers 80,000 packages per shift on any given day, and each shift has up to 200 employees. “Now they’re hiring new employees to add,” he said. “I’m seeing a lot of new faces.” Twenty-fifth Ward alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, whose ward includes the Chicago facility, said Amazon notified him about the second COVID-19 case at that site. He filed a complaint with the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and their Office of Labor Standards, which have jurisdiction over business licensees in the City of Chicago. BACP is in conversation with the workers and gathering evidence, a spokesman said via email. “We have assembled a team of investigator to response [sic] to violations where essential businesses may be in violation of the Stay at Home Order, including the Social Distancing Requirements. Failure to adhere to the Stay at Home Order can lead to fines of up to $10,000. “Additionally, requiring employees to work while sick or retaliating against employees for using earned sick time can constitute a violation of the Paid Sick Leave Law.” The BACP encouraged workers to submit complaints to 311. On Saturday, April 4, a caravan of community supporters showed up at the Western Avenue facility at 6am to honk their horns in support of picketers during the morning shift. About fifty cars circled the parking lot and inadvertently blocked 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ APRIL 15, 2020
a fleet of Amazon vans from leaving the loading dock, prompting police to arrive and disperse the traffic. “It was awesome to see so many community members come together to take part in the caravan,” said Pete DeMay, a union organizer affiliated with SEIU, who took part in the caravan. “The workers on the picket line are really brave— true warriors that inspire us all. It takes guts to take on a company like Amazon and put your livelihood on the line.” Employees in the Chicago and Skokie facilities are collecting hundreds of petition signatures. “Over 600 people work in the [Chicago] facility across different shifts from all over the Chicago area, northwest suburbs, northern Indiana... so places like this are steel petri dishes for coronavirus to be spread,” said employee and organizer Tedd Miin. Amazon operates about 500 warehouses nationwide, and at least fifty of those warehouses have confirmed cases of COVID-19. Chicago-area employees joined hundreds of Amazonians around the country who are leading walkouts and protests during the pandemic, like they recently did in Sacramento, California; Detroit, Michigan; and Staten Island, New York. “My message to people is please stand in solidarity with Amazon warehouse workers, please don’t order unessential items, talk with your co-workers,” Miin said. “A lot more people are going to get sick and die if we don’t make a stand and stop Amazon from using us as ‘essential’ sacrifices.”¬ Jacqueline Serrato is editor-in-chief of South Side Weekly. She last wrote about the need for rent relief in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who Gets to Work From Home?
Transit operators, retail employees, and factory workers are deemed “essential,” but reporting to work puts them at risk of infection BY YIWEN LU
A
s the entire city shelters in place, the essential infrastructure of Chicago is still running. And while ridership is down citywide, buses and trains continue to keep normal schedules. But the CTA does not run itself. This means that close to 10,000 employees, including transit operators, janitors, instructors, and others, are still working, and many of them have to stay in crowded, enclosed spaces for eight to twelve hours a day. “We have a great level of anxiety and anguish about not being able to be home with our families in a safe environment,” Ken Franklin, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308, which represents 3,000 rail operators, told the Weekly. Just like health care providers, transit operators are frontline workers who strive to keep the lives of the rest of Chicagoans as normal as possible. Simply labeling them as “essential workers,” however, glosses over the fact that they are also marginalized communities who are more vulnerable than many other workers at this point. CTA operators also may be disproportionately at risk of suffering from coronavirus-related illness and death. On April 5, WBEZ reported that seventy percent of people who have died from COVID-19 in Chicago were Black; according to a 2009 report on diversity hiring in the CTA (the most recent information available) about sixty-five percent of its workforce was Black. Despite social distancing guidelines, most CTA terminals do not have the capacity to allow adequate physical
separation. Unlike riders who would be able to spread out across eight rail cars on the Red Line, for example, employees are unable to do so due to limited space, Franklin said. While some terminals, such as the ones at the 95th Street and Howard Street Red Line stops, are larger, there are also more workers inside them. The possibility of getting infected drastically increases in such an environment. According to Franklin, as of April 1, five workers at the Howard terminal tested positive for COVID-19, one of whom was only given the test after they developed serious symptoms and had to go to an emergency room. A Pace bus driver tested positive on March 26. Others are waiting for accurate classification of confirmed cases from the CTA, but it is not easy: the employee had to get their Leave of Absence paperwork approved by ReedGroup, an absence management services company, and the CTA then got the paperwork from ReedGroup. “That is an administrative nightmare because they all have to be talking in order to approve, pay, and so forth,” Franklin said. Currently, test sites are still limited in number and hard to access; one has to show symptoms and contact a health care provider in order to get tested. However, for at-risk groups such as transit operators, the longer the wait, the greater their anxiety that they could be bringing the coronavirus home and infecting their families. Meanwhile, the ATU says that sanitization of trains is not sufficient protection for workers. On March 25, the ATU called for stronger protections for
