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Belabored Stories: After Deaths, Fear Rises at Walmart
Walmart is on a hiring spree as workers fear for their lives.
Walmart is on a hiring spree as workers fear for their lives.
At a company that provides services to public health agencies tracking the coronavirus, workers sit in cubicles “like sardine cans.”
McDonald’s boasted about distributing protective equipment to employees. But one worker said masks, hand sanitizer, and gloves were only available “for a brief period of time. So it was only to get us to be quiet.”
States like California have yet to roll out a system to process gig workers’ unemployment-assistance applications. Rideshare drivers are running on fumes.
“We take in a lot and don’t talk about it,” a nurse in Chicago said. But healthcare workers are talking now—not just about how to save their patients, but about rebuilding the system from the bottom up.
The broken federal funding system is reflected in the dangerous conditions faced by many mail carriers.
Art handlers in New York City have filed an NLRB complaint alleging that their employer fired workers for organizing a union.
Workers in the fields in Immokalee, Florida, are demanding public health infrastructure that takes into account cramped living and travel conditions. “Social distancing is not possible.”
A group of laid-off service workers in Denver is pushing for a total cancellation of rent, mortgage, and utility payments, for at least the next ninety days.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that “any hospital operating off the crisis protocols should let him know,” said one nurse in Brooklyn. “Well, this is us letting him know.”
Millions of immigrant workers are toiling in frontline low-wage industries. But the CARES Act excludes many from its welfare provisions.
Grocery store workers have become an important point of human contact for customers isolated at home. “People are seeing you in a different light now.”
The director of Athena joins us to talk about why Amazon workers have been walking off the job.
General Electric workers want to use the company’s idled manufacturing facilities to make desperately needed lifesaving equipment.
Amazon is hiring thousands of new workers. What happens when they feel they risk more by going to work than by refusing to show up?