Unsafe Employers Endanger Workers

By SETH SANDRONSKY

To highlight Workers Memorial Week at the end of April, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) released a list of 12 employers that put their employees at risk of fatalities and injuries.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon, at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where six employees lost their lives, and across the US, has a rate of injuries on the job that is double the industry average.

Amazon, until the successful union formation at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, pushes union-free employees to work faster and faster. That drive to increase employee productivity, or output per hour, fuels the company’s profitability. Amazon has no monopoly on this workplace reality. “Moments are the elements of profits,” according to “Marx in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.”

Jessica E. Martinez is co-executive director of National COSH. “The Dirty Dozen are companies that needlessly expose workers to preventable hazards, leading to preventable illnesses, injuries and fatalities,” she said in a statement. “Workers who die on the job have names. We confront this reality so that workers can gain power to win the safety improvements that will prevent further loss of life.”

At Starbucks across the nation, employees faced COVID-19 exposure and risked infection during the coronavirus pandemic, and lost their jobs for organizing to win safer labor conditions. “We said from day one, this is about keeping our stores safe for workers and customers,” said Nikki Taylor, a former Starbucks worker from Memphis who was fired after she and her co-workers organized for better working conditions after COVID-19 spread in the store where she worked. “Sure enough, I was exposed at work and brought COVID home to my 8-year-old daughter,” Taylor said in a statement. That’s not right.”

The National Labor Relations Board has filed an unfair labor practice complaint against Starbucks for terminating Taylor and her co-workers illegally for trying to organize a labor union.

Consider Dollar General, where Mary Gundel was a store manager, in Tampa, Florida. “I knew Dollar General had serious safety problems, and I must have really struck a nerve,” she said in a statement, after uploading a Tik Tok video that nearly two million viewers watched. In it, Gundel described Dollar General’s practice of overcrowded, unsafe stores and long hours at the end of March. The company fired her a week later.

Smaller firms also obey the system’s logic of profits first and worker safety last. Here are two examples on the Dirty Dozen 2022 list.

Consider Liox Cleaners/Wash Supply Laundromat in New York City. Workers there experienced a lack of COVID safety protocols, e.g., no ventilation and protections from toxic chemicals. At the Mayfield Consumer Products in Mayfield, Kentucky, nine workers died when the company forced employees to remain on the job during a tornado.

Along with compiling and releasing the annual Dirty Dozen list of unsafe employers during Worker Memorial Week, National COSH also highlights stories of workers who are organizing for job safety daily on WorkedUp.us and related platforms on social media. Visit ()

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento, Calif. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2022

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