The fight to prevent the nation’s next major workplace tragedy is here. onesarahjones writes
Photo: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Walmart workers had warned for weeks that someone like Wando Evans could die. Before the 51-year-old stocker succumbed to COVID-19, activists in the company workforce had repeatedly tried to raise the alarm. Through United for Respect, a national advocacy group, they said the company’s emergency sick-leave policy was inadequate and late, announced after a Kentucky worker had already fallen ill. They needed protective gear in all stores.
But Wando Evans was already dead by then. So was Phillip Thomas, who worked for the same Chicago-area store. And according to a wrongful-death suit filed by the Evans family this week, Walmart could have done more to prevent their deaths. Evans, a 15-year Walmart employee, told his manager he had COVID symptoms two weeks before he died. He was ignored, the suit claims, until March 23, when managers finally sent him home. Two days later, he was dead.
Work has always been deadly for some people, even before the onset of COVID-19. Employers who want to flout safety regulations often do, and the consequences can be fatal. In West Virginia, survivors marked the tenth anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mining disaster just this week. Twenty-nine coal miners were killed in an explosion that the United Mine Workers of America would later call an act of “industrial homicide.
On Thursday, workers at 30 California-based fast-food restaurants went on strike, demanding basic protective gear, soap, and hazard pay from Burger King, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and others. Two other McDonald’s locations in the state had already gone on strike the previous week, an indication that slow and inadequate corporate responses may be fodder for a nascent strike wave. Some Instacart workers are still on strike.
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