TWITTER POSTS ABOUT INSTACART STRIKE

From Twitter

Whole Worker

WholeWorkerWFM

OUR DEMANDS https://t.co/u08PDuHuuY

Twitter2020-03-29 5:48 p.m.

Bernie Sandersverified_user

BernieSanders

.@Instacart was last valued at nearly $8 billion. A company of this size should not be forcing its workers to put themselves — and us all — at risk. I stand with the workers, and encourage Instacart to meet the their demands. https://t.co/x7Jid1NvWH

Twitter2020-03-28 1:12 p.m.

Instacartverified_user

Instacart

Our priority is to safely serve the Instacart community. Today we’re announcing new safety measures including manufacturing & distributing our own hand sanitizer to shoppers & launching a new customer tip default feature to help shoppers earn higher tips. https://t.co/mR0eBA71TP

Twitter2020-03-29 3:50 p.m.

Kshama Sawantverified_user

cmkshama

Watch my exciting interview with Instacart strike leader Vanessa Bain! Essential workers fight for safety and hazard pay! “Companies say we are in this together, but this crisis has shown - it is their profits versus our lives.” #NotDyingForWallStreet https://t.co/7tvbVbVaha

Twitter2020-03-31 4:28 p.m.

Picture of the ISS from last night. Taken from my backyard.

image/gif

ELON MUSK IS SHIPPING FREE VENTILATORS TO HOSPITALS WORLDWIDE

SO HE SAYS, BUT WILL HE FOLLOW THROUGH, REMEMBER HIS FAILED SUBMARINE TO RESCUE THE 13 BOYS TRAPPED IN A FLOODED CAVE

Free Of Charge
Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has announced renewed efforts to supply hospitals around the country — and internationally — with life-saving equipment amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“We have extra FDA-approved ventilators,” he tweeted. “Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla delivery regions. Device and shipping cost are free.”

He did, however, have one caveat: the ventilators need to be put to use immediately: “Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not stored in a warehouse.”

“Heroic Effort”

The news comes after Musk sourced some 1,255 ventilators from Chinese manufacturers and donated them to hospitals in the Los Angeles area last week. “If you want a free ventilator installed, please let us know!” he tweeted at the time.

California governor Gavin Newsom praised the move at the time, calling it a “heroic effort,” according to Bloomberg.

Vent Rush

Hospitals across the country are quickly running out of ventilators, machines that play a crucial role in providing care for a growing number of COVID-19 patients. Healthcare practitioners now have an awful decision to make: which patients get access to a limited number of ventilators?

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump used the Defense Production Act to encourage companies including General Motors to produce ventilators. Despite severe shortages in the US, Trump announced plans yesterday to send excess ventilators to Europe.

READ MORE: Tesla offers ventilators free of cost to hospitals, Musk says [The Hill]

More on Musk: “Heroic Effort”: Elon Musk Donates 1,250 Ventilators to Hospitals

GENUINELY HEROIC

GE WORKERS PROTEST: WE WANT TO BUILD VENTILATORS, LET US BUILD VENTILATORS

Mass Protest

On Monday, General Electric workers staged a mass protest and walked off the job.

Their demands for the company: stop going about business as usual and start mass-producing ventilators for coronavirus patients, according to The Independent. Ventilators are in extremely short supply, especially in cities hit hardest by the pandemic, so the GE workers reasonably posit that the country needs them more than their usual output of jet engines right now.

War Effort

President Trump has invoked but not actually used the Defense Production Act, which grants him the authority to compel manufactures like General Motors and General Electric to manufacture whatever is needed in a crisis. In this case, that would be medical ventilators and other supplies for overburdened hospitals.

Meanwhile, GE, which The Independent reports stands to benefit from the government’s $2 trillion bailout, recently announced that it was laying off 2,600 factory workers and half of its maintenance staff in a bid to save money — an unfortunate display of priorities in the face of a global crisis.

All Hands

“If GE trusts us to build, maintain and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?” union leader Jake Aguanaga said during a press conference, per The Independent.

It’s reassuring to know that the nation’s factory workers are ready and willing to get to work manufacturing the supplies hospitals need, but equally unfortunate that the company’s leadership still hasn’t gotten on board.


READ MORE: Coronavirus: GE workers walk off the job and demand they build ventilators [The Independent]

More on ventilators: Experts Say Putting Multiple Patients on one Ventilator Is Unsafe

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Communities Enduring Racism & Poverty Will Suffer Most Due to COVID-19
MARCH 31, 2020

GUESTS
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed
a physician and epidemiologist. He is the former director of the Detroit Health Department. He is the author of the new book Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, and his recent piece for The Guardian is headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”

LINKS
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Twitter
"Healing Politics: A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic"
"Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity"


As the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States tops 3,100, states are demanding ventilators and medical supplies. Michigan is a growing hot spot and struggling to prepare for a surge in cases, but President Trump has repeatedly attacked Michigan’s governor, calling her “that woman.” We speak with the former director of the Detroit Health Department, Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a physician and epidemiologist, and his new book is just out today, “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.” His recent piece for The Guardian is headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting from the epicenter of the pandemic in New York; co-hosting, Juan González, broadcasting from his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to stop community spread.

Monday marked the deadliest day of the pandemic in the United States with more than 500 deaths reported. The total death toll in the United States has now passed 3,100 — a number that’s tripled since just Thursday. Medical workers are bracing for that number to soar in the coming weeks. In New York state, the current epicenter of the pandemic, the peak of the crisis is expected to come around April 10th, when one study estimates 827 people will die of the virus in a single day. More than 1,200 people here in New York have already died.

In Michigan, a growing hot spot for the virus, the death toll is expected to peak a day after New York, with 164 deaths on April 11. Nearly 200 people have died already in Michigan as the city of Detroit prepares for a swell of cases. Michigan state Representative Isaac Robinson died of the virus in a Detroit medical center Sunday. He was only 44 years old. Detroit’s police commissioner has tested positive for the virus, and 500 officers are in quarantine. Detroit’s hospital system is already overwhelmed. The city has high rates of asthma and chronic illness. Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is calling on the federal government to offer more medical supplies and who is expected to shutter the state’s schools for the remainder of the school year by the end of this week. They’re already closed, but to announce they would be closed for good for this semester.

Well, for more, we are joined by the former director of the Detroit Health Department, recent candidate for governor of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a physician, an epidemiologist. He’s the author of Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, the book just out today, his recent piece in The Guardian headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”

And thanks so much for joining us, Doctor, from your home, again, to protect your family, yourself and community spread. How critical this is. Can you talk, overall — I mean, every time I see President Trump talking about “that woman,” meaning the governor of Michigan, saying he told Vice President Pence not to call her, because he doesn’t like her, also talked about the governor of Washington state, as well, talking about him as a “terrible person,” and yet your governor continues to say things like — they had just gotten a federal shipment, and she said, “This shipment is not enough for one shift at one hospital in my state.” Talk about the state of Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, let me tell you, first of all, thank you for having me today. What we’re seeing here is just an utter lapse in federal leadership. It’s clear that the individual in the White House sees himself more as the head of a political party whose job it is to divide the country between himself and leaders in other states, while you’ve got governors in places like Michigan or Washington or New York who realize the depth of their responsibility right now. Michigan is a state with 10 million people. It’s one of the most diverse states in the country. But also we’ve had this very devastating history of what has been a level of leadership that has taken from communities like Detroit to pass tax cuts for major corporations across the state.

And when you think about the movement of a pathogen like coronavirus, it’s easy to just focus on the pathogen. But epidemiologists think not just about the pathogen, but also about the host and about the environment. And what we’ve seen is an interplay between the host and the environment that’s left people in communities like Detroit fundamentally vulnerable to this disease. And that’s why we’re seeing the spikes that we’re seeing now. And in the absence of federal leadership to coordinate the response, we’re seeing suffering that didn’t have to happen.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. El-Sayed, you’ve talked often that this is not just a question of the epidemic of COVID-19 itself, but that there is also an epidemic of insecurity in the country. Could you expand on that?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: That’s right. I spent 18 months touring my state. And I had thought that when I walked into my campaign, that the challenges that people faced in places like Detroit or Flint had to be different than the ones they face in places like Petoskey or Kalkaska. And then I toured the state. And as an epidemiologist, my job is to understand patterns in disease, how disease moves between people. And one of the most interesting but also inspiring things that I found was that people were talking about the same set of issues — why water is so expensive in a state that’s defined by its fresh water, while corporations like Nestlé can bottle unlimited amounts of water for $400 a year; why our education system is being corporatized and profiteered off of by people like Betsy DeVos; why it is that people still can’t get healthcare in the richest, most powerful country in the world.

And what I realized is that all of us are living in this system that has moved more of the means of wealth off to the very top, leaving all the rest of us, whether it’s because of healthcare or housing or an insecure gig job in a gig economy or the porous barrier between corporations and government — have left us fundamentally insecure, and that insecurity has consequences for all of us in some pretty profound ways. It’s what’s left us so vulnerable as a society to this. You know, when we talk in the United States, when we say we’re number one, usually we mean that to be a good thing, but it shouldn’t mean that we’re number one in the case burden of a global pandemic. And that’s what we’re seeing right now. And unfortunately, that was written for us well before this pandemic hit, because if it wasn’t this, it might have been a climate event. And we are, as a society, ill-prepared for these things, because our people are unfortunately living at the slippery edge of our economy and because we have torn our public service and our public infrastructure apart to sell it to the highest bidder.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — you mentioned President Trump, and we’ve been watching now, day after day, as the president has his daily press briefings in the evening, just before the 6:00 news is getting ready to start. And he brings a parade of corporate CEOs, one after another, calling them all by first names. I don’t know if that’s because he’s on a first name basis with all of them or he just can’t remember their last names. But he brings them up one after another, yet we’ve seen very few health professionals, the people — you’re a doctor yourself, a public health professional. None of the — except for the top people at NIH and at the Centers for Disease Control, we’re not seeing any of the doctors and nurses and people who are on the frontlines fighting this disease. I’m wondering what your reaction to that is.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah. We are suffering a public health emergency, not a private health emergency. But it’s rather clear that this is part and parcel of the kind of leadership that, unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have offered for a very long time, which is to say that the best way to respond to a public crisis is not to empower the government infrastructure that’s intended to solve it, like, say, the CDC or HHS or any of the infrastructure that’s focused on public health, but instead to bring in corporate CEOs as private solutions to the problem, almost to point at government and say, “Well, that’s why we failed, is because we failed to privatize and sell.”

Fact of the matter is, though, is that the reason we are suffering where we are — right? — is because we have gutted the public health infrastructure in this country. If you look at the state and local level, we’ve seen a 45% drop in public health funding over the past 15 years. The CDC has had its budget cut — its budgets proposed to be cut every year of the Trump presidency. In fact, they were proposing to cut the 2021 budget, which they’re negotiating right now in the middle of this pandemic. We need a public response. And what Donald Trump is saying is that he doesn’t believe in the government that he leads to solve it. And meanwhile, because of the failure of federal leadership across the country, you’ve got governors and mayors competing against each other for resources we should have had stockpiled. We should have been ready for this.

And one last point about this. When you look at a pandemic, it’s not like a hurricane. It’s not like when it forms, you can’t do anything about it, and you’ve just got to be ready. The thing about a pandemic is that it starts small. And it’s almost like a fire. If you put it out when it’s in your toaster, you won’t be fighting it when it’s in your house. And if you put it out when it’s in your house, you won’t be fighting it when it’s taken over the neighborhood. Unfortunately, right now it’s almost like we’ve taken the battery out of the fire alarms. We have told all the firehouses to go home. And then, when this thing is raging in our neighborhoods, we’re wondering why it’s happening, and everybody is left to themselves to try and put out their own fire. And that’s why we’ve seen such a massive failure in the response federally.

AMY GOODMAN: [inaudible] like a few weeks ago, and other newspapers, of course, as well, that running water will be temporarily restored to thousands of poor Detroit residents disconnected due to unpaid bills, disconnected to the water supply of Detroit amidst an outcry about the public health threat posed by the pandemic. At least 141,000 Detroit households were disconnected since 2014 as part of a widely condemned debt collection program, according to records obtained by The Bridge news magazine. Just last year, taps were turned off in more than 23,000 homes, three-fifths of which were still without water by mid-January. So, can you talk about the significance of saying they’re temporarily being rehooked up? Because you so well describe in your book the way this pandemic has exposed the fissures of inequality and health inequality in this country.

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah, when you look at communities that are suffering the most, they’re communities on which environmental injustice, structural racism, and their implications on poverty, have already softened the space for the incoming of this virus to devastate people. You know, you think about something like water. The fact that a mayor or a governor have to be thinking about turning water back on suggests that they’re already playing from the back foot, because water should already be on. It should never have been turned off. It’s one of the most frustrating things about the system of corporate capitalism in communities like Michigan, because what we do is we, in effect, ask poor people to pay exorbitant rates for basic things like water to pay off debts that governments well before them incurred.

You know, look at the situation in Detroit. The reason that people had their water shut off is because during the municipal bankruptcy in the city of Detroit, which, by the way, had a lot more to do with white flight and the resulting loss of a tax base — during that municipal bankruptcy, it was agreed upon that Detroit had to pay debts for their water authority, that, in effect, had actually purified water for the entire region. So they were literally — Detroiters were literally having to pay back the debt that the entire region incurred because Detroit was the single utility purifying water for everybody. And then they just raised rates. And when people couldn’t pay them, they just shut off people’s water. You think about the logic of this — right? — and the realization that water should just be a human right for people, it should just be there for people, and then you fast-forward, and you think about the incoming pandemic, and we’re telling people to wash their hands with warm, soapy water for 20 seconds. Well, if you don’t have water in your house, you can’t do that.

All of those — all of that is seeded by decisions that have been made, that have been patterned around race and patterned around wealth for a very long time. And that’s why I talk about this epidemic of insecurity as being what laid the groundwork for the incoming pandemic. And if it wasn’t a pandemic like this, it might have been a climate event. But we are not well situated to be able to handle these challenging circumstances that we’re going to see pitched at us. And it’s the reason why we have to build a robust federal government that can take these things on and prevent them when they’re small, and, more importantly, build the kind of social infrastructure for people, the kind of social safety net, that says that you’re not going to be evicted if something bad happens to you, that you’re not going to lose your water simply because you can’t pay exorbitant rates, that your kid is not going to have to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to go to college, that you can get healthcare if and when you’re sick.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. El-Sayed, I’d like to ask you about that last point, healthcare when you’re sick. We just played a headline earlier of Joe Biden talking about why Medicare for All would not have been a solution to the current problem. But the reality is that our healthcare system is this Byzantine world of for-profit hospitals, nonprofit hospitals, some community hospitals, some huge so-called nonprofit chains where the executives make multimillion-dollar salaries, and they’re all now competing for resources. If there was a single-payer system with some rationale or planning to a process of responding to an epidemic like this, would the situation have been easier to deal with?

DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Absolutely, there’s no doubt. And I just want to explain a couple reasons why. Number one, the idea that 10% of your population doesn’t have healthcare at all, or another 50% on top of that have a deductible that’s so high that they’ve learned to ignore symptoms like a fever and a dry cough — which, by the way, are the symptoms of COVID-19 — because they know that if they do go and seek medical care for those symptoms, that they’ll be hit with a bill on the back end, that’s a really dangerous state of affairs when you’ve got an incoming global pandemic.

But even beyond that, I just want you to think about the structure of our health system. Hospitals make money in this system on elective surgeries. That’s how they get reimbursed from insurance companies. But if you’ve got a global endemic that’s about to hit your hospital, what’s the first thing you cancel? Elective surgeries. And so, now you’ve got hospitals that not only are trying to staff up and be ready for one of the most serious public health crises of our time, but they’re also battling bankruptcy on the back end because they’ve lost their main source of pay. All of that is because the system is run for profit.

Here’s the other part. We keep hearing about doctors going without PPE, personal protective equipment. And part of the reason why is because they’ve talked to business consultants who told them that the best way to supply your hospital is what we call “just-in-time” supplying, meaning you don’t want to have a bunch of stuff laying around, because you don’t know when you’re going to use it. That’s all overhead you can strip away. But here’s the problem. Well, when you’re hit with a pandemic, just in time doesn’t work, because all of a sudden everybody is trying to get the resources that they need. Just in time is a classic page out of a business consulting manual. When you run hospitals like a business, you forget the fact that they’re actually supposed to be there to save lives.

And the third point is this. There is no incentive for prevention in our system. Why? Because our system makes money on people getting sick, right? You can’t actually bill something if somebody does not get sick, so that you can bill them for the care. And so, if you look at just the way the system is set up, there’s very little incentive to talk about prevention. And that’s why we keep seeing budgets get cut for institutions like the CDC or local health departments or state health departments, because it just doesn’t fit within the incentive structure of our health system. Imagine we had a system that actually rewarded keeping people healthy rather than taking care of them after they get sick. That’s what Medicare for All would have done.

And one last point. We keep hearing this comparison between us and Italy. And like, since when did we start comparing ourselves with Italy? When was that the comparison? The fact of the matter is, Italy is a far smaller country. And even then, even then, we just surpassed them in terms of the number of COVID cases, and it’s looking like, over the long term, our cases are going to skyrocket well beyond what Italy experienced. We have a responsibility to learn from this moment and realize that we’ve got to guarantee everybody in this country healthcare. And if we don’t, we will continue to be vulnerable to these kinds of massive public health crises.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We hope to talk with you at a future point more about your book and your work as an epidemiologist, a physician, former director of the Detroit Health Department. His new book is out today, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.

When we come back, an exclusivDr. Abdul El-Sayed: Communities Enduring Racism & Poverty Will Suffer Most Due to COVID-19

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TOPICS

Coronavirus

Racism

Michigan

Environment

Water

Healthcare

GUESTS

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed

a physician and epidemiologist. He is the former director of the Detroit Health Department. He is the author of the new book Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, and his recent piece for The Guardian is headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”

LINKS

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Twitter

"Healing Politics: A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic"

"Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity"

As the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States tops 3,100, states are demanding ventilators and medical supplies. Michigan is a growing hot spot and struggling to prepare for a surge in cases, but President Trump has repeatedly attacked Michigan’s governor, calling her “that woman.” We speak with the former director of the Detroit Health Department, Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a physician and epidemiologist, and his new book is just out today, “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.” His recent piece for The Guardian is headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”




Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting from the epicenter of the pandemic in New York; co-hosting, Juan González, broadcasting from his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to stop community spread.




Monday marked the deadliest day of the pandemic in the United States with more than 500 deaths reported. The total death toll in the United States has now passed 3,100 — a number that’s tripled since just Thursday. Medical workers are bracing for that number to soar in the coming weeks. In New York state, the current epicenter of the pandemic, the peak of the crisis is expected to come around April 10th, when one study estimates 827 people will die of the virus in a single day. More than 1,200 people here in New York have already died.




In Michigan, a growing hot spot for the virus, the death toll is expected to peak a day after New York, with 164 deaths on April 11. Nearly 200 people have died already in Michigan as the city of Detroit prepares for a swell of cases. Michigan state Representative Isaac Robinson died of the virus in a Detroit medical center Sunday. He was only 44 years old. Detroit’s police commissioner has tested positive for the virus, and 500 officers are in quarantine. Detroit’s hospital system is already overwhelmed. The city has high rates of asthma and chronic illness. Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is calling on the federal government to offer more medical supplies and who is expected to shutter the state’s schools for the remainder of the school year by the end of this week. They’re already closed, but to announce they would be closed for good for this semester.




Well, for more, we are joined by the former director of the Detroit Health Department, recent candidate for governor of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a physician, an epidemiologist. He’s the author of Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, the book just out today, his recent piece in The Guardian headlined “Coronavirus is exploiting an underlying condition: our epidemic of insecurity.”




And thanks so much for joining us, Doctor, from your home, again, to protect your family, yourself and community spread. How critical this is. Can you talk, overall — I mean, every time I see President Trump talking about “that woman,” meaning the governor of Michigan, saying he told Vice President Pence not to call her, because he doesn’t like her, also talked about the governor of Washington state, as well, talking about him as a “terrible person,” and yet your governor continues to say things like — they had just gotten a federal shipment, and she said, “This shipment is not enough for one shift at one hospital in my state.” Talk about the state of Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.




DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Well, let me tell you, first of all, thank you for having me today. What we’re seeing here is just an utter lapse in federal leadership. It’s clear that the individual in the White House sees himself more as the head of a political party whose job it is to divide the country between himself and leaders in other states, while you’ve got governors in places like Michigan or Washington or New York who realize the depth of their responsibility right now. Michigan is a state with 10 million people. It’s one of the most diverse states in the country. But also we’ve had this very devastating history of what has been a level of leadership that has taken from communities like Detroit to pass tax cuts for major corporations across the state.




And when you think about the movement of a pathogen like coronavirus, it’s easy to just focus on the pathogen. But epidemiologists think not just about the pathogen, but also about the host and about the environment. And what we’ve seen is an interplay between the host and the environment that’s left people in communities like Detroit fundamentally vulnerable to this disease. And that’s why we’re seeing the spikes that we’re seeing now. And in the absence of federal leadership to coordinate the response, we’re seeing suffering that didn’t have to happen.




JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. El-Sayed, you’ve talked often that this is not just a question of the epidemic of COVID-19 itself, but that there is also an epidemic of insecurity in the country. Could you expand on that?




DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: That’s right. I spent 18 months touring my state. And I had thought that when I walked into my campaign, that the challenges that people faced in places like Detroit or Flint had to be different than the ones they face in places like Petoskey or Kalkaska. And then I toured the state. And as an epidemiologist, my job is to understand patterns in disease, how disease moves between people. And one of the most interesting but also inspiring things that I found was that people were talking about the same set of issues — why water is so expensive in a state that’s defined by its fresh water, while corporations like Nestlé can bottle unlimited amounts of water for $400 a year; why our education system is being corporatized and profiteered off of by people like Betsy DeVos; why it is that people still can’t get healthcare in the richest, most powerful country in the world.




And what I realized is that all of us are living in this system that has moved more of the means of wealth off to the very top, leaving all the rest of us, whether it’s because of healthcare or housing or an insecure gig job in a gig economy or the porous barrier between corporations and government — have left us fundamentally insecure, and that insecurity has consequences for all of us in some pretty profound ways. It’s what’s left us so vulnerable as a society to this. You know, when we talk in the United States, when we say we’re number one, usually we mean that to be a good thing, but it shouldn’t mean that we’re number one in the case burden of a global pandemic. And that’s what we’re seeing right now. And unfortunately, that was written for us well before this pandemic hit, because if it wasn’t this, it might have been a climate event. And we are, as a society, ill-prepared for these things, because our people are unfortunately living at the slippery edge of our economy and because we have torn our public service and our public infrastructure apart to sell it to the highest bidder.




JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — you mentioned President Trump, and we’ve been watching now, day after day, as the president has his daily press briefings in the evening, just before the 6:00 news is getting ready to start. And he brings a parade of corporate CEOs, one after another, calling them all by first names. I don’t know if that’s because he’s on a first name basis with all of them or he just can’t remember their last names. But he brings them up one after another, yet we’ve seen very few health professionals, the people — you’re a doctor yourself, a public health professional. None of the — except for the top people at NIH and at the Centers for Disease Control, we’re not seeing any of the doctors and nurses and people who are on the frontlines fighting this disease. I’m wondering what your reaction to that is.




DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah. We are suffering a public health emergency, not a private health emergency. But it’s rather clear that this is part and parcel of the kind of leadership that, unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have offered for a very long time, which is to say that the best way to respond to a public crisis is not to empower the government infrastructure that’s intended to solve it, like, say, the CDC or HHS or any of the infrastructure that’s focused on public health, but instead to bring in corporate CEOs as private solutions to the problem, almost to point at government and say, “Well, that’s why we failed, is because we failed to privatize and sell.”




Fact of the matter is, though, is that the reason we are suffering where we are — right? — is because we have gutted the public health infrastructure in this country. If you look at the state and local level, we’ve seen a 45% drop in public health funding over the past 15 years. The CDC has had its budget cut — its budgets proposed to be cut every year of the Trump presidency. In fact, they were proposing to cut the 2021 budget, which they’re negotiating right now in the middle of this pandemic. We need a public response. And what Donald Trump is saying is that he doesn’t believe in the government that he leads to solve it. And meanwhile, because of the failure of federal leadership across the country, you’ve got governors and mayors competing against each other for resources we should have had stockpiled. We should have been ready for this.




And one last point about this. When you look at a pandemic, it’s not like a hurricane. It’s not like when it forms, you can’t do anything about it, and you’ve just got to be ready. The thing about a pandemic is that it starts small. And it’s almost like a fire. If you put it out when it’s in your toaster, you won’t be fighting it when it’s in your house. And if you put it out when it’s in your house, you won’t be fighting it when it’s taken over the neighborhood. Unfortunately, right now it’s almost like we’ve taken the battery out of the fire alarms. We have told all the firehouses to go home. And then, when this thing is raging in our neighborhoods, we’re wondering why it’s happening, and everybody is left to themselves to try and put out their own fire. And that’s why we’ve seen such a massive failure in the response federally.




AMY GOODMAN: [inaudible] like a few weeks ago, and other newspapers, of course, as well, that running water will be temporarily restored to thousands of poor Detroit residents disconnected due to unpaid bills, disconnected to the water supply of Detroit amidst an outcry about the public health threat posed by the pandemic. At least 141,000 Detroit households were disconnected since 2014 as part of a widely condemned debt collection program, according to records obtained by The Bridge news magazine. Just last year, taps were turned off in more than 23,000 homes, three-fifths of which were still without water by mid-January. So, can you talk about the significance of saying they’re temporarily being rehooked up? Because you so well describe in your book the way this pandemic has exposed the fissures of inequality and health inequality in this country.




DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Yeah, when you look at communities that are suffering the most, they’re communities on which environmental injustice, structural racism, and their implications on poverty, have already softened the space for the incoming of this virus to devastate people. You know, you think about something like water. The fact that a mayor or a governor have to be thinking about turning water back on suggests that they’re already playing from the back foot, because water should already be on. It should never have been turned off. It’s one of the most frustrating things about the system of corporate capitalism in communities like Michigan, because what we do is we, in effect, ask poor people to pay exorbitant rates for basic things like water to pay off debts that governments well before them incurred.




You know, look at the situation in Detroit. The reason that people had their water shut off is because during the municipal bankruptcy in the city of Detroit, which, by the way, had a lot more to do with white flight and the resulting loss of a tax base — during that municipal bankruptcy, it was agreed upon that Detroit had to pay debts for their water authority, that, in effect, had actually purified water for the entire region. So they were literally — Detroiters were literally having to pay back the debt that the entire region incurred because Detroit was the single utility purifying water for everybody. And then they just raised rates. And when people couldn’t pay them, they just shut off people’s water. You think about the logic of this — right? — and the realization that water should just be a human right for people, it should just be there for people, and then you fast-forward, and you think about the incoming pandemic, and we’re telling people to wash their hands with warm, soapy water for 20 seconds. Well, if you don’t have water in your house, you can’t do that.




All of those — all of that is seeded by decisions that have been made, that have been patterned around race and patterned around wealth for a very long time. And that’s why I talk about this epidemic of insecurity as being what laid the groundwork for the incoming pandemic. And if it wasn’t a pandemic like this, it might have been a climate event. But we are not well situated to be able to handle these challenging circumstances that we’re going to see pitched at us. And it’s the reason why we have to build a robust federal government that can take these things on and prevent them when they’re small, and, more importantly, build the kind of social infrastructure for people, the kind of social safety net, that says that you’re not going to be evicted if something bad happens to you, that you’re not going to lose your water simply because you can’t pay exorbitant rates, that your kid is not going to have to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to go to college, that you can get healthcare if and when you’re sick.




JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. El-Sayed, I’d like to ask you about that last point, healthcare when you’re sick. We just played a headline earlier of Joe Biden talking about why Medicare for All would not have been a solution to the current problem. But the reality is that our healthcare system is this Byzantine world of for-profit hospitals, nonprofit hospitals, some community hospitals, some huge so-called nonprofit chains where the executives make multimillion-dollar salaries, and they’re all now competing for resources. If there was a single-payer system with some rationale or planning to a process of responding to an epidemic like this, would the situation have been easier to deal with?




DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED: Absolutely, there’s no doubt. And I just want to explain a couple reasons why. Number one, the idea that 10% of your population doesn’t have healthcare at all, or another 50% on top of that have a deductible that’s so high that they’ve learned to ignore symptoms like a fever and a dry cough — which, by the way, are the symptoms of COVID-19 — because they know that if they do go and seek medical care for those symptoms, that they’ll be hit with a bill on the back end, that’s a really dangerous state of affairs when you’ve got an incoming global pandemic.




But even beyond that, I just want you to think about the structure of our health system. Hospitals make money in this system on elective surgeries. That’s how they get reimbursed from insurance companies. But if you’ve got a global endemic that’s about to hit your hospital, what’s the first thing you cancel? Elective surgeries. And so, now you’ve got hospitals that not only are trying to staff up and be ready for one of the most serious public health crises of our time, but they’re also battling bankruptcy on the back end because they’ve lost their main source of pay. All of that is because the system is run for profit.




Here’s the other part. We keep hearing about doctors going without PPE, personal protective equipment. And part of the reason why is because they’ve talked to business consultants who told them that the best way to supply your hospital is what we call “just-in-time” supplying, meaning you don’t want to have a bunch of stuff laying around, because you don’t know when you’re going to use it. That’s all overhead you can strip away. But here’s the problem. Well, when you’re hit with a pandemic, just in time doesn’t work, because all of a sudden everybody is trying to get the resources that they need. Just in time is a classic page out of a business consulting manual. When you run hospitals like a business, you forget the fact that they’re actually supposed to be there to save lives.




And the third point is this. There is no incentive for prevention in our system. Why? Because our system makes money on people getting sick, right? You can’t actually bill something if somebody does not get sick, so that you can bill them for the care. And so, if you look at just the way the system is set up, there’s very little incentive to talk about prevention. And that’s why we keep seeing budgets get cut for institutions like the CDC or local health departments or state health departments, because it just doesn’t fit within the incentive structure of our health system. Imagine we had a system that actually rewarded keeping people healthy rather than taking care of them after they get sick. That’s what Medicare for All would have done.




And one last point. We keep hearing this comparison between us and Italy. And like, since when did we start comparing ourselves with Italy? When was that the comparison? The fact of the matter is, Italy is a far smaller country. And even then, even then, we just surpassed them in terms of the number of COVID cases, and it’s looking like, over the long term, our cases are going to skyrocket well beyond what Italy experienced. We have a responsibility to learn from this moment and realize that we’ve got to guarantee everybody in this country healthcare. And if we don’t, we will continue to be vulnerable to these kinds of massive public health crises.




AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We hope to talk with you at a future point more about your book and your work as an epidemiologist, a physician, former director of the Detroit Health Department. His new book is out today, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.




When we come back, an exclusive Democracy Now! TV/radio broadcast. We speak with Tara Reade about her allegations against Joe Biden. She says he sexually assaulted her in 1993 when he was a senator and she was his staff assistant. Stay with us.




The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

e Democracy Now! TV/radio broadcast. We speak with Tara Reade about her allegations against Joe Biden. She says he sexually assaulted her in 1993 when he was a senator and she was his staff assistant. Stay with us.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Facing Mass Layoffs, Restaurant Workers Living “Tip to Mouth” Demand Living Wage & Paid Sick Leave

This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.DONATE

TOPICS
Labor
Coronavirus
U.S. Economy

GUESTS
Saru Jayaraman
co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, president of One Fair Wage and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Damani Varnado
New York City restaurant worker who was laid off due to COVID-19.

LINKS
Saru Jayaraman on Twitter
One Fair Wage Emergency Coronavirus Tipped and Service Worker Support Fund


Mass shutdowns and layoffs due to the spread of COVID-19 are affecting millions of restaurant workers across the U.S., with bars and restaurants closing for the foreseeable future. Servers, bartenders, kitchen staff and more have been left in the lurch, many without paid sick leave, paid time off or benefits. One study estimated 4 million restaurant workers in the U.S. are at risk of losing their jobs in a matter of weeks. For more on the impacts on service workers, we speak with Saru Jayaraman, the co-founder of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of One Fair Wage, which has launched an emergency fund to support workers during this time. We also speak with Damani Varnado, a restaurant worker who has worked in catering, fine dining and cocktailing for the past 20 years in New York City. He was working at the restaurant Tiny’s & The Bar Upstairs when the whole staff was let go during the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak is a “devastating” blow to an industry that had “severe structural inequality problems that existed long before this crisis,” Saru Jayaraman says.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to look at how the mass shutdowns and layoffs due to the spread of COVID-19 are affecting millions of restaurant workers across the United States. With cities across the U.S. going dark, bars and restaurants closed for the foreseeable future, servers, bartenders, kitchen staff and more have been left in the lurch, many without paid sick leave, paid time off or benefits. One study estimates 4 million restaurant workers in the U.S. are at risk of losing their jobs in a matter of weeks. Many were already living paycheck to paycheck. This is India John, a server at The Chocolate Bar in Cleveland, Ohio, which has closed due to the coronavirus.


INDIA JOHN: I’m kind of upset about the closing, because of rent and financials, and I know that we all have families to take care of and things like that. I do want us to all be safe and healthy, but I’m really concerned about how I’m going to pay my bills.

AMY GOODMAN: Nearly one in five households have already experienced a layoff or work reduction due to the pandemic, according to a new PBS/NPR/Marist poll. As many hope for desperately needed federal assistance, the Senate is set to take up a significantly weakened emergency coronavirus bill the House passed Monday night. The bill had already exempted employers with more than 500 workers, such as megacorporations like McDonald’s and Amazon, only protecting 20% of workers in the private sector. Now it’s expected to leave out even more workers, including millions who work for small businesses. The Reverend Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign tweeted, “Congress must go back & pass another bill that covers all workers. They cannot leave out millions by exempting some low-wage workers from paid sick leave. These workers will not be exempted from the disease.”

This comes as the Trump administration said Tuesday it will support a plan to inject more than a trillion dollars into the U.S. economy to fight the unprecedented drop in economic activity. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the stimulus package would rapidly deliver a $1,000 check to most American adults, with more direct payments likely to come in the months ahead.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. From California, by Democracy Now! video stream in Berkeley, Saru Jayaraman is with us, the co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. We are also joined in New York by a laid-off worker, by Damani Varnado, restaurant worker in catering, fine dining, cocktailing for the past 20 years. He was working at Tiny’s & The Bar Upstairs when the whole staff was let go during the coronavirus epidemic.

Saru, let’s start with you. Give us the scope of the problem and what’s happening now. I mean, we’re talking to you in Berkeley. San Francisco, 7 million people are just sheltering in site right now.

SARU JAYARAMAN: Yeah, and I think that we are at just the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re going to see this happen nationwide. You mentioned that as many as 4 or 5 million workers are at risk of being laid off in the restaurant industry. I think it’s much higher than that. The restaurant industry is nearing 14 million workers nationally. And I think that you’re going to see a very large percentage of those workers at risk of being laid off as more of the country follows the Bay Area with shelter in place.

And that is devastating, because this industry had severe structural inequality problems that existed long before this crisis. In particular, this industry, unlike almost every other industry, was allowed to pay a subminimum wage to its tipped workers, forcing them to live off of tips. That’s an actual literal legacy of slavery and a source of terrible sexual harassment for a mostly female workforce of servers and bartenders and bussers. Now, think about that workforce when it’s laid off. First of all, there have been very little tips in the last few weeks leading up to shutdowns. And so, already people were struggling. With layoff, people have been living, I call it literally, tip to mouth. They got tips on Friday. They were laid off over the weekend. They can’t feed their kids on Monday.

We started a relief fund for these workers Monday morning at 9:30. We’ve had almost 15,000 workers apply for relief in just over a 24-hour period. And that’s because most of these workers aren’t going to qualify for any kind of unemployment benefits or paid sick leave, as you mentioned. Paid sick leave wouldn’t last long enough anyway. But even if they do qualify, even if they are eligible [inaudible] the subminimum wage and a very poor or rough calculation of tips. I mean, unemployment insurance is already a percentage of your income. For subminimum-wage restaurant workers, you’re talking about a percentage of a percentage of your income. There was a problem that existed before this crisis, that is now exemplifying why we needed $15, one fair wage, much more sustainable industry, long before the crisis hit.

AMY GOODMAN: So what exactly are you pushing for, Saru Jayaraman?

SARU JAYARAMAN: We’re pushing for multiple things in this moment and long term. Right now we are pushing for that unemployment benefits actually measure — provide some buffer, particularly for tipped workers, that they overcompensate for the fact that really the government has no clear idea of how much these workers actually earned in tips. So we want to see a better calculation of unemployment benefits, number one. Absolutely, paid sick leave, covering all industries, all workers, and better paid family leave, as well.

In terms of relief for businesses, we would like to see targeted relief along the lines of what Senator Warren called for, basically, targeted relief for businesses that are willing to move to a sustainable model post-crisis. Let’s encourage businesses post-crisis — let’s support businesses to stay with us through the crisis and to move to a better model post-crisis, so that we are not in the same boat afterward. So that would look like tax and rent abatements for small businesses that are willing to commit to going to $15 and one fair wage after the crisis. We don’t want to see this industry stuck through the crisis, only at the end of it with large chains surviving, because they’re the ones that are able to weather the crisis. We don’t want to see small businesses go out of business as a result of the crisis. But we do want to see businesses encouraged through this crisis, supported through this crisis, that are willing to make a commitment to change, because, clearly, the crisis is highlighting why we needed that change in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to turn to a comment of Robert Reich, who said — earlier this week, he tweeted, “McDonald’s Burger King Pizza Hut Duncan Donuts Wendy’s Taco Bell Subway None give their workers paid sick leave. They should be required to post this sign on their doors: 'Because we don't give our workers paid sick leave, they may be sick when they serve you.’” That was Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. Saru, you retweeted his message. Talk about this. For people to understand, as the White House talks out bailing out the economy, who is being bailed out, and who isn’t? And are there strings being put on these bailouts to ensure that their workers are protected? When they say they’re bailing out the airline industry to the tune of $50 billion, are the airline flight attendants, are the workers on the planes, etc., are they being protected? But you stick with what you know, the restaurant workers and these large corporations.

SARU JAYARAMAN: No, absolutely. That’s exactly my point. There is talk of very large bailout and, in some cases, funding already going to very large restaurant corporations, that — many of whom have been taken over by hedge funds, so this is Wall Street controlling very large restaurant corporations. They are seeing potential large subsidies, tax subsidies, incentives. There is talk also of support even for smaller businesses, but we haven’t seen it yet. Meanwhile, these same large businesses are not being forced to provide their workers with paid leave, and not being called on, when receiving these bailouts, to move to higher wages, that we know would have staved off the kind of dire situation we’re seeing right now among millions of workers, had they been forced to pay livable wages and provide paid sick leave prior.

And so, what we need is not mass bailouts of an industry with absolutely no strings attached or requirements for workers. What we need is relief for an industry that encourages — or requires, actually — moving to livable wages, moving to what we call one fair wage, a full minimum wage with tips on top, as we have here in California, and paid sick leave, and paid sick leave because 90% of workers across the country don’t have the ability to take a day off when they are sick. Two-thirds reported that they worked when sick before coronavirus. You know, yes, a lot of workers are going to be laid off, and so paid leave is not going to be as relevant for them, but think about all the delivery workers that are continuing to work. Do we want them to work when they are sick? No. We need to see paid leave apply to everybody. We need companies to be forced to pay livable wages, if they’re going to get any kind of relief from the government.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Damani Varnado into this conversation, longtime New York City restaurant worker. He right now is in another studio in New York City, so we can maintain our social distance and keep our workplaces safe. But it’s good to have you with us, Damani.

DAMANI VARNADO: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened to you? We only have a few minutes. You were just laid off from a place in Tribeca?

DAMANI VARNADO: Yeah, I can tell you the short about it is. We were down in Tribeca. Tribeca is a pool of money. There’s a lot of influence down there from Wall Street to families to smaller businesses to basically tourists coming in. I’d say that the pandemic started about a month ago, and we noticed when Europe was starting to close restaurants and businesses, and people were getting scared. That’s when we started noticing a reduction in the customers that were coming in. We started to slowly reduce shifts right then and there. And then, I’d say, within about 72 hours, we not only lost our shifts but were told that we were going to be closing the business.

The business was nice enough to send us an email to say that they’re definitely going to be rehiring us when this is over, but that is an indefinite amount of time that no one can quite speak to. So, we’ve been devastated. And I say “devastated” not just for front of the house. Back of the house, immigrants that were working without any kind of legal status, they have no rights to unemployment benefits, which were already skewed off by, as Saru said, a percentage of what we would have actually been making as what will be adjusted for unemployment benefits, that many of us that were working part-time may not even be eligible for. So, I think the crisis —

AMY GOODMAN: Do you get unemployment benefits, Damani?

DAMANI VARNADO: I have applied for them, but I have not — a decision hasn’t been made right now, because the system continues to crash, because everyone in New York City is unemployed right now, not just — you know, the crisis has made everyone stop working, so…

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what you’re most worried about right now, with what people will turn to if they can’t get financial support?

DAMANI VARNADO: I think that people are going to turn to resourcing food banks, human resources, social services. But I feel like when that is full, I think that people are going to start needing to move in together to reduce their living costs. I think that people are going to think more about shared kitchens for feeding their families. I think that restaurants right now should be thinking about, the food that is in their refrigerators right now should be donated to all food pantries, because there’s no one in the restaurants eating them, and there’s not enough takeout orders that are going to work right now to get —

AMY GOODMAN: And if people get really desperate?

DAMANI VARNADO: I think if people really get desperate, I think it’s going to be very similar to the Depression. People are going to be out in the streets in lines waiting for soup and bread, because there’s no money to go around the city.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Saru Jayaraman, what kind of organizing are you doing? I mean, we’re talking about people — I mean, you shelter in place, the whole San Francisco area, 7 million people. It looks like it’s coming to New York, as well. How do you organize in a crisis like this?

SARU JAYARAMAN: Well, as I mentioned, we launched this One Fair Wage emergency fund Monday morning. We’ve been raising money and doling out cash assistance to workers. But for every single worker that signs up, we’re doing a one-on-one, a one-hour conversation, talking to them about their needs, their situation, why are we in this to begin with, and why we need to vote. We’re signing people up to vote, as we talk to them and to screen them to send out the checks. So, it is a very strange and crazy and dystopian moment. The stories that are coming in of these 15,000 workers that have already applied are heartbreaking. You know, “I lost my job on Friday. I cannot feed my three children. I have children with developmental disabilities. I have children with illness. I don’t know how I’m going to feed them or take care of them. I really don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent to keep a roof over my head.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Saru. I want to thank you so much for being with us. And be safe. Saru Jayaraman, with the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, One Fair Wage. Also joining us from New York, Damani Varnado, longtime New York restaurant worker who was just laid off.

That does it for our show. A huge thanks to our staff. Thank you so much to Julie Crosby, Miriam Barnard, Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Nermeen Shaikh, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Denis Moynihan, Libby Rainey, Sam Alcoff, John Hamilton. I’m Amy Goodman.

“Profit Over People”: UPS Workers Say Company Not Prioritizing Safety as Workers Test Positive

APRIL 01, 2020

This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.DONATE

TOPICS
Coronavirus
Labor

GUESTS
Richard Hooker
secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia Teamsters Local 623. He’s the first African American to ever lead the 101-year-old union, after being elected secretary-treasurer in November. Richard Hooker has worked at UPS for 20 years.
David Levin
lead organizer with Teamsters for Democratic Union and the coordinator of the UPS Teamsters United campaign.

LINKS
Richard Hooker on Twitter
Teamsters for a Democratic Union
UPS Teamsters United

The White House is now estimating 100,000 to a quarter of a million people could die from the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those most concerned about exposure to the highly infectious virus are workers on the frontlines of grocery stores and delivery services. On Monday, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island walked off the job, and the company fired one of them in response. At least three employees at a large UPS facility near Boston have tested positive, and two dozen more have been quarantined. Details about the infections were shared by the workers’ union because they said the company refused to provide the critical information to its employees. We speak with Richard Hooker, secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia Teamsters Local 623, and David Levin, lead organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the coordinator of the UPS Teamsters United campaign.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: The White House is now estimating that between 100,000 and a quarter of a million people could die from the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those most concerned about exposure to the highly infectious virus are workers on the frontlines of, well, grocery stores and delivery services. This is in addition to all the attention to the doctors and nurses and the staffs of hospitals across the country.

On Monday, workers who fulfill orders for Instacart staged a protest to demand better working protections and hazard pay. Also Monday, Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island walked off the job. Amazon fired one of them in response, and we’ll get his response later in the broadcast. Amazon says they fired him because he wasn’t doing social distancing. He tells a different story. On Tuesday, Whole Foods workers organized a national sick-out protest demanding double normal wages for workers as hazard pay for working on the frontlines during a pandemic. This comes as three workers at a large UPS facility near Boston have tested positive and two dozen more have been quarantined.

For more, we’re joined from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Richard Hooker, secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia Teamsters Local 623, the first African American to ever lead the 101-year-old union, after being elected secretary-treasurer in November. Richard Hooker has worked at UPS for 20 years.

We welcome you, Richard, to Democracy Now! Can you describe what was happening where you worked? What kind of access do you have to protective gear, to washing your hands? Describe the scenario.

RICHARD HOOKER: Well, in the beginning of it all, there was no access to being clean, no soap in the bathrooms. Some bathrooms had no running water, no hot water.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you work?

RICHARD HOOKER: At the airport facility in Philadelphia.

AMY GOODMAN: Keep going in describing what was happening there.

RICHARD HOOKER: So, what was happening was, like I said, the bathrooms were not clean, no running water, dirt everywhere. The facilities were a mess, trash everywhere, dirt everywhere. We took pictures. We sent them to the company, let them know, “Hey, this is the issues that we’re having here, and we need some help.” And all the response that we would get was that the government deemed UPS essential, and we were to keep working. So we kept going.

We filed grievances. Under our contract, you know, sanitation and safety are big issues. So we filed grievances against the company with that. Still no response, no communication. We sent letters to our governor here in Pennsylvania to get some help. Since we’re deemed essential, we need to make sure that our people are protected during this pandemic. That wasn’t happening. So that’s why we sent letters to the governor. Still no response from the company — same old, same old, business as usual.

And so, we did a interview on a national news network. It got a little traction. But still the company refused to communicate what they were doing. And the members were very, very upset, anxious, concerned, because if we are so essential, then we need to make sure that our people are protected and not feel like we’re disposable.

So, we did another national news broadcast, and we laid it all out on the line. We told them, hey, this is what was going on — the bathrooms, pictures, video of the water not even being able to be turned on, trash everywhere, the facilities not being clean. We kept doing that. We talked about it on live TV everywhere. Then, all of a sudden, now the company wanted to sit down and talk and come up with some ideas and plans.

So, this past Monday, we had a sit-down meeting with the president of our district, Mrs. Kim, and she gave us her commitment and the company’s commitment that they would communicate with us everything they were doing. Cleaning the bathrooms will be a priority, making sure there was going to be social distancing, making sure the water was running, making sure there was multiple cleaning crews coming in to clean the facilities constantly.

Unfortunately, even though there’s been some progress, it’s not enough. There’s still no social distancing, some of our members still not getting the supplies that they need. The communication has gotten better, so I will be relaying some more information to the powers that be to keep this thing going. But again, there’s still a big disconnect between what they’re saying and then what’s really going on in the operation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Richard —

RICHARD HOOKER: And our members are at risk. We just —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Richard Hooker, I wanted to ask you —

RICHARD HOOKER: Yes, go ahead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Given the fact that so many millions of Americans are being forced to stay home, I would assume that there has been a huge increase in the work that UPS and other delivery companies have. Did you notice any change from the time that most Americans were told to stay in place and stay at home in how the company dealt with the workers before and after the pandemic exploded?

RICHARD HOOKER: There has been an increase in the residential deliveries, not so much in the business, because a lot of businesses, as you guys know, are closed. But when people are sitting at home, they do a lot more ordering. So the residential part has really skyrocketed.

Now, there hasn’t been a big difference on what the company has done before this pandemic or during it. It’s still business as usual. It’s not a lot of “Let’s try to get our members the supplies they need.” There’s not been a really — there’s not been a concern on their part. Even though I know they come out and they say it and they try to downplay what’s really going on, from our standpoint, it hasn’t been enough. And to our members, it’s definitely not enough, because, like you guys mentioned, there has been three confirmed cases up in Boston, but we have two confirmed cases here in Philadelphia, one in the Oregon Avenue building and one in the PHL building. And again, we had to fight to get that information. Before, they weren’t telling us anything. And so, we had to keep fighting and fighting and fighting, and pushing and pushing and pushing, just to get the information so we can let our members know what’s going on.

So, it’s still been that same — they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing, it seems, and it always has been profit over people. Profit over people. But us, as a union, we’re not profit-based. We’re membership-based. We care about our members. And that’s what this is all about, protecting our members. So, if they’re not protected —

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Hooker, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to continue this discussion on the other side of the break, as well, with David Levin. Richard Hooker is secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia Teamsters Local 623, has worked at UPS for 20 years. When we come back, David Levin, lead organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union and coordinator of the UPS Teamsters United campaign. Stay with us. And stay safe, Richard.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Alone Together” by jazz trumpeter and composer Wallace Roney, who died March 31st of COVID-19. He was 59 years old.

This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman in New York. Juan González is in New Jersey. And as we’ve reported, at least three workers at the large UPS facility near Boston have tested positive, two dozen more have been quarantined. Details about the infections were shared by the workers’ union. Teamsters Local 25 union President Sean O’Brien said in a statement UPS was, quote, “refusing to provide critical information to its workers regarding positive and presumptive positive COVID-19 cases in the facility.”

For more, we continue to look at organizing efforts by workers on the frontlines. We’re joined from his home in Philadelphia by David Levin, lead organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, coordinator of the UPS Teamsters United campaign.

David, we just have a few minutes, and we’d like you to link what’s going on with UPS and the union negotiations with United Postal Service — rather, with UPS — with what’s going on at Amazon and Instacart, the people who are protesting outside, demanding that they have to have a safe workplace, too.

DAVID LEVIN: Well, thanks for having me, so much. You know, Amazon workers are raising the exact same worker — the same issues that Richard was just talking about and that UPS workers across the country are raising: a lack of personal protective equipment, unsanitary conditions, not being informed when a co-worker tests positive, the workplace not being sanitized properly after someone tests positive. These are all CDC and OSHA guidelines. They’re not being followed, and we need to hold these corporations accountable.

You know, UPS and Amazon are competitors, but UPS workers and Amazon workers are not. We share the same concerns. We have the same corporations that we have to hold accountable. So one of the things that we did as Teamsters for a Democratic Union and our UPS Teamsters United campaign, last night we launched a national petition specifically reaching out to UPS Teamsters around the country to call for the reinstatement of Chris Smalls, who I guess you have coming up on the show later, who was fired for organizing a protest around these issues at Amazon. We’re all in this together. We’re demanding for these health and safety issues to be addressed both at UPS and at Amazon and for all workers.

AMY GOODMAN: David, very quickly, what do say — I mean, what do you say to — Amazon wrote to us last night and said he wasn’t fired for organizing, but for not maintaining social distance and not going home and quarantining since he was near someone who tested positive.

DAVID LEVIN: Yeah, well, the next time that a corporation admits that someone was fired for organizing will be the next time that Democracy Now! gets a million-dollar donation from Amazon. It’s not going to happen. Everyone knows what happened.

The difference in the situation is that if you’re a union worker, you have more protections to be organizing and taking action. A lot of Teamsters are doing that. When their unions are — when their local union isn’t helping, Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UPSTeamstersUnited.org, we’re here — people can reach out — to be a resource. And we need to be — this is a time when union workers, Teamsters and Amazon workers need to be making connections, because over the long haul, not just in this crisis, we need to be working together to hold these corporations accountable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Levin, I wanted to ask you this, about over the long haul, because, really, this pandemic is really creating a major shift in the way that goods are distributed in our society, as increasingly people are being forced to go online, and therefore to have packages delivered by companies like UPS and Amazon and others. I’m wondering: Do you sense that the labor movement is prepared — organized labor is prepared for what is essentially a radical shift? For instance, Macy’s just announced they’re laying off or furloughing 100,000 workers, that the brick-and-mortar stores are really at an enormous disadvantage right now. And these delivery companies now are going to have a much greater share of the market in America. I’m wondering how you feel, if the labor movement is prepared for this shift in distribution of goods in the society.

DAVID LEVIN: Well, one thing I want to say about UPS, this is company that makes $6 billion a year. They can track a package at any moment, anywhere around the globe. They track their workers’ movements everywhere they are at all times. And they can’t seem to track down, or won’t track down, personal protective equipment, masks, gloves, hand sanitizers, that workers need. That’s why people are organizing to demand that.

The Teamsters union is a logistics workers’ union. We’re a transportation union. We’re a package union. We’re a grocery and food delivery union. We’re the logical hub to be organizing and uniting and bringing workers together. We’re doing that at the grassroots level at Teamsters for a Democratic Union. You see some aggressive local union leaders pushing for that. And we need a transformation, we believe, in the Teamsters union in the top leadership, which has largely been missing in action through this crisis, if we’re going to meet the kinds of challenges that you were just laying out.

AMY GOODMAN: David Levin, we want to thank you so much for being with us, lead organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the coordinator of the UPS Teamsters United campaign.