Friends,
As
someone who worked in a grocery store for five years, I like this designation “Emergency
Personnel.” And I agree these workers deserve $15 an hour and a union.
Kagiso,
Max
Thursday, March 19, 2020
'Now Make
It National': Vermont and Minnesota Classify Grocery Store Staff as Emergency
Personnel
"If
your job is so 'essential' that you can't get off for a killer global pandemic,
you deserve $15 an hour and a union."
Redner's cashier Christina Selepcheny rings up a customer at the
Redner's in Wyomissing, PA on March 16, 2020. Employees are working to keep
in-demand items in stock with concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo:
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
Demands for nationwide protections for grocery store workers
grew Thursday after officials in Minnesota and Vermont officially designated
such employees as emergency workers who are essential to the U.S. population's
wellbeing as the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the country.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, added grocery store
workers to those protected under the state's "Care for Children of
Families of Emergency Workers" order, requiring schools in the state to
provide childcare for the employees. Previously, only hospital staff, nurses,
and other public health and disaster workers qualified as emergency personnel
under the directive.
In Vermont, children of grocery store workers will now be able to
attend child care at private centers which will be reimbursed by the state,
under an order by public safety commissioner Michael Schirling.
"Hell yeah, now make it national," tweeted Clara
Jeffery, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones.
Hell yeah, now make
it national https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/03/minnesota-and-vermont-just-classified-grocery-clerks-as-emergency-workers/ …
"Grocery clerks are often underpaid and
underappreciated," noted Becky Dernbach, a writing fellow at the magazine. "As they
brave the daily crowds of people rushing to stock up their pantries, and risk
infecting themselves through contact with so many customers, their essential
role in a functioning society has become clearer than ever. Designating them
emergency workers and providing them childcare is the least we can do."
With the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19,
infecting more than 8,000 people in the U.S. as of Thursday, shelter-in-place orders have been
issued in nine counties in the San Francisco Bay area, requiring more than nine million people to remain at home except to procure necessities including food and other groceries. At least one county in Colorado and a number of cities and towns in the U.S. have
also issued shelter-in-place orders to help stop the spread of the coronavirus,
while Portland, Oregon officials were considering one Thursday.
With grocery store employees among those most essential to their
communities during the ongoing pandemic, workers' rights advocates have called
for them to receive hazard pay and other benefits. The public health crisis is also
illustrating that all retail and food service workers must be paid a living
wage and have the right to unionize.
If your job is so
"essential" that you can't get off for a killer global pandemic, you
deserve $15 an hour and a union.
"The class inequality of quarantine is that the poor are,
ironically, the most likely to be employed in the industries deemed
'essential,'" tweeted one critic, "while their upper-class peers are
freed to bunker down for weeks until the first death wave passes."
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to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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