Workers’ Memorial Day Homily by Fr. Clete Kiley, UNITE HERE

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The Catholic Labor Network observed Workers’ Memorial Day on April 28, 2020 with a Mass remembering the thousands of workers who die on the job each year — including, this year, so many felled by covid-19. Fr. Sinclair Oubre (Seafarers) was our celebrant, while Fr. Clete Kiley (UNITE HERE) offered the homily. You can view highlights from the Mass on the CLN YouTube Channel. Below find the text of Fr. Kiley’s homily.

More than 125 years ago in his groundbreaking Encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII exhorted Catholic bishops and their clergy “to go to the worker”. And he promised working people all over the world they should always count on the pastoral solicitude of the Church. Today in this mass we gather as a testimony to that pastoral solicitude. We are grateful to the Catholic Labor Network for bringing us together. We come together today virtually in a mass we are celebrating from different parts of the country – all reflective of this challenging time of COVID-19 pandemic and economic upheaval.

For more than 129 years the Church and the Labor Movement have been building bonds to serve the Common Good, to promote solidarity, and to incarnate the principle of subsidiarity in the formation of local labor unions. Both the Church and the Labor Movement believe in the right — and actually fight for the right — of workers to form unions, to bargain collectively, to secure a living wage (not a minimum wage), and to be able to work in safe places. In these difficult times this Church-Labor collaboration is more important than ever.

In our Holy Mass today Church and Labor come together to remember those union members who have died in the past year. In a special way we remember those who have succumbed to the COVID-19 virus in these recent months. Each in our way holds these beloved dead, our union sisters and brothers, to sacred memory. To remember signifies that we hold them in our minds. In Spanish, the word is recordar, which signifies that we hold them still in our hearts. Each of these beloved dead was a person destined to be, as the Church says, “an agent of their own development”. Each was destined to be a fully integral human person. Each had a name, a family, friends, neighbors. And each is held in communion with us in this mass.

As we remember them, we recognize that working people living today still face significant challenges. Too often today workers are denied those very rights the Church and Labor say are inherent. Too often today work conditions in some places reflect the same unsafe and uncaring environments that Leo XIII condemned more than a century ago. Too often today workers are put in risky situations resulting in catastrophic accidents. Too often still today, just as back in 1891, workers lose their lives at work. Too often today grieving families and co-workers, all of us really, wonder if such deaths weren’t avoidable. Today, as in former years, workers are confronted by a prevailing culture of profit over people- a culture that quantifies work and robs it of its humanity and inherent dignity–a culture that treats workers as cogs on a production line rather than the precious human beings they are.

In this COVID-19 crisis, all the raw underside of our economy is being revealed. We cannot help but think of healthcare workers, and meat packers, and other workers who risk their lives and perhaps the lives of their families and co-workers. They have no protective gear to wear. There is no social distancing in their workplaces. And in spite of their pleas, there are employers who would still cut corners. This reflects what Pope Francis calls a “throwaway culture”.  This dishonors our Beloved Labor dead and it threatens the humanity of us all.  For that reason, our remembrance of our union dead today must move beyond any grief and remembrance to a renewed commitment and call to action. As Mother Mary Harris Jones would exhort us today: “mourn the loss of the dead, but fight like hell for the living”.

The gospel today shows us exactly how we are to fight like hell for the living.  Did we feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the stranger? Clothe the naked? Shelter the homeless?  Care for the sick? Visit the imprisoned?

As we remember our Beloved Union dead let us feel joy for them. They worked hard, supported families, and as union members, they stood up for fairness, for the least of these, and they put solidarity into practice. And we can trust the Lord says to them: “Come, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

That promise is held out for you and me too. But the gospel is utterly clear about how we are expected to answer those questions. In this gospel, Christ is showing us a pathway for living. He is showing us precisely how we are to fight like hell for the living. He is showing us the way of solidarity. As Pope Francis says: “Solidarity, this word that strikes fear in the more developed world. They try not to say it. It’s almost a dirty word for them. But it is our word!” I Brothers and sisters, it is the word that belongs to the Church and it is the word that belongs to the Labor Movement. Together let us call the world to solidarity.

Finally, in his letter to the Corinthians St. Paul uses the same phrase twice, which is always significant in the scriptures. It is like underlining something in red.  Paul says to the Corinthians as well as to us: “we are courageous”.  This is as much an exhortation to dig deep to find courage, as it is a statement about our existing courage.

To honor our Beloved Union dead, and to forge the pathway of solidarity, to build a more just and equitable world, to create a culture of encounter will take courage. For that we turn to the Lord. We draw courage from the Eucharist we celebrate here. We draw courage from the spiritual communion we share now through this Zoom conferencing. We draw courage from the examples of our Union dead. And we draw courage when our Catholic community and our Labor unions work together to renew solidarity throughout the world. May the Lord who began this good work in us bring it to fulfillment!

Amen.

Walter Reuther: A Memorial

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Labor historian Kim Baker submits his reflections fifty years after the untimely death of Walter Reuther, pioneering leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

A half-century ago, on May 9, 1970, America lost one of its greatest heroes, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, in the crash of a plane whose engine, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, was missing parts and had parts wrongly installed–including one part installed upside down.

This tragedy, and several similar tragedies, occurred amidst a time like today, when progressive reformers are battling valiantly to promote social justice in every area of economic life.  Therefore, it behooves us to take a fresh look at Walter Reuther and what he fought for, and to realize the large extent to which today’s workers and worker-justice activists are standing on Reuther’s shoulders.
Reuther, in turn, was standing on the shoulders of the workers and worker-justice reformers who preceded his rise to dominance as a leader in the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during their organizing and 1935 founding.  Reuther and his fellow workers and activists saw industrial unionism as a direct outgrowth of a democratic-socialist vision for the United States, a vision in which workers and other Americans can thwart income inequality and play larger roles in determining their economic and political destinies.

One cannot fully understand worker justice in the 1930s and 1940s without exploring the extent to which unions in those decades were affected by the relationship between the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and its allies, and U.S. socialists and their allies (including the Catholic social-action movement).  Communists and socialists were bitter foes long before the 1930s, and except for a brief period of cooperation during the Popular Front era of the 1930s (cooperation which ended with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939), UAW and other CIO unions were constant battlegrounds.

Communist workers everywhere had to follow a line of complete subjugation of worker interests to the war aims and foreign-policy objectives of the Comintern (the Communist Party globally), which still and always included world domination.  During World War II, CPUSA-led union factions hampered collective-bargaining activities (already hampered by corporate domination of wartime union-management relationships) by demanding no-strike pledges and extreme production speed-ups, and by downplaying workers’ concerns with low pay, meager benefits, lack of worker input, and unsafe working conditions.

From UAW’s founding, Reuther courageously led the union’s democratic-socialist coalition.  He was a member of the Socialist Party in the 1930s until 1938, when he joined the Democratic Party, and he played a major role in UAW going from 30,000 members in 1935 to 400,000 members in 1938.  He sought cooperation with the workers of every union faction, and was a veteran of the sit-down strikes and of the bitter three-year-long struggle to organize Ford Motor Company (featuring the famous photo of Reuther being bloodied by company goons).

Walter Reuther’s World War II innovations, however, most dramatically exemplify his leadership.  His defense-readiness plan was extremely effective, and could serve as a model for dealing with today’s coronavirus.  And most significantly, in June 1945 he filed a brief with all war-production agencies recommending that in postwar, “increased production must be supported by increased consumption, and increased consumption will only be possible through increased wages.”

Indeed, he made this recommendation part of UAW’s then-current round of negotiations with General Motors by proposing that the company’s workers be given a 50-percent wage increase and that it not be accompanied by an increase in the price of GM cars.  Reuther’s proposal did’nt go through, but it was a ground-breaking challenge to economic inequality in a ground-breaking manner and promises to play a key role in today’s crucial national debates.

Poet Robert Frost speaks of the importance of “the road not taken”; and America’s not taking the road championed by Reuther set a discouraging tone for the country’s postwar years, when labor had to yield to corporate dominance and the country entered an era of excessive consumer abundance.  Reuther was disappointed, but he still fought hard for worker justice (such as by supporting Cesar Chavez and farmworker organizing and by promoting public-sector unions), and he expanded efforts long made
on other social-justice fronts, including civil-rights struggles, Vietnam War protests, and a greater voice for young people.

Unfortunately, this road called for but not taken has received woefully insufficient attention in the few major biographies of Walter Reuther.  Nelson Lichtenstein, for example, in “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit”, portrays Reuther after World War II as a champion of corporatism and consumer abundance, a portrayal which insufficiently accounts for Reuther having to row against the anti-labor current of that era and for his increased efforts in non-labor directions.  Also, Lichtenstein neglects the positive anti-Communism which Reuther displayed and which helped propel him to the UAW presidency in 1947, helping bring about CIO’s expulsion of 13 CPUSA-led unions in 1949-50.  Sadly, positive anti-Communism was soon replaced by the negative anti-Communism of the right wing and of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk.

Ironically, during Reuther’s fight for his innovative challenge, James Matles, President of the CPUSA-led United Electrical Workers-CIO (UE), secretly negotiated with GM on behalf of the 30,000 company workers which it represented.  The UE-GM agreement unfortunately became a basis of the much weaker agreement which UAW eventually had to settle for.

In “The Wage Earner”, a highly-regarded Detroit labor newspaper, the paper’s editor, Paul Weber, commented in October 1945 on the Reuther challenge: “If Reuther succeeds in forcing GM, one of the country’s largest industrial empires, to redivide the fruits of its production, the day of gigantic profits in American business will be done … {T}he result may not be the end of capitalism, but it will certainly be the beginning of a new kind of capitalism.”

The actual result, as we know, was swallowed up in the machinations of runaway capitalists and right-wing politicians, who then gave us decades of assaults on worker’s rights to organize and bargain collectively–including, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 12,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, or PATCO (see Collision Course by labor historian Joseph McCartin, Oxford University Press, 2011).  Such assaults continue today, but thanks to the renewal of the democratic-socialist vision for America’s future, Walter Reuther’s “road not taken” promises to become a wide highway of worker justice and of social justice in general.

 

Who is the Catholic Labor Network? Meet Adrienne Alexander, AFSCME Activist

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Adrienne Alexander, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Illinois, serves as Vice President of the Catholic Labor Network. Adrienne’s union activism and Catholic faith share a thread in her family’s history as both are a source of pride and dignity for her family.

Her great-grandfather was a floor refinisher by trade but found work hard to find as a Black man in the segregated south. However, the local nuns gave him work, which led him to convert to Catholicism. His son — Adrienne’s paternal grandfather — became one of the first of many in the family to make a career in the US Postal Service and become a member of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU).

Like so many Black folks from the south, Adrienne’s maternal grandparents headed north looking for economic opportunities.  Adrienne’s grandfather got a job in Flint and joined the United Auto Workers (UAW) while her grandmother worked at a local hospital represented by the Service Employees union (SEIU). Being members of their respective unions, gave them dignity and financial resources they could not get in the south.

Adrienne’s parents live in Georgia where her father works for the Archdiocese of Atlanta newspaper as a photographer and her mother retired from work as a lobbyist. Because of her father’s job, growing up she had a unique exposure to the diversity of the church and got to know many priests and sisters. However, it was not until Adrienne attended a training at the Congressional Hunger Center and said out loud for the first time that her faith motivates her worldview, that she set about explicitly putting her faith into action through her work and began a career fighting for workers’ rights. In 2010, she joined AFSCME in Illinois and eventually became Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for AFSCME Council 31. AFSCME Council 31 was ground zero for attacks on the rights public employees because it was a Council 31 feepayer that filed the fateful Janus lawsuit.

Adrienne lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. They attend St. Benedict the African in the Englewood neighborhood. She is a board member of Arise Chicago, a nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of faith & workers’ rights, and the Catholic Labor Network. Adrienne is a graduate of Agnes Scott College, a small, women’s college in Georgia, and earned her Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota.

St. Joseph

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The Working Catholic: St. Joseph Day
by Bill Droel

Some years ago I was part of a lobby group to change the feast of St. Joseph the Worker from May 1st to the first Monday in September. The change would apply only to dioceses in the United States; the country that has Labor Day in September. The proposal got a respectable hearing from some bishops but the liturgy police (smile) at the bishops’ conference said no.

In 1889 communist and other pro-worker groups in Europe designated May 1st as International Workers’ Day. It is today celebrated as such by many people in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. To counter the communists, the Vatican designated May 1st as St. Joseph the Worker Day. Ironically, the May 1st designation is not directly related to a communist event from Europe. It commemorates an event in the U.S., specifically here in Chicago. The issue was an eight-hour workday.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was interested in an eight hour day. When he wrote about it in 1867 he referred to the situation in the U.S. A stateside group, National Labor Union, championed the cause. Move ahead to 1886. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions obtained a City of Chicago permit dated May 1st for a rally in support of the enforcement of eight-hour-per-day laws. This event, writes William Adelman in Haymarket Revisited (Illinois Historical Society, 1986), has uniquely “influenced the history of labor in the U.S. and even the world.” What happened?
Late in the evening of the rally someone threw dynamite. Police fired their guns wildly. Soon seven officers and four workers were dead. Eight labor activists were rounded up and arrested. Those apprehended included a lay minister, a printer and others. Within about three months seven of the activists were found guilty. One was sentenced to 15 years; two others got life sentences; one was killed in jail. The remaining four were hanged in November.
The issue didn’t totally disappear. Beginning in the last months of the 19th century various unions were able to include an eight-hour provision in contracts: the United Mine Workers, a Building Trades Council in California, the Typographical Union and more. Only in 1937 with the Fair Labor Standards Act did the restriction on working hours become a national standard. Even then, however, its application was only gradually extended to various sectors.
In recent times the Illinois Labor History Society (www.illinoislaborhistory.org) has refurbished the graves of the Haymarket workers who are buried in Forest Home Cemetery, located in Forest Park, Ill. The Society has several resources related to the Haymarket event and to the meaning of May 1st.
Haymarket Square itself, located just west of Chicago’s Loop, is today home to several trendy restaurants and relatively new condos. Tourists who go there would have to know some history to understand Adelman’s contention that an event occurred there that “influenced the history of labor in the U.S. and even the world.”

Parishes in the U.S. routinely include symbols and prayers about the dignity of work during the September Labor Day weekend. It would be an enhancement, in my opinion, to also have a feast day that weekend honoring that long ago tradesman, St. Joseph.
“O God, Creator of all things… by the example of St. Joseph and under his patronage may we complete the works you set us to do and attain the rewards you promise.” – Collect from Mass of May 1st

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a newsletter on faith and work.

CSPL Push Reopens Chicagoland Hospital for COVID Patients

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Congratulations to our friends at the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership (CSPL) for their successful push to reopen Westlake Hospital in Melrose Park, outside Chicago.

This intriguing organization does leadership development training and community organizing rooted in a Catholic model. Based in Chicago’s blue-collar Western suburbs, CSPL offers parish-based training for community activists. CSPL has drawn an outsized share of attention lately, first with coverage in a recent edition of Commonweal (“Modeling Change“) and then campaigning for Illinois Governor Pritzker to reopen a much-needed, shuttered community hospital as part of the area’s covid-19 response. As the Chicago Tribune noted,

[Rep Emanuel] Welch was joined on a conference call Friday morning by Maria Franco, a board member of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, who also praised the Governor’s move.

“We are working together to address this crisis,” Franco said. “The community really came together for this. Many signed petitions and our CSPL members pushed to get allies and supporters. It was definitely a beacon of hope when the news came out that our governor was going to reopen this hospital.”

CLICK HERE for the Tribune’s full coverage!

Connecting Low-Income Workers with Middle-Class Careers in Nashville

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Bishop J. Mark Spalding of Nashville with MC3 grad Joseph Kenyawia

For more than a century, America’s building trades unions have prepared workers for skilled, family-supporting jobs in the construction industry. Today these unions are preparing for a wave of retirements, and are recruiting a new generation of workers through a pre-apprenticeship program aimed at diversifying their ranks. In Nashville, the Catholic Labor Network has been teaming up with Catholic Charities and local parishes to move low-income workers into these high-wage jobs.

The pre-apprenticeship program known as the Multi-Craft Core Curriculum (aka MC3) programs introduces those considering a career in construction to each of the trades in turn. Thanks to outreach work at area Masses by local CLN representative Aimee Shelide Mayer, four of the nine participants in the last MC3 class to precede the coronavirus lockdown were immigrants from Diocese of Nashville parishes — three from a large Hispanic congregation, Iglesia Sagrado Corazòn, and one from one of the oldest churches in the Diocese, Church of the Holy Name in East Nashville.

CLN’s Aimee Mayer joins the proud MC3 grads in February

At the close of the two-week program, all nine participants graduated with plans to enter the trade of their choice.  Graduation on February 7th was a joyous event.  Marisa Morales Perez from Sagrado Corazòn said in her address to the graduation attendees that she was there “for her siblings and her family,” and hoped that her aspired path with the Painters would help support her family so she would no longer have to work second shift.  Leo Martinez, also from Sagrado Corazòn, said he wanted to “show his children that anything is possible if you make the commitment.”  Leo had received electrical training in California before moving to Tennessee, but now—with the skills he learned with MC3—hopes to enter a full-time apprenticeship with the Electrical Workers.  Joseph Kenyawia, who moved to Nashville from Sudan twenty years ago and is a pillar of the Sudanese community at Holy Name, said that joining the Insulators Apprenticeship following graduation is his “opportunity to leave a firm foundation for [his] family.”

For now, coronavirus shutdowns are interfering with what is also known locally as MC3: Music City Construction Careers. CLN looks forward to additional recruitment when instruction resumes!

Who is the Catholic Labor Network? Meet Fr. Sinclair Oubre, union seafarer

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Fr. Sinclair K. Oubre, J.C.L.  is the pastor of St. Francis of Assisi in Orange, TX in the Diocese of Beaumont and a member of the Seafarers Union. Fr. Sinclair grew up in Beaumont and knew from about the 4th grade that he wanted to be a priest and entered the seminary immediately after high school. He said that while others were going through “spiritual discerning” in the seminary, “I was just there to get trained.”

The area around Beaumont has three major ports, which also drove Fr. Sinclair’s attachment to the sea. As a seminarian, he would spend two summers on merchant marine ships working in the Gulf of Mexico, and sailing between the Texas and Florida ports. In 1990, he joined the Seafarers Union, with which he continues to maintain his membership. He attended the University of St. Thomas in Houston and Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he received his bachelor’s degree. He did his graduate theological studies in Leuven, Belgium, and was ordained to the priesthood May 10, 1986. In 1997, he completed his license in canon law at Catholic University in Washington.

Fr. Sinclair has been active in the labor movement for more than 30 years. During the famed Staley lockout in Decatur IL. In Decatur, IL the workers were locked out by the AE Staley company after prolonged contract negotiations in which the company demanded large concessions. The Staley workers were soon joined by Firestone and Caterpillar workers on strike. The struggle came to represent the growing greed of global corporations and the decline of worker power.  Fr. Sinclair met Fr. Martin Mangan, a Decatur area priest who worked with the Staley workers during their fight. While doing graduate work for his JCL in canon law, he met Msgr. Higgins, who was living at Catholic University.

With the Staley lockout, working with Tim Vining and Steve Donahue of the Baton Rouge Catholic Worker House, and other prominent national labor priests, he organized a conference in Decatur, whose goals were to support the workers in Decatur, and promote the Catholic social teaching regarding work, workers and unions. This group coalesced into the Catholic Labor Network in 1996 as the group realized that the bonds between the church and the labor movement had to be reinvigorated.

Fr. Sinclair is now the Spiritual Moderator for the Catholic Labor Network and continues his labor activism as a Chaplain to the Sabine Area Central Labor Council. As a Diocesan Director of the Apostleship of the Sea in the Diocese of Beaumont, he ministers to local and visiting seafarers at the Port Arthur International Seafarers’ Center.  He is also active in the Port Arthur Area Shrimpers’ Association, which organizes among the local Vietnamese shrimping community.

Fr. Sinclair also maintains his connections to the water, as a member of the United States Merchant Marine, and holds a merchant marine credential as AB-Limited, and holds a 100 ton near coastal master license. He sails through the Houston Seafarers International Union hall. In the summer of 2019, he signed on the Training Ship Golden Bear with the cadets of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy for 29 days.

CLN Livestreamed Talk and Happy Hour Friday 5/1: Feast of St Joseph the Worker

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Did you know that St. Joseph is the patron saint of all who labor – and that the Church celebrates this holiday on May 1? Join us this Friday, May 1, at 5pm ET for a Happy Hour as Catholic Labor Network Executive Director Clayton Sinyai (LiUNA) recounts the story of May 1 as the worldwide workers’ holiday and its designation as a feast day in the Church calendar. And that’s not all! CLN Founding Father Sinclair Oubre (Seafarers) will be on hand to share the 25-year history of the Catholic Labor Network, followed by Q+A, discussion and fellowship.

Grab your favorite beverage and CLICK HERE to register for the Catholic Labor Network Happy Hour May 1 at 5p ET!

CLN to Livestream Workers’ Memorial Day Mass 4/28 at 3pm ET

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COVID has shined a harsh light on worker health and safety in the United States: nurses, supermarket clerks, warehouse workers and bus drivers who continue to work through the pandemic continue to face infection, illness and death as they labor to meet the needs of the rest of us. But even in a good year, nearly five thousand American workers are killed on the job, and a much larger number are sickened or injured by exposure to dangerous worksite conditions. That’s why the labor movement marks April 28 each year as Workers’ Memorial Day.

The Catholic Labor Network will honor the day by live-streaming a memorial mass for fallen workers 3pm ET on April 28, and YOU are invited. Fr. Sinclair Oubre (Seafarers Union) will be our celebrant; Fr. Clete Kiley (UNITE HERE) will offer the homily.

If you would like to join us for the Mass, CLICK HERE to register.

Whether you are able to attend or not, we invite you to submit the names of friends, relatives, co-workers and others who have died on the job or from work-related illnesses, so they can be remembered in this votive mass. Send the names of those you would like remembered to [email protected].

Covid-19 and worker health: Reflections of a Catholic Occupational Health Physician

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A guest contribution from Rosemary Sokas, MD, MOH

As Catholics, we believe that working is a sacred act of co-creation.  We believe in the intrinsic dignity of the person performing work.  The covid-19 pandemic circles the globe like a crown of thorns, amplifying the need to put our beliefs into action.

First, it sickens and kills workers in sadly predictable ways. Frontline healthcare workers, first responders, nursing home and homecare workers – not to mention agricultural, food processing, transportation, grocery, pharmacy, and delivery workers — have all been asked to place their own lives and those of their families at risk. They and their families are dying.

Despite SARS, MERS, the H1N1 pandemic, Ebola and countless post-9/11 tabletop exercises, our just-in-time healthcare non-system, public health infrastructure, and basic labor laws have failed workers. Employers largely failed to provide the engineering, administrative and personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect workers – these differ by industry, but should have included basic hygiene measures, physical barriers, ventilation, and reusable as well as disposable forms of personal protective equipment that could have reduced the impact of shortages. What’s more, many have punished workers for speaking out and suspended them for bringing protective equipment from home. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) failed to implement even the most basic safety inspections until announcing a compliance directive on April 13, and still fails to enforce employers’ general duty to provide a workplace safe from infection to workers in non-health care facilities, despite thousands of worker complaints and worksites with hundreds of infected workers.  The need for OSHA to enact an Emergency Temporary Standard has been widely noted, but that standard must address all workers deemed essential as well as all potential routes of exposure.

Many workers still lack paid sick leave and any form of job security. The most vulnerable earn poverty wages and lack health insurance. Hundreds of poultry and meat processing workers across Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Colorado, South Dakota and elsewhere are infected and seeding outbreaks in rural areas.  Farmworker and labor organizations are desperately petitioning federal agencies to improve work, housing, and transportation hygiene measures to protect the nation’s farmworkers, including H2A workers.

African American and Latino communities have been hardest hit, with death rates more than double that of the general population in those states and cities where demographic information is available; national data are missing.  African American and Latino workers are disproportionately represented in the low-wage, high-risk jobs that have been deemed essential.  On April 8, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines for “critical infrastructure” workers that, unfortunately, further increases the risk to these workers.  The guidelines target, among others, workers in food preparation and agriculture.  Despite abundant evidence of viral transmission from asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals, CDC now recommends these exposed or infected workers be kept in the workforce, given masks, and told they “should maintain 6 feet and practice social distancing as work duties permit” (emphasis added). The document ignores family and co-worker concerns.

This failure to recognize that workers have intrinsic human worth beyond their functional utility is unacceptable.  We need to protect the workers who provide essential services. This requires listening to workers to identify and address their concerns. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union has communicated with its members, other workers and state governments, and negotiated approaches to protect workers and customers while helping to promote essential food production and distribution. Governors and mayors are listening – grocery workers are eligible for benefits provided to other essential workers in some states, and a number of cities and counties are requiring measures to reduce risks, including having customers wear masks. CDC would benefit from input from the front lines; giving worker representatives a seat at the table would be an important start.

What about those workers who have lost their jobs in the economic wake of the pandemic? Workers are struggling with an overwhelmed unemployment compensation system and many are dealing with the loss of their employer-funded health insurance.  Despite Congressional efforts to improve unemployment benefits and to extend them to non-traditional workers, including the self-employed and gig workers, undocumented workers and others in the margins are eligible for none of this assistance. The long-term health consequences of involuntary job loss are sadly predictable as well.  Risks include increased rates of heart attacks, strokes, all-cause mortality, substance abuse, mental health disorders, homicides and suicides. There is a better way. The short-time work program Germany and other E.U. countries use to reduce hours but prevent unemployment offers population health benefits that go beyond retention of health insurance and continued income support. German workers, classified as “not working” rather than “unemployed”, do not sustain the increased mortality seen among unemployed medium and low-skilled U.S. workers. We need to restructure our current approach to unemployment insurance to use funding to support continued employment.

Rosemary Sokas is professor of human science at Georgetown University’s School of Nursing and Health Studies and professor of family medicine at the School of Medicine, and previously served as Chief Medical Officer at OSHA and as Associate Director for Science at NIOSH.