Front-end staff worry plexiglass dividers won't protect them during holiday crowd levels
It’s been eight months since an employee at Portland's Pearl District Whole Foods on Northwest Couch Street and Twelfth Avenue died from complications related to COVID-19, and some employees at the store worry that the company’s measures against the pandemic have only gone downhill this holiday season.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires all workplaces to allow employees at least six feet of distance from one another, but workers at the location told Street Roots that when it gets busy this holiday season, employees work back-to-back behind plexiglass shields in close vicinity and customers check out back-to-back with little distance as well.
“There’s no possible way to maintain any type of distance. I understand there’s a plexiglass divider but I feel like that’s kind of a visual more than anything,” said one employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing employment.
The employee, who is on the front-end leadership team at the Pearl District store, told Street Roots that during the pandemic, the store usually only utilizes every other cash register to allow employee and customer distance.
They said workers are only permitted to work in close quarters with the barriers for 15 minutes, the maximum amount of time someone can be exposed to another person who has the virus without needing to quarantine, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
Street Roots accompanied local workers’ rights nonprofit Jobs with Justice to the store on Dec. 23 and observed four workers within the plexiglass barrier systems in close vicinity to one another during a busy afternoon.
In October, CNN reported that while barriers will prevent larger respiratory droplets from spreading to others, there is little data to show how they prevent the spread of smoke-like aerosols that can also spread the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. However, OSHA does recommend the use of barriers whenever possible.
Alexander Collias, a customer service team member at the Pearl District Whole Foods, worried that the COVID-19 diagnosis of a co-worker near Thanksgiving may have been related to the use of the plexi-glass barriers in place of actual physical distance. He’s chosen to get tested for the virus multiple times, paying out of pocket.
“I’m really proud of the work my co-workers and I have done,” Collias, who has worked at the location for four years, told Street Roots. “It did feel especially at first like we were really helping people stay home and do the right thing by stocking up on groceries.”
He said that the relaxed attendance policy and the hazard pay granted to him and co-workers during the start of the pandemic helped create a better sense of security for those working with the public. But as those policies fizzled in the summer, frustrations began to simmer and cases started to soar.
Earlier this month, the state started seeing unprecedented daily death tolls related to COVID-19, as many as 54 daily deaths on Dec.15.
Collias and the other employee both expressed concern that the store had recently increased its pandemic capacity to 150 people at a time. Whole Foods has not yet responded to a request for comment from Street Roots to confirm the store’s current capacity.
“We have implemented crowd control measures that limit the capacity of customers based on store size, and installed spacing guidelines for lines throughout the store, including outside of the store, at the register and in departments such as Meat and Seafood,” states the national grocery company’s website section on COVID-19 safety.
Sarah Kowaleski, coalition organizer at Jobs with Justice, told Street Roots that the organization received similar reports from employees at the Whole Foods store in the Tanasbourne neighborhood in Washington County.
Street Roots previously reported on a springtime walkout by local Whole Foods employees demanding that stores with diagnosed COVID-19 cases close down for at least two weeks after a positive test result from an employee. Nationally, workers pushed to have stores move to a delivery-only model.
Kowaleski noted that Jobs with Justice had received an increasing number of working condition complaints from local Whole Foods Market employees since the chain was bought by Amazon in a $13.4 billion deal three years ago.
“It’s consistent that the workers at Whole Foods and the workers at Amazon in Troutdale have some of the strongest complaints,” she added.
With 159 COVID-19 cases as of Dec. 23, the Amazon facility in Troutdale has the state’s fifth highest COVID-19 outbreak.
OPINION: I work at Whole Foods, and I am calling out its hypocrisy
Street Roots is an award-winning, weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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