Essential workers

While much of the country shelters in place, farmworkers, grocery store clerks and airline employees are on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

This week, reporter Monica Campbell at our partner The World takes us into fields where workers are harvesting crops in the middle of the pandemic. She investigates the challenges of social distancing for these workers, including the question of what happens if they get too sick to work. 

Next, we speak with a grocery store employee who is home sick with symptoms of COVID-19, yet says he doesn’t qualify for a test. We also recount stories from grocery store employees across the country about how they are being treated on the job, both physically and financially.

Also in the episode: We hear from The Okra Project, a food justice initiative for black transgender New Yorkers, to learn how it’s continuing to serve the community during the pandemic.

We end with a story from workers in an industry that’s been hit hard by the coronavirus: airlines. Host Al Letson speaks with a flight attendant who says his airline has been slow to take measures to protect passengers and crew, and we hear from Reveal data reporter Melissa Lewis about conflicting information one airline is sending to its employees and how flight attendants throughout the system are concerned for their safety.

Hear the episode.
 

“I’ll be the oversight,” President Donald Trump declared last month as Congress debated the $2.2 trillion economic rescue package he later signed into law. 

The bill, the largest stimulus ever enacted in the United States, greatly expands unemployment benefits, shores up small businesses and sends one-time checks to Americans making under $100,000 a year. It also includes unprecedented giveaways to corporate America, including a $170 billion tax break over 10 years for real estate investors and developers, such as Trump and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, and $500 billion in corporate bailout money to be administered by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which Democrats have called a “slush fund.”

True to his word, Trump balked at any congressional oversight of the money. Just after signing the stimulus, the president issued a rare signing statement saying he would treat accountability provisions of the law as “not mandatory,” citing “constitutional concerns” over the separation of powers. A requirement that a special inspector general provide information to Congress without delay, he said, “is unreasonable.”

Read the full story.

Drug rehab shutters amid coronavirus outbreak, sending residents scrambling 

Two weeks ago, Kara Almand woke up feeling blessed. She had been living at a drug rehab center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for almost 15 months. News of the coronavirus pandemic was unsettling, especially in a state roiled by a sudden spike in cases, but Almand had sobriety and a place to live. It was more than she could say for many people she knew struggling with addiction.

A few hours later, Almand learned she would soon be homeless.

On March 25, executives from the Cenikor Foundation called Almand and some 60 other participants into a meeting room and told them their local long-term rehab facility was shutting its doors. They had two days to find another place to live. 

Read the full story.

Tesla workers say company risked lives by sending them to work in shutdown

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, was originally a high-profile coronavirus doubter. “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” he tweeted March 6, when there were just 282 confirmed cases in the United States.  

Still, Tesla eventually promised to shut down its car factory in Fremont, California, on March 23 under pressure from local authorities, which had issued an order for all nonessential businesses to stop operating a week earlier.  

That’s why some Tesla workers were surprised to get a text message March 22 telling them their jobs – fixing cars that had come off the production line with paint mistakes – were still necessary. They would have to report for work or use their paid time off until the cars were finished, they were told.

Read the full story.

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