[States must create health and safety councils—one way that
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IT’S WORKERS WHO SHOULD DETERMINE WHEN THEIR WORKPLACE IS SAFE  
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Nelson Lichtenstein
May 29, 2020
The American Prospect
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_ States must create health and safety councils—one way that
‘essential’ workers can begin to gain one essential they lack:
power. _

A medical worker adjusts her gloves before administering a test for
the coronavirus in Somerville, Massachusetts., Steven Senne/AP Photo

 

_This article is part of our symposium on “The Future of Labor.” _
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When it comes to our collective understanding of the American working
class, this pandemic marks a decisive inflection point. In our moral
and social imagination, we have finally displaced the white male
autoworker and construction worker, let alone the vanishingly small
remnant of those who mine coal, with a multicultural army of all those
who staff the distended supply chains, the vital hospitals, the home
care services, the warehouses, the poultry and meat disassembly lines,
the sales counters, and the grocery aisles, performing the mundane
jobs we once disparaged or ignored. Now denoted as essential workers
by no less an entity than the Department of Homeland Security, we
recognize them both for their indispensability and for their moral
dignity.

Moreover, our new appreciation of these poorly paid and precarious
strata of the working class reflects not just the vital role they play
in the current crisis, but the centrality of these workers to firms
and industries—food processing, fulfillment centers, mass retailing,
and health care—that now constitute a new “commanding heights”
of Western capitalism. This realization echoes the great social and
economic shift that took place 90 years ago when our conception of the
American working class was transformed, from that of the tradesman,
railroader, or victimized immigrant to a stratum of self-confident
mass-production workers organized into a set of powerful trade unions
led by “the new men of power,” to use a phrase first coined by C.
Wright Mills.

The celebration of these workers opens the door to their empowerment.
Corporate advertisers now endorse the vital role played by retail
clerks; grateful New Yorkers clap and shout at 7 p.m. each evening to
honor those on 12-hour hospital shifts. But as Dahlia Lithwick points
out in a recent_ Slate _column, commending these frontline workers as
heroic—or even offering them a bit of bonus money—does nothing to
enhance their actual power. Indeed, praise for their heroism is
actually an accommodation to their victimization, as if nothing can be
done to make their jobs more safe and secure. Instead, we need laws,
institutions, and unions that can make the work they do and the
rewards they receive sustainable and healthy for the long haul,
ensuring that careers can be built, homes purchased, and retirement
assured.

So how do we get from here to there—from the cultural and moral
goodwill now showered on these workers to the unions and laws and even
to the transformation in employer expectations and behavior that will
elevate and institutionalize their new status? It will not happen in
any automatic fashion; a transformation in our cultural and social
mores may be necessary to a transformation in the law, but it is
hardly sufficient.

What we need now is a set of prefigurative movements and institutions.
Just as resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act prefigured the
Emancipation Proclamation, just as the great strikes of 1919 and 1934
set the stage for the Wagner Act, and just as the integration of a
Woolworth lunch counter foreshadowed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so
too must we act now to empower frontline workers, both to make their
jobs safer and to create a set of models for the kind of laws and
organizations that can build a militant and inclusive labor movement
in those business sectors and commercial firms that now stand at the
core of our economy.

If we are to “reopen” the American economy, we must be certain
that our workplaces, and especially those large supply-chain
distribution centers and food processing facilities, are safe. Today,
they are anything but: Infections have raced through Tyson Foods
plants, Amazon distribution centers, nursing homes, and prisons.
Workers have quit and protested. But they remain essentially
powerless, since the overwhelming majority of such worksites are
non-union. As Jennifer Suggs, a Walmart cashier, told New Orleans
public radio station WWNO: “We’re not essential. We’re
sacrificial. I will be replaced if I die from this. I don’t have a
mask or gloves. The only thing I have is a stupid blue vest.”

Managers claim that their workplaces are safe, that social-distancing
rules are observed, that workers are paid to stay home if infected.
But in a pandemic like this, their word cannot be trusted. From the
Smithfield meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to
Amazon’s Riverside, California, fulfillment center, production-line
workers have been the first to sense the danger. They issued early
warnings that infections were spreading, safety standards were
inadequate, and supervisors were blind to the danger. Even putting
profits aside, these supply-chain managers face a deadly conflict of
interest: between the safety of their workers and their orders to keep
the lowest-cost production and distribution of essential commodities
rolling along.

Health and safety councils can be prefigurative institutions,
proto-unions that can give hundreds of thousands of workers their
first taste of voice and solidarity.

So here is a practical first step. In blue states like California, and
even in the more conservative heartland states where infections in
poultry and meatpacking plants have become a national scandal, we have
to demand that as our state economies are “opened up,” new
procedures and institutions are put in place to ensure the safety and
voice of those on the front lines. No government bureaucracy, either
that of a state health department or the federal Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, has the personnel to “police” hundreds
of thousands of workplaces. Indeed, public-health professionals tell
us that we can expect additional infections and quite possibly a
second and even a third wave of contagious transmission extending well
into 2021 and beyond.

The “police power” of the state is vast. We have just seen it
exercised by 44 governors who have shut down millions of businesses in
the interest of the public’s safety. Unions, worker advocates, and
all those seeking to stanch the coronavirus should demand the
application of that same police power to mandate that every firm,
college, government agency, or other workplace employing more than 25
people must establish a health and safety council before opening or
staying open. These councils will be elected by all those either on
the payroll or who are contractors who work in physically close
proximity to those who are.

These councils will ensure that all health and safety guidelines
promulgated by the state’s department of health are implemented, and
if the violations are egregious, the councils will be able to
temporarily close the workplace while reporting such transgressions to
the local public-health authorities. In large workplaces (more than
200 workers), the elected leader of each of these councils will be
relieved of his or her normal responsibilities one day of each week so
as to canvass workmates, offer complaints and suggestions to
management, and confer with public-health authorities and leaders of
health and safety councils at similar worksites.

The creation of these councils should take place during “Opening Our
State for Work Week.” On one designated day of that week, the
workplace will remain open but cease productive operations to allow
for informational presentations, discussion, and election of the
health and safety council. Health professionals from state and county
departments of public health will be on hand to facilitate discussion
and election of the councils. Because no state government has enough
health professionals to visit the thousands of workplaces that will be
convening employee meetings, governors could use their authority to
deputize sufficient volunteers to conduct these meetings. In the 19th
century, lawmen and local officials frequently deputized citizens
during emergencies. Nurses, physicians, students from schools of
public health, and other volunteers might well be recruited. They
would be trained ahead of time to instruct workers in sanitation and
testing protocols, but equally important, to ensure that the health
and safety councils established in each workplace are representative,
effective, and autonomous.

Many of these councils can be prefigurative institutions, proto-unions
that can give hundreds of thousands of workers now laboring in
authoritarian workplaces their first taste of voice and solidarity.
Many will fail, and some will turn into “company unions” dominated
by managers and supervisors. The same problems arose in the early
1930s when the National Industrial Recovery Act mandated that in its
newly formed Codes of Fair Competition, workers had the right, under
its famous Section 7a, to form “unions of their own choosing.”
Some of those company unions would become incubators for genuine,
militant industrial unionism, as in the steel industry, but in many
other instances, including coal mining, apparel manufacture, and auto
production, trade unionists took Section 7a as a warrant for building
their own organization, interpreting it to mean that “The President
Wants You to Join a Union.” The same dynamic can unfold today, in an
era when the moral standing of frontline workers has never been higher
and the incompetence and mendacity of many corporate elites has been
exposed to all.

It’s time for government officials, union organizers, and committed
democrats to step up and help these essential workers gain what’s
essential to their own, and society’s, well-being: power and voice.

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Nelson Lichtenstein teaches history at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work,
Labor, and Democracy.

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