Just like COVID, KY tornadoes show us that most vulnerable workers need protecting
In just one week here in Kentucky, we’ve learned so much about so many things.
We know that we need weather radios in our houses and weather notifications on our phones because while many warnings are false alarms, sometimes they are not. These days, weather forecasters have become amazingly accurate about where and when storms will touch down, and they were in this case, too.
We’ve learned that nothing in the world will stop an EF4 tornado, not a solid brick church, not a huge factory and certainly not a house. So maybe we need new building codes that require some kind of shelter in case, let’s say, you don’t have a root cellar anymore like in Wizard of Oz.
And we’ve gotten a lot more insight about how those fragrant candles we love are produced and just what our lowest wage workers have to contend with when they’re not trying to survive as the roof of their factory blows off.
Lawsuits and investigations will determine what really went on at the Mayfield Consumer Products factory Friday night when eight people were killed. Some have said they were threatened with firing from their $8 an hour jobs if they left. Others deny it.
Whatever the facts, it’s very clear that the emergency response and safety plans were scattershot. It’s also very clear that candle factory had deadlines to meet, no matter what. Consider John Cheves’ Thursday story about prison labor being used at the factory. “Mayfield Consumer Products turned to inmate labor to meet its production needs, company spokesman Bob Ferguson said this week. The company employed 550 people as of last week, Ferguson said. ‘It’s an incredibly tight job market right now,’ Ferguson said.”
There are pluses and minuses to prison labor programs that can be discussed, but basically, what they’re saying is not enough people wanted to work at the candle factory so it turned to prison labor for help. That’s incredible.
Caitlin Blair is the communications specialist for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227, which represents more than 4,000 workers in the region, most of them in factories, like the huge Pilgrim’s Pride Chicken plant outside Mayfield, which is the city’s largest employer. She said that many people try to get jobs at Pilgrim’s Pride because while a difficult factory job, it has union benefits, including safety plans. Its third shift, scheduled to start at 10:30 p.m. after the storm, was canceled. At the Carhartt plant outside of Madisonville, union workers were allowed to leave without recrimination.
“In all of our plants, we have safety committees where the workers themselves have input into safety plans,” Blair said. “What’s clear is not only did the candle factory workers not have an advocate at that moment, but they didn’t have input into the plans that ultimately affected their health, safety and lives.”
The UFCW has made attempts to talk to candle factory employees before, and they might be more interested now.
The tornado has created a fascinating intersection with COVID and the subsequent Great Resignation. Minimum wage is not worth a lost life or a dangerous job and people just aren’t as willing to do it. That’s why prison labor, and sadly, why deputy jailer Robert Daniel was at the factory Friday night, and died as he tried to protect the workers.
“During COVID, people asked, ‘am I willing to die on the job for $7.25 an hour?’ That equation doesn’t make sense any more,” said Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky AFL-CIO.
He says that’s why you’re seeing more union action across the country that’s starting to turn the tide against corporate anti-union propaganda that’s been going on for decades. Safety, of course, is why organized labor got its start. But you’re seeing a demand for better working conditions, wages and benefits at many other places, like Starbucks in Buffalo, N.Y., the Kellogg strike, groups of university staff and lecturers across the country, including a new group at the University of Kentucky.
“One of our main reasons for existing is to make sure workers are safe and protected on the job,” Londrigan said. But “people have been turning to unionization as a logical and rational response to improve their living and working conditions. When you look at candle factory, the starting wage is minimum or what we consider starvation wages, you can see workers have very little option to organize together.”
Kentucky’s GOP majority is hostile to labor, making Kentucky a Right to Work state, which means that workers can’t be compelled to join a union. That doesn’t stop unions, of course, but it makes it harder.
As the middle class slowly disappears in the U.S., disasters and crises like disproportionately affect those in the increasingly large bottom rungs of economic life. As Jason Bailey of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy said in a recent editorial: “People’s vulnerability when the tornadoes tore their path that night was closely related to how much power they have in society.”
And as these kinds of disasters are sure to get more common, along with weather radios, we need to buy into the fact that people don’t need to hurt as much as they do here in the United States. With benefits, health care, savings and education, losing a job or a workplace or a home is terrible but not catastrophic. Right now in late stage capitalism, whether floods or tornadoes, what we see far too often is catastrophe.
