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Millions of front-line workers in California are falling through the cracks of an undersupplied COVID-19 vaccine distribution system, putting entire communities at prolonged risk of illness and raising the question among workers: Who counts as “essential,” and who gets to decide?
The state’s front-line workforce includes 5.7 million people at heightened risk during the pandemic, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. They package food, prune fields, clean offices and assemble cloth face masks, among other jobs.
Some have higher-paid roles in public health and public corrections. All are at risk of contracting the virus because they regularly interact with other people customers and colleagues as they keep services running and pantries stocked.
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A year ago this month, during the early days of the pandemic, Susan Hernandez, a cashier at Food 4 Less in North Hollywood, found herself in a sea of panic-buying shoppers.
The coronavirus hadn’t claimed any lives yet in Southern California, but the scenes in stores gave a certain dawn-of-the-apocalypse movie, everyone-out-for-themselves vibe.
“People were fighting over water,” Hernandez recalled. “Our managers had to break up fights.”
Eventually, a sense of relative calm descended as the direst projections didn’t seem to come to pass. Then came the fall surge, when Los Angeles County became the latest American epicenter of the pandemic. Working in a supermarket once again became a crucible of stress, but not because of panicked shoppers. Now, it was the sheer amount of infection everywhere.
The Ralphs supermarket on the corner of Wardlow Road and Los Coyotes Diagonal in Long Beach looks like so many other suburban grocery stores.
But it has become an unlikely flashpoint in the heated battle over whether grocery workers deserve “hero pay” for their work during the pandemic.
Ralphs now plans to close the location after Long Beach approved a hazard wage. And the industry has warned that more stores will close if the such pay rules expand. That has outraged some officials.
Here is a look at the hero pay issue:
Q: So what is hero pay?
The concept is that grocery store workers who have put their lives at risk during the pandemic would get extra pay.
As local governments look to enact hazard pay rules for grocery workers, businesses are pushing back, saying the extra pay is too costly to sustain. Kroger on Monday blamed its decision to close a Ralphs supermarket and a Food 4 Less in Long Beach on a hazard pay measure.