Workers who pack and ship boxes of food for HelloFresh in California voted against unionizing at the end of last year despite facing high rates of injury, low wages, and a major COVID-19 outbreak, a loss for the labor movement that reflects the ongoing challenges facing organizers two years into the pandemic.
In summer 2020, a HelloFresh food-packing facility in Richmond, just north of Oakland, was the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in one of the state’s most populous counties, a wave that infected 171 workers at one warehouse. After an employee who worked at the facility died of COVID, state health and safety officials opened an investigation and in April 2021 charged the company with a “serious” violation.
A labor union, UNITE HERE, started looking into working conditions at HelloFresh and published government data that showed rates of injury at the Richmond facility in 2020 were more than three times the average for the warehousing industry and almost twice as high as the average for workers in prepared food manufacturing.
And workers faced those risks all while getting paid at an $18-an-hour rate that amounted to less than a living wage in the Bay Area, according to calculations by researchers at MIT.
To organizers at UNITE HERE, the combination of those conditions made HelloFresh a prime target for unionizing — especially at a time when the risks of working through the pandemic seemed to have sparked a turning point in the American labor movement as workers...
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