5/24/20
By the end of April, employees at a Walmart in Quincy, Mass., were panicking: Sick colleagues kept showing up at work. Other employees disappeared without explanation. The store’s longtime greeter was in the hospital and on a ventilator, dying of covid-19. Local health officials grew alarmed as employees and their relatives reported sick co-workers. Shoppers called to complain about crowded conditions. Despite the pandemic, grocery stores generally are not required to publicly disclose coronavirus cases involving employees or report them to local health departments. The Washington Post interviewed about 40 current and former employees at more than 30 supermarkets who alleged that the companies had not disclosed cases of infected or dead workers, retaliated against employees who raised safety concerns, and used faulty equipment to implement coronavirus mitigation measures. The $800 billion grocery industry *— dominated by a handful of major players, including Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons — employs more than 3 million people in what are typically low-paying positions with little job security.
Amid the pandemic, the country’s nearly 40,000 grocery stores have been classified by officials as essential businesses that must remain open, putting the stores at the front lines of the crisis. At least 100 grocery workers nationwide have died of complications from the virus since late March, and at least 5,500 others have tested positive. All of the grocers contacted by The Post — Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Market, Target, Kroger, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Lidl — declined to provide the number of workers who tested positive for the coronavirus or died of it. Combined, those employers account for roughly 11,300 stores and 2.4 million employees nationwide. n Los Angeles, a Ralph’s supermarket employee, Jackie Mayoral, said managers instructed workers not to talk about sick colleagues around customers and that managers also refused to disclose how many employees were infected. It was only through the union that Mayoral learned more than 20 of her colleagues at the supermarket, owned by Kroger, had tested positive for the virus. By not sharing a breakdown of coronavirus cases, the retailers may be breaching consumer protection laws, which “require businesses to provide truthful information and disclose material information to consumers.”
