In late July, Gloria Lopez, a weight checker at a frozen food processing plant in Vernon, noticed that a plexiglass divider was missing between workers on the production line.“I said to one of them, ‘Do you feel comfortable the way you’re working?’ And she said, ‘No, but what do you want me to do?’” Lopez recalled.
Overhill Farms and Jobsource have said they plan to dispute the citations. Overhill Farms called the allegations “erroneous,” asserting that Cal/OSHA falsely claimed that the company failed to install plexiglass dividers. According to county health officials, there had been 26 coronavirus cases from March through August at Overhill Farms. Most cases were in April, when 11 workers became sick.
“When coronavirus began, no one knew what rules to follow,” Romero said. “From there, we saw we needed to do something to protect ourselves.”A group of workers with safety concerns approached their union, which proposed the idea of the committee to Overhill managers.
“Some of the things they accomplished was giving the workers a voice,” she said. “They got the ability to shut down the line when they saw unsafe things happening. That is a huge, huge power to stop production because that impacts the company in its pocketbook.”
So sad