Photo @JPWeiland
Unfortunately, due to the threat of COVID-19 and the lack of windows in the Central Library’s community room, Chapter leadership felt it prudent to protect membership health and safety by moving the September General Membership meeting to a virtual-only meeting. We will reassess the hybrid format ahead of the upcoming October/November meetings.
In lieu of food, please reply to this email and let us know if you would like a purple CSU/PTRLA T-shirt and your unisex size (see it modeled in below image) delivered to your worksite!
The Latest COVID-19 Wave
Your union chapter does not presume to know the true health risks of repeated COVID-19 infections.
But it does follow the “precautionary principle” (something the City of Berkeley claims to follow by law as well) and is monitoring developments closely to keep our workers informed. The precautionary principle suggests that “[w]hen an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
What your union chapter does know is that consider able skepticism is warranted with respect to City Management in situations where your health could be at risk. As we wrote in February, “your boss, despite all evidence, is pretending that the pandemic and all related impacts are over.” They stripped you of COVID sick leave, access to rapid PCR testing, federal hero pay, and they refuse to install air filtration to keep you safe at work.
No matter how much the ruling class of our City, the State, the federal government, and corporate America wish to prematurely and zealously declare the pandemic “over,” so that they can go back to extracting maximum labor value and profits from you, COVID keeps spreading indiscriminately in the workplace and beyond with uncertain consequences.
City Management Likely Grossly Undercounting Workplace Cases
Since we last wrote to you in August some two weeks ago, the City Manager disclosed at least 16 more City of Berkeley employees have gotten COVID. This does not include additional cases in the Library bringing the ostensible total to 19. By some miracle, City Management claims that all but three got it outside of work (like they always do to cover their tracks). Note: the City appears to report all cases at 2100 MLK Jr Way (Public Safety Building) as work related and all cases at any other building as non-work related regardless of the facts.
We stitched together the reporting data for you; it turns out that City Management is under reporting COVID cases possibly related to lack of universal reporting by certain Departments. This obscures the truth, and keeps workers divided.
Since reliable testing is no longer accessible/free and the City refuses to provide COVID sick leave, these tragic 19 cases in two weeks likely barely scratch the surface of the true total. Some workers are probably going to work sick out of survival necessity, or because they don’t know they have COVID. Many other workers may not report their COVID cases, and even when they do, there is no guarantee that management will include them in their reports. Multiple workers said they told management they got COVID, but it seems the City never reported it.
With officials closing their eyes to the omnipresence of the virus, public health analysts and workers have to rely on wastewater, i.e., poop water from the sewer, to approximate the number of infections at any given time.
National wastewater analysis suggests that there are now up to 720-900k new cases per week nationally! That’s nearly as high as the initial 2020 Alpha and the 2021 Delta variant waves. 1 out of 46 Americans are infected right now. Over the next six weeks it is projected that 7-10% of the entire US population will be infected.
The latest variant of concern is so highly mutated it is arguably no longer Omicron and deserves a new Greek name.
Precaution and Organizing Are in Order Amidst Uncertainty
Besides the emerging evidence that 1 in 10 infections lead to debilitating Long-COVID, and that COVID is associated with a number of health outcomes such as diabetes, heart attacks and brain inflammation to name a few, there is the open question about other potential long-term effects that we may not fully appreciate for decades to come.
For example, survivors of the 1918 Spanish Influenza were 2-3 times more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s later in life. Similarly, post-polio syndrome only arises 15-40 years after infection. Other viruses such as HPV and Epstein-Barr can cause cancers many years after infection.
Again, your union chapter leadership cannot pretend to know what the future holds. We are workers just like you, and we believe, unlike the City, that you ought to be protected at work, and armed with emerging evidence.
From the outset of the COVID outbreak, so-called government and health “leaders” decided that they would roll the dice and return to “normal.” The result is that COVID is now so widespread that it may never be eradicated. That means that without basic precautions and a fundamental change to our economic system–something only workers can accomplish through organizing–you will likely contract COVID multiple times per year for the rest of your life, with the possibility of compounding issues.
We certainly hope that the most optimistic outcomes prevail: that most infections are mild and do not lead to long-term issues. But caution is warranted in case the optimistic view proves misguided.
By design there is little accountability for management decisions: both the Public Health Officer and the Deputy City Managers who oversaw the COVID response have moved on to greener and more lucrative pastures in other cities.
Given the potential risks, the precautionary principle would mean that workers should organize themselves to force management to take steps to protect workers from outbreaks.
In Solidarity,