Women of the Pandemic

by Lauren McKeon

  And they were. The pandemic created a new class of frontline workers, expanding the conventional definition of emergency care to people who were never trained for it—people who, quite frankly, had never signed up for it and weren’t being compensated for it. Some got relatively lucky, like Grey—despite the extraordinary stress of the job, she said both her union and her employer supported workers. Or, at least they supported them the best they could. Others didn’t. It wasn’t just that workers were getting sick, although many did; by early May, Loblaws had reported more than 130 cases across its stores, and other large chains reported similar numbers. It was the stress. The knowing that any customer could have the virus, could pass it to you, and leave you to pass it on to everyone you love. It was watching customers hem and haw over whether to get zesty Doritos or cool ranch. Knowing that you were there risking your life every day, working longer hours, being yelled at, and receiving what felt like the world’s frustration piled on your shoulders, all so people could get a bag of Oreos. Then you’d hear about the Oshawa department manager who died, the Vaughan distribution centre worker, the Walmart employee. How could you not be afraid? “It takes the energy right out of you,” said one Toronto woman, a manager who works at two stores owned by the same chain. “You put all the strength that you have to make it through the day, to be able to do your job, to execute your daily functions. And by the time you get home, you’ve just got nothing in the tank.”

  The “right thing” lasted until June. Loblaws, which said it had spent $180 million on extra wages, clawed back its pandemic pay first, then sent its rivals a so-called courtesy email informing them of this step. Everyone else followed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move was a bitter pill for many essential workers. One Hamilton, Ontario, grocery store baker who spoke out explained that the wage hike had allowed her to put away savings for the first time since she’d been off maternity leave. Plus, the pandemic, clearly, was still happening. “We’re being called essential workers,” she said. “Well, you can’t take away essential.” As cities and other jurisdictions passed mandatory mask bylaws, many workers experienced daily verbal, and even physical, harassment. Videos of hyper-privileged customers berating workers who had politely asked them to wear a mask went viral. Speaking at the time, Medline echoed his earlier language, albeit in a considerably less rah-rah moment: “Should this terrible virus rear its ugly head to the degree that…we experienced in March and April, we will put hero pay back into our company stores in those regions or cities,” he said. “That would be the right thing to do.” (And, in late November 2020, Sobeys did reinstate some form of “hero pay” in three of Canada’s hardest-hit regions: Winnipeg, Toronto, and Peel.)

  In response to the cuts, senior executives from three major chains were called to speak before a parliamentary committee, their testimony timed like snug dominoes, but little came of it. In late August, eleven Loblaw-owned grocery stores in Newfoundland went on strike over the pandemic-pay cut. That same week, a Loblaws distribution centre in Surrey, B.C., announced a new outbreak. So much for The Birth of Fair Wages.

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  In many cases, the pandemic flipped the traditional script, putting women on the front lines. A significant number of workers who briefly gained higher (but not high) “hero” wages are women, many of them women of colour. A lot of them are new Canadians, mothers, recent students, seniors: economically vulnerable populations scraping by. They are the people we thanked with colourful, bold signs, staked in lawns and taped in windows. Children wrote pastel tributes to them in sidewalk chalk. We drew hearts and grocery carts and we drew women on signs, happy and uniform. Perhaps you thought of them gratefully when you got home and plopped three browning bananas into a bowl. Or maybe you realized, as you pulled your lumpy bread from the oven, that you could have been nicer when you paid for your flour, yeast, or butter. Maybe you thought, “Thank goodness I only have to do this once a week,” as you made it to the front of the winding line, nodded to the security guard, and walked through the automatic doors. Maybe you were one of these workers, just trying to make it through the day before you made it home with your own hard-earned bags of sugar and chocolate, chips and cheese. Maybe, regrettably, you didn’t think much about these workers at all. Certainly, there were some people in this comfort-food chain that we didn’t see, that we never see—even before the pandemic. Much of the country’s mass-produced food system relies on certain invisible workers staying invisible. It took longer for us to thank them, if we did at all.

  Pramie Ramroop went to work one morning in March and kept going until July. Seven days a week, she’d arrive early for her 4:55 a.m. shift at a food processing plant in Mississauga. She needed time to don her arsenal of protective gear and get her temperature checked. Ramroop has been an employee at the plant for over two decades. When she was hired, she worked the line for three years, packaging precooked chicken and sauces in box after box. Eventually, she worked her way up to the position of packaging lead hand, what might be called an assistant supervisor. She watches the line run. If there’s a breakdown, she figures out how to fix it. She knows every single job required to keep the plant running, and she knows how to do all of them. She’s also the person whom many workers come to if they have a question or a complaint, or if they need to share their feelings. And how they were feeling in March and April was scared. Ramroop was also scared. The plant had told workers early on that there would be no days off unless they had a doctor’s note—demand for prepackaged, frozen food was through the roof. “We’re helping our Canadian family through this pandemic,” Ramroop said, explaining the duelling emotions many workers felt. “But we don’t want to go home sick.”

  Even before the pandemic, Ramroop’s workplace followed strict safety precautions. Where COVID thrives, so too can nasty, gut-churning bacteria like listeria and salmonella. Anybody entering the plant’s ready-to-eat area already had to wear a face covering, hairnet, helmet, protective sleeves, gloves, an apron, and water boots. To get inside, you walk through a sanitizer that sprays white foam on your feet—imagine a car wash for humans, except the effect is more like the fog that eddies the ground at a rock concert. Once you’re there, handling all manners of precooked chicken, you’re so swathed in protective gear only your eyes show. COVID-19 added face shields, better masks, and extra sanitization. People distanced on the line and started tapping their feet together like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly to say hello, forgoing hugs. When one person tested positive for the virus, everyone watched, aghast, as the story made the local TV news. Ramroop was just as shaken as everyone else. “Oh my God,” employees exclaimed in the lunchroom, on the line, as they passed each other on the floor. “Oh my God, are we going to get it, too?” An entire production line closed so everyone could get tested. The company put more Plexiglass barriers up. Co-workers were forbidden to sit next to each other in the lunchroom. Cleaners regularly sprayed tables, doorknobs, washrooms—everything.

  Only one other person at that time at the plant got sick, but it didn’t make Ramroop any less nervous. Most of her family were essential workers. Her husband had a job at another food processing plant, one that was much slower to take extra precautions than hers. At the beginning of the pandemic, she drove him to Costco, stockpiled disposable masks, and forced him to wear them. Her son is a paramedic who worked some of the hardest-hit regions of Ontario. She didn’t see him for months, but sometimes he would drive by her home in Brampton and they would both wave hello. Her daughter, who lives with Ramroop and her husband, stayed working, thankfully from home. Every day after work, Ramroop bolts straight to the shower. She leaves her boots in the garage, dipped in a bucket of homemade cleaner, sanitizes all the mats, and after she gets out of the shower everything is sanitized: her lunch bag, those boots, everything she touched. Every two weeks, someone goes to the grocery store and she’ll sanitize whatever bounty they return with, too. Her son, who didn’t want Ramroop leaving the house more t
han she had to, dropped off supplies once. She washed those as well. Whenever someone stuck flyers in her door, she’d wipe the doorknobs clean.

  Throughout it all, her son helped keep her going, encouraging her to relax. Every day he called to remind her to lie down and nap. “You’re working seven days a week,” he’d tell her. “The time you wake up isn’t normal. You’re going to get drained.” She was too worried about catching the virus to risk walking through her neighbourhood, so when the weather became nicer he coaxed her to spend time in the backyard—told her to take her vitamins, try some yoga. Day in and out, he kept her spirits up. Not that Ramroop ever resented the dogged pace at work. She knew that frozen food might be the easiest way to put dinner on the table during the toughest months of the lockdown. People had to work and people were out of work, and both sets of people had children to feed. She doesn’t even really resent that her two-dollar-an-hour pandemic pay boost lasted only a month, not nearly as long as the period of intense overtime. What she does wish is that people like her, those who work behind the scenes, were more publicly acknowledged as essential workers. If not for farmers and food processing plants, how would all that food even make it to the grocery stores? “The people who put food on the table,” she said. “They didn’t get no recognition.”

  Or if they did, she added, it was because they had died.

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  The wind whips against Nga Nguyen’s grey cargo pants, pleating them haphazardly. It’s the first Monday in May, a few hours after the Cargill meat packing plant in nearby High River reopened, and exactly two weeks after Nguyen’s wife, Bui Hiep, died after contracting COVID-19 while working there. Nguyen is standing on the green-and-beige grass of Forest Lawn High School, near their Calgary home—now his alone. Through an interpreter, he is trying to explain how he is feeling, but he can’t because, really, he isn’t feeling anything at all. He’s numb. Hiep had worked at the plant since 1996, nimbly picking bones out of beef destined to become hamburger meat. She started to feel ill on Thursday, April 16, but finished her eight-hour shift, sitting on cold metal as an industrial fan blew frigid air at her back. The sixty-seven-year-old was charming and friendly at work, doling out candy to co-workers, and, as one put it, “always winning for ‘never absent employee.’ ” They were probably surprised when Hiep called in sick on Friday with what she thought was the flu. The next day, an ambulance rushed her to the hospital. The day after that, she was gone; Nguyen didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. Now, Nguyen was alone on the grass, in front of a condolence fruit basket and a white banner with orange hearts, attempting to put words to a constellation of grief. “I want to find a way to join my wife,” he told the crowd gathered at the memorial service. “I just want to end my life.”

  Nguyen and Hiep had escaped Vietnam on the same boat after the war. They landed at the same refugee camp, fell in love, and were only briefly separated when Hiep immigrated first to Canada. A year later, in 1993, Nguyen was able to follow and the two were reunited and married. They had a happy, full life, but no children. Nguyen confessed through his interpreter that he had worried about his wife dying and leaving him alone. Now that it had happened, well—the interpreter trailed off as Nguyen did, ending with a plaintive shrug, palms to the sky. The memorial, organized by Action Dignity, a community-based non-profit that supports and advocates for the city’s ethno-cultural groups, was in actual effect more of a press conference. For both Action Dignity and Nguyen, the event became a way to immortalize Hiep into more than “the Vietnamese worker who died at Cargill.” By then, the plant had laid a notorious claim to the worst workplace outbreak in North America. Almost half of the plant’s 2,000 workers had tested positive for COVID-19, and another 609 cases in Alberta had been linked to Cargill employees. At least three, including Hiep, would die. The explanation for this disastrous record was both terrible and simple: Cargill hadn’t done enough to protect its workers.

  As Edmonton’s Poet Laureate, Nisha Patel, wrote in a lengthy, rage-fuelled poem named for Hiep: “how essential the temporary have become, how foreign the ghosts will be when all that’s left are the ones that started it, I didn’t believe in revenge until I learnt that only managers got the masks.” Later media investigations showed that, indeed, Cargill did not widely supply masks to workers in March. Nor did it initially make other changes that might have helped, like installing plastic shields or applying distancing rules. The plant disassembled 4,500 cows per day, all along tightly packed lines, and introducing such measures would have presumably ground down productivity. Some workers did what Ramroop had for her husband: they bought their own masks. Often, they reused them, sometimes for weeks. Other workers tied bandanas over their mouths like cartoon bandits. Not every worker wore protection; Cargill didn’t require it, and as of March, the public hadn’t widely adopted masks either. A Globe and Mail report revealed that many workers felt pressured to come to work, even when they were sick. Multiple employees told the Globe they were cleared to return despite symptoms, unfinished self-isolation periods, recent international travel, and—most maddening of all—positive COVID-19 test results. What’s more, Cargill released its info bulletins to employees only in English, further sowing confusion at a plant where many employees are temporary foreign workers and new Canadians. Even if what they were reading would have made sense to employees, it’s likely many would not have been able to understand it.

  As COVID-19 case counts climbed too high to pretend the situation was business as usual, Cargill ordered the plant’s temporary shutdown. Perhaps predictably, the company admitted neither fault nor regret. If anything, the later statement detailing the new safety measures largely blamed the very workers it failed to keep safe. One Calgary Herald columnist described the announcement thusly: “It’s a doozy filled with whoppers.” The company said it had “progressed from encouraging personal face masks to providing them and making their use mandatory”—as if workers had chosen not to engage in health-saving measures. It also said it would work on continued “awareness” of social distancing, inside and outside work. “This includes,” it noted, “not sharing food during meals.” Cargill also stressed that it would discourage carpooling. “We put people first,” it added. “No employee should come to work if they are sick or they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.” Even a casual reader did not have to squint to read between the lines: workers’ own carelessness and bad (cultural) habits, it strongly implied, had caused the outbreak, first and foremost. At the memorial, reporters asked Nguyen if he’d heard from Cargill. No, he said, no condolences had come from the company where Hiep had spent more than two decades of her life. A forty-minute car ride away, another worker settled into his wife’s spot on the line while Nguyen fought back tears.

  Meanwhile, around this same time, in stores across the country, outburst after outburst occurred in the meat aisle. People sputtered over the blank spaces where the ground beef should be. They yelled over chicken breasts and steak cuts and the scared thought of less-than-full bellies. Combined with its other plant in Guelph, Ontario, Cargill has cornered more than 50 per cent of the beef processing market in Canada, and as these and other processing plants shut down, the seemingly endless flow to the shelves trickled. But the situation at Cargill was only the beginning. All over North America, the people who pick Canada’s produce and slaughter its meat were not well cared for, their already poor working conditions compounded by a virus that thrives in close quarters and unsanitary conditions. The hard truth is that as some people savoured plump strawberries in sun-beaten parks, barbecued in smoky backyards at six feet apart, and mollified themselves with sugar-crusted pastries, others got sick. These workers fell ill trying to bring you comfort, trying to bring their families comfort, trying to survive.

  In April, 184 employees at an industrial bakery in Toronto, which supplies goods to Walmart and Loblaws, got sick. The company, FGF Brands, had encouraged its employees, many of whom are
temporary foreign workers, to “get gritty” and make the most of the unprecedented time, during which it boosted hourly pay by a scant fifty cents. “How are you making the most of the disruption?” one company update asked the workers. Like at Cargill, masks were reportedly scarce at FGF in the early days of the pandemic, and social distancing was difficult. But employees kept coming in, even as fear rushed through them, because they couldn’t afford not to.

  These disease-ripe conditions were repeated at many farms. By early June, more than 420 migrant farm workers had tested positive for COVID-19 across six operations in Ontario. A subsequent report on behalf of over 1,000 migrant workers detailed inadequate food during their mandated quarantine upon arrival to Canada, even worse living conditions (often with one shower to share among upwards of forty workers), and increased surveillance and intimidation. Again, people reported testing positive for COVID but being told to keep working with others who’d also tested positive. As one Jamaican seasonal worker of eleven years said, “We’re treated like machines. We just want them to recognize that we’re still human.”