Fish Plant Workers Demand Safer Working Conditions Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

About a month ago, fish plant worker Yamileth Alvarado says she and her team got together at the Tichon Seafood facility in New Bedford to listen to a presentation on how workers can protect themselves from COVID-19. A government employee, through a translator, told them what many of us have been hearing for weeks:

• Maintain six feet of separation from everyone at all times.
• Wash your hands.
• Disinfect everything.
• Don’t reuse gloves.

Alvarado felt some relief thinking the facility would start putting these precautions in place. “But everything continued as any other day,” Alvarado told The Public’s Radio in Spanish. “Nothing changed.”

“We are so close to each other that we can hear the person next to us breathing,” Alvarado said. “And nowadays [given COVID-19] this is not how things should be.”

Workers receive sleeves, hairnets, and two pairs of latex gloves every week, says the 32-year old fish processor. Any other protective equipment, like masks, must be purchased on the workers’ dime. And the basics, Alvarado says, are hard to come by. There is no hand sanitizer and one alcohol spray bottle at the entrance of the facility that workers congregate around.

Read the rest of this story at The Public’s Radio’s website.