flagged staff members who work in multiple facilities as a factor in the hundreds of cases of COVID-19 associated with the Life Care Center of Kirkland, a nursing home in King County, Washington, and to the spread of the virus to other nursing homes in the area.
Many large companies have come to rely on a temporary pool of workers, whether they are in-house or drawn from an agency, said Susan Houseman, the director of research at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a think tank in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “This kind of on-demand workforce, where workers just appear as regular employees but have unpredictable schedules, is very prevalent in retail, restaurants, and across the hospitality industry,” she said.
Despite the cleanings stipulated by both Walgreens and CVS, employees said that it is difficult to clean stores frequently and that supplies remain scarce. When someone tested positive at one of the CVS stores where the Dallas floater worked, the people in charge of sanitizing it were the pharmacist and the lead technician, who cleaned the counters, keyboards and phones with Lysol wipes. It was a valiant effort, he said, but hardly the work of professionals.
“Because you’re not on a conference call or on a mailing list with a core group of employees and managers, you don’t receive the same regular communications that others would,” the Dallas floater said. “You are relying on others to play telephone with you about what’s going on.”
well fuck