The People’s Pandemic Response calls on city policy-makers to put Milwaukee’s working class to work in good jobs that pay living wages.
The city should take aggressive action to protect public health and safety and ensure consumer, worker, and business confidence in the safety and health of every building of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee should prepare to re-imagine and re-open, with a strong economy flowing from clean buildings.
Join us in calling on our legislators to re-open Milwaukee safely, prioritizing putting people to work cleaning buildings and enforcing health standards in good-paying jobs.
Click each of the tenets to read the detailed proposal below
We have a plan to open Milwaukee safely and put people to work. Get involved here.
The CDC recommends wearing masks in public settings:
“We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms and that even those who eventually develop symptoms can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity — for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing — even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms.
In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”
While other states require masks to be worn in public spaces, Wisconsin does not. The city of Milwaukee has a responsibility to protect its residents and workers by requiring face masks in buildings and spaces where social distancing is difficult or impossible.
How does Milwaukee make sure everyone wears a mask?
Without city policy-maker intervention, it will be the retail, hospitality, and service industry workers who become the de facto enforcers of public health guidelines. Making these workers enforce masks or social distancing risks violence in jobs already fraught with health perils. In addition to risking exposure to COVID-19 by coming into contact with the public, workers tasked with mask enforcement risk verbal harassment and the threat of physical violence.
- A Target employee in Van Nuys, California, ended up with a broken left arm after helping to remove two customers who refused to wear masks.
- A cashier told a man refusing to wear a mask that he could not buy a pack of cigars at a convenience store in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. He punched her three times in the face.
- In San Antonio, a man who was told he could not board a public bus without a mask shot a passenger. The victim was hospitalized and the gunman was arrested.
- And in a confrontation that turned deadly, the security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot and killed after insisting that a customer put on a mask.
To ensure public health safety and the safety of workers, when any business opens up, it should be required to post trained security personnel to ensure everyone wears masks and that social distancing is followed.
These workers must ensure masks are worn in public buildings and spaces, have masks available to those who don’t have them, and be trained in de-escalation — on no account should the public be faced with the risk of violence. At the same time, these security guards must be trained, equipped, and empowered to enforce mask use to uphold necessary public safety requirements.
These building service workers should be paid living wages with good benefits and rights on the job.
The CDC includes routine, thorough cleaning and disinfecting of frequently touched objects and surfaces in its recommended practices to safely reopen America. Along with social distancing, hand washing, staying home when sick, and requiring wearing face masks, Milwaukee policy-makers must take aggressive action to protect public health and safety and ensure consumer, worker, and business confidence in the safety and health of every building of Milwaukee. In the words of the CDC, “it is essential to change the ways we use public spaces to work, live, and play.”
When any business opens up, it should be required to be cleaned daily by cleaners with proper materials, adequate PPE, appropriate training, and the ability to voice concerns.
With these requirements in place, we can have clean and safe buildings while building a healthy economy. We need you to adopt a program for clean and safe buildings that put thousands of people to work with economic security.
Buildings must be thoroughly cleaned daily in order to minimize contact transmission of the coronavirus on surfaces. Patrons, employees, and other building visitors must have the confidence that any building is cleaned and disinfected. Businesses must have the confidence that their establishment can safely handle employees, patrons and other visitors, along with the confidence that they will not be shut down on account of further contact transmission.
Every square foot of every building that is opening up should be cleaned by qualified, trained, equipped cleaners paid living wages, with a voice about health and safety. This is an opportunity to put people who lost their jobs to work in critical jobs that pay living wages.
Decisions affecting the health and safety as well as the economic security of working people should involve the voices of workers.
Healthcare workers serving on the front line in this pandemic should have a seat at the table along with healthcare employers. Essential workers who risk exposure to enable critical services should have a seat at the table with their employers, too. And unemployed service workers thrown out of work because of the pandemic should have a seat at the table with their industry.
Together, workers and employers across industries can develop and implement workforce practices, employment standards, and health and safety protocols — but only if workers are at the table with a voice.
City policy-makers should prioritize worker voice in the decisions made about their work and lives and sectoral approaches.
Business and industry voices always will be heard. For worker voices to be heard — and to carry influence with power and authority more balanced — city policy-makers should create structures that bring together representatives of business and industry and of workers in those industries.
This concept — called “sectoral stakeholder” structures — provides an even playing field for all with commonality, aligns industry decisions with the common good and public interest, leverages the scale of collective wisdom through the business and worker stakeholder insights and perspectives, and creates a coordinated mechanism through which rational decisions can be made.
City policy-makers should create sectoral boards or councils, comprising equal representatives of employers and workers, in the healthcare sector, essential services sector, and the service industry, charged with the development and implementation of industry-wide employment standards, workforce practices, and operational recommendations for all employers, including for this pandemic moment, for the re-imagination and re-opening of our economy, and with contingency for a future outbreak of COVID-19.