Pa. grocery workers finally get the COVID-19 protection they deserve from entitled shoppers | Maria Panaritis

Of all the coronavirus crackdowns, one taking hold this week in Pennsylvania finally delivers something important to a gargantuan group of essential workers whom we, our corporations, and our economy have dissed for decades: supermarket staffers.

The directive from Harrisburg also strikes at a group that could use a past-due pandemic smackdown: COVID-19 deniers. Customers so pathologically entitled that they consider it their right under God to make others sick.

What is this magical wand with such power?

An order by Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine that as of this week requires everyone who sets foot into a grocery — customers and employees — to wear masks.

» READ MORE: All Pa. businesses must require employees and customers to wear masks amid coronavirus pandemic

No mask, no entry. This is no longer an honor system. No longer does some vague “guidance” from government urging masks cut the mustard. Want to shop for your Hellmann’s without a mask? Say hello to the police officer who will kick you to the curb.

This directive is coming not a minute too soon. Grocery workers are dying of coronavirus-related ailments in spots across the country. They are in the line of fire — this group among the lowest-paid of all “life-sustaining” workers still heading out to jobs across Pennsylvania.

» READ MORE: Still going in to work in Pennsylvania amid the coronavirus? Chances are, you’re a low-wage worker, data show. | PolitiFact

It will force reluctant chains to arm their staff with masks, and enforce social distancing and other measures.

Not to be diminished, though, is that it also will knock sense into the heads of recalcitrant customers.

No longer is anyone allowed to spread germs in grocery stores as part of some perceived constitutional right to be a deleterious dimwit. By sidling up to the bread guy. By breathing over the customer service counter.

The state directive, had it been implemented weeks earlier, might have come in handy when, according to the union representing workers at a Philadelphia Fresh Grocer supermarket, a clerk was stabbed with a knife. (He is home recovering, the union said.)

“A group of rowdy young folks didn’t like being told that they had to wait, that there were too many people in the store,” United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 chief Wendell Young IV told me Tuesday. It happened on Broad Street. “They dragged him out into the parking lot and stabbed him. It was a clerk who was assigned to help work the front door and hold customers off until there was enough room.”

“We’ve had incidents in other places, too,” Young continued, “where customers break into arguments.”

The new rules come six weeks into the government-ordered shutdown of schools and nonessential businesses that took hold, starting in waves, across Southeastern Pennsylvania and beyond under orders of the Wolf administration to contain the spread of COVID-19.

ShopRite supermarket scion Jeff Brown, who runs 12 stores across the region, said it had been tricky until now, trying to work with the UFCW to aggressively protect workers. He simultaneously had to tiptoe around patrons who refused to wear masks.

“Some customers feel they have a right not to wear it,” Brown said. Their so-called gripe? Liberty. As if any of them have been refusing to wear seat belts while driving? Or not paying for car insurance? Please.

“Generally, if you don’t have a crisis, we’re accustomed to liberties,” Brown said. “But this is a crisis where one person’s liberty could be another person getting sick. We can’t really allow that.”

Now?

“Theoretically, now the police commissioner of Philadelphia has the right to tell the police officers to tell stores to clear out people or shut it down,” said UFCW’s Young.

Disrespect shown toward grocery workers is part of a bigger problem with our economy that had been brewing for decades.

Grocery chains used to be a source of living-wage jobs. But corporations in pursuit of ballooning profits and revenue moved into the supermarket business. They attacked wages, hours, and benefits packages. Walmart, Giant, Target, Aldi, and Amazon — to name a few in our region — do not have unionized workers. ShopRite, Acme, Fresh Grocer, and Rite Aid have union workers.

The average pay overall for the 120,000 grocery workers in Pennsylvania is exceptionally low, an Inquirer analysis found this week. They make up one of the largest groups of life-sustaining workers under the governor’s definition of who may work during the COVID-19 shutdown. Yet they earn only about $23,000 a year while telecommunications industry professionals working from home are notching take-home pay of $111,000 a year.

These workers who are keeping the rest of us alive by exposing themselves to the deadly coronavirus are making so little money.

It is a disgrace. A reckoning is due.

Brown said his ShopRite workers have shown up with very little attrition. He is paying a hazard differential and also offers sick leave for confirmed and suspected COVID-19-infected workers. Meanwhile, word is that workers at non-union megachains, which are not independent-owner operated like ShopRite, are calling out in high numbers.

“I hear around anecdotally,” Brown said, “that some locations have lots of people not coming because they’re afraid.”

UFCW has secured 25,000 plastic face shields and is distributing them to workers.

A union doing good by its people. But these are workers in an industry who should not be hanging by a thread to begin with.