Essential Work, COVID-19, and Air Pollution

The global pandemic has put people in the Inland Empire region of California at particular risk from higher levels of air pollution, COVID-19 infection, and the related risks of respiratory illness from chronic exposure to toxic air. These unhealthy conditions are in large part due to the growing logistics industry in the region.

When California governor Gavin Newsom issued the statewide stay-at-home order on March 19th, 2020, Inland Empire resident Guadalupe (a main source for this reporting who wished to remain anonymous for privacy concerns regarding her current employer ) was surprised to learn that her job unloading miscellaneous materials including electronics, home decor, and summer clothing were deemed essential.

Guadalupe was confused as to why the warehouse employing her remained open while other local businesses shut down. As Guadalupe put it,

"I could not understand why we stayed open at first, we could have just closed. Most of the things we had at work did not seem essential. I was worried that we were going to get COVID for no good reason." 

On March 19th, 2020, California issued the first  stay-at-home order (EO N-33-20)   in the United States. All residents were directed to stay inside their homes in an effort to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. The only people exempt from this rule were "Essential Critical Infastrcutural Workers", which according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security includes sectors that ensure "...the continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security." Along with public health, food and agriculture, energy, and other sectors, logistics, and transportation-related labor was deemed essential.

Being an essential worker was especially dangerous for Guadalupe. She contracted the virus three times while working at a logistics warehouse and now suffers from the effects of long COVID.

"I got COVID a few times. It was obviously horrible when I had the virus, but I still feel like I have not recovered. Sometimes I have migraines. They feel like something is squeezing a part of my brain for hours. The pain physically stops me from doing things. It is worse during the morning when I wake up congested with a sore throat, and just feel out of it. This is like every single day; it is not getting better."

The health impacts Guadalupe is experiencing is not just a byproduct of the pandemic. Her exposure to the virus and the adverse effects of COVID-19 are linked to a history of unjust social and environmental conditions that many racially minoritized people face in the Inland Empire.

Guadalupe is 26 years old and has lived in the Inland Empire her entire life. Warehousing is part of the fabric of every daily life in the region. It’s not a surprise that she wound up working in logistics, the same way it’s not surprising for someone living in coal country to wind up working in a coal mine.

The global logistics industry facilitates the movement of goods from producers to consumers. Broadly speaking, global logistics includes the transportation, storage, packaging, and redistribution of goods.   Over the last 40years, market-oriented policies restructured the economic landscape into one which favors unrestricted trade networks.   Many companies gained access to a competitive global marketplace from which they could seek out the cheapest goods to import into the United States and turn a profit. These market-oriented policies and economic transformations dramatically increased the movement of goods around the US.

For example, from 1990 to 2021 the Port of Long Beach, one of the busiest ports in the world and a main link to the industry in the Inland Empire,  increased its total throughput of packaging containers by 484%.   The port of LongBeach alone moved a total of 9.28 million containers in 2021 .

 This massive increase in the movement of goods is mirrored in the nearby Port of Los Angeles, which moved 10.67 million containers in 2021.  It is estimated that around 43% of goods are imported through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The consistent movement of goods contributes to making the Inland Empire region one of the most polluted places in the nation, especially for workers like Guadalupe. Many of these high pollution areas are home to communities suffering from the dual impact of environmental racism and poverty like high exposure to toxic air and the lack of access to healthcare. Take a look at the map below to get a better understanding of how these issues intersect. The areas that appear red and brown on the map feature an overlap of logistics warehouses and transportation routes and a dense concentration of housing for some of the region's poorest families, residents that are majority Black and Latino and disproportionately represented in the logistics workforce.

Guadalupe grew up next to  100,000-square-foot   warehouses, railway yards, diesel truck thoroughfares, and airports which all contribute to some of the worst air quality in the United States. At a young age, she was breathing severely toxic air. She also began to see the impact nearby industry was having on her family’s health.

“Both of my parents and grandparents worked for this industry. My grandma, mom, and dad worked inside of the warehouses and my grandpa worked as a chef at the local truck stop. I remember they would often get home tired and sometimes injured from work. I could tell they were super exhausted from work, but not like a regular job. Either way, I knew they would still get up the next day before everyone else and go back to work. I feel like anyone else with more options would not go back to that job.” 

During Guadalupe’s teenage years, her family sought financial stability and bought a home in the Inland Empire, they witnessed the rapid transformation of the region. As companies built more warehouses around their home, they also saw an increase in ground and air transportation slowly toxifying the environment. The signs of harm to the community’s health were all around. Countless neighborhood children often talked about their asthma, and at home, her brother suffered respiratory issues that prevented him from playing outdoors.

As Guadalupe reached her early 20s, she faced respiratory issues related to air pollution, she was living with her parents in a lower-income part of the Inland Empire, and was working at a warehouse by the time she turned 22.

During the pandemic, essential workers in the Inland Empire, like Guadalupe, face individual burdens of increased exposure to contamination. Additionally, studies found that air pollution and COVID-19 have had combined negative effects on people’s health. Air contamination damages people's respiratory and cardiovascular systems,   and long-term exposure to pollution is linked to higher COVID-19 mortality rates . Studies have found that it’s also likely  pollution prolongs the life of the virus  and  certain pollutants may aid in the transmission of COVID-19 .

Much of this data is underreported and mostly circulated in academic and medical journals like  Science Advances  and  Cardiovascular Research . The signs of air pollution exacerbating the effects and transmission of the virus were difficult to identify for some people, but not for Guadalupe.  

“I just felt like we were more at risk than other people, everyone I knew in my family kept working. And even though I tried to be safe and stay indoors, when I would go grocery shopping, I just felt like it was riskier. Because of my experience at work, I knew that the other shopper's working conditions were bad. I knew a lot of companies weren't being safe.”

Guadalupe and other local warehouse workers reported that their employers were negligent in their responsibility to keep their workers safe. Generally, warehouse workers are responsible for unloading goods from containers, storing and packaging the items, and loading them onto outgoing trucks. According to most of the warehouse workers interviewed for this project, they felt their employers put them in harm’s way to increase their economic profit. And various workers observed that higher management at their companies transferred their own work online, took breaks from the job, and spent more time in their private offices. It became clear that the lower-wage employee’s life came after economic profits and the health of people in higher management.

Guadalupe says her employer didn’t do enough to protect her and her colleagues.

“Since the beginning of the shutdowns, I knew there was something shady going on with the company. The fact that we did not close even though our items weren’t essential is one thing, but even when the other employees and I would ask for answers from the bosses –they would ignore us. I get that at first no one really knew how to handle the lockdowns, but then they started trying to pretend that things were normal for us, while they physically distanced themselves from the warehouse.”

According to Guadalupe, her company was ignoring most of the safety regulations the federal government was requiring.  The company was not supplying the workers with protective equipment like masks and hand sanitizer, they were not regularly cleaning the building, and they were not following distancing protocols, some workers continued to be stuck within a foot or two of their colleagues. Guadalupe also noticed company management was discouraging people with concerns about the virus to speak up.  She said warehouse management even began telling employees who contracted the virus that they should not share that information with co-workers. In some instances, co-workers informally communicated with each other using personal phone numbers to explain that they had been exposed to the virus while being in close physical proximity to colleagues.

“They got really weird about people who brought up the virus or reported being sick or exposed. I remember when I first got COVID, it was so hard to find testing, but I knew I was sick from the virus. I told my supervisor that I thought I got COVID. They told me I had to get tested. When I told them that it might take a while because I could not find a site that was willing to test me, they just shook it off and told me I should just come back to work.”

Guadalupe says her company’s management fired people who expressed health concerns or contracted the virus. It became so bad that people would just come to work when they were sick to avoid losing their source of income, she said. Some workers expressed feeling like they were better off not getting tested for COVID-19 because if they were infected, they could get fired.

“We started noticing that they would get mad at us if we brought up COVID. They treated us like if we were just trying to make excuses to be lazy. At first, they would just roll their eyes when people said they wanted to go get tested or were feeling sick, but then they gave out a notice saying they were going to be downsizing employment. After that, basically who ever got sick or called off got fired.”

For a lot of local families that relied on warehouse work, the possibility of getting laid off or being out due to illness was financially devastating. Guadalupe, her father, and her brother all worked for different warehouses in the Inland Empire during the pandemic. The three of them were also sharing a home in San Bernardino County with Guadalupe’s mom and niece.  Five people sharing a living space made it difficult to social distance and everyone eventually contracted the virus said Guadalupe.

“It was hard because we all live together. We would try to keep our distance from each other to be safe, but sometimes it was just impossible to avoid getting close to someone. We all got COVID, sometimes we did not know how we got it or how it spread at the house. It was just scary, when I got it, I felt like I was going to die. I remember when my brother and mom were sick, they couldn’t even get up from bed. Even my niece was sick. It was bad, and at the time all the hospitals were packed.”

In the Inland Empire, there were an increasing number of stories about young and healthy individuals ending up on ventilators, hospital beds, and death according to warehouse workers and local residents. A local radiographer, who asked to remain anonymous, helped measure the potential threats of the virus using x-rays explained that they observed a trend of young people coming in bad conditions,

"It really sucked, I would see young people coming in and out. It just got extremely real when I saw people who looked like they should be perfectly healthy getting really sick from the virus. The worst was when I started seeing some of my own friends coming in sick. One of my friends who I knew very well came to the emergency room. She was just a few years younger than me; she was around 27. She just never got better. I saw her slowly dying. The only thing the staff could do at one point was to try and make her as comfortable as possible."

Guadalupe grew up in the Inland Empire, near warehouses, freeways, and railyards where she was exposed to excessive air pollution for more than two decades. By her early 20s, she was experiencing respiratory issues. Like many other Inland Empire residents, she also resides in a lower-income area and lives in a densely populated multigenerational home. Most of the available local jobs for Guadalupe and her family were in the local logistics industry, which is notorious for its stringent output goals, crowded workspaces, and bringing polluting diesel trucks to the Inland Empire. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Guadalupe and her family were predictably and disproportionately impacted.

Warehouse labor exposed workers to unhealthy work environments, increasing the risk of COVID-19 transmission. The virus spread beyond the workspace and into workers' homes, putting their family's health at risk. For people in the region, the effects of COVID-19 are devastating.

While the labor elements of the pandemic are easier to tease out, the role of contamination is more difficult to pinpoint because of the slow violence it inflicts. The scientific literature demonstrates that there are close links between areas with high pollution, COVID-19 transmission, and deaths related to the virus. In the U.S. alone,   air pollution contributed to 18% of COVID-19 deaths .

 However, it is difficult to determine who specifically was impacted by the combination of air pollution and COVID-19. Both short and long-term exposure to air contamination can slowly damage people’s health –  sometimes without any explicit signs . It is likely that the intensified adverse effects that pollution has on individual and community health go under-examined and -reported. As illustrated by Guadalupe, the links to air pollution are unclear, but the evidence of people suffering the negative effects is strong.

“I kept getting it and I don’t know why. I wore my mask and kept my distance from people as much as I could. Before COVID, I did not have the health problems I do now.

After years of working in unsafe conditions, Guadalupe was laid off from her job. Since then she has been working in retail service. After more than two years of the pandemic, receiving the vaccinations, and working at a new job – like many people around the world – she strives to get back to a sense of normal. There are no signs that her migraines, weakened immune system, daily congestion, sore throat, or brain fog are going away.

 _{This story is part of the local environmental reporting initiative Unfiltered IE that is supported by the civic media project The Listening Post Collective and funded by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation.}  

  _{Thank you Yvette Vargas, Jesse Harman, and Quinn Mays for the editorial support and the helpful comments throughout the project. A special thank you to Guadalupe (V.G.B) and the Inland Empire residents, friends, and family who shared their experiences and contributed their expertise to this project.}  

 _{A total of 15 essential workers in the Inland Empire region of California were interviewed for this story. While Guadalupe's experience is the focus of the story, the other interviewees had similar experiences moving into the Inland Empire, working in unhealthy environments, and being impacted by COVID-19. The name Guadalupe is a pseudonym to protect the identity of the interviewee. Guadalupe carefully looked over, provided feedback, and approved the writing and quotes in the story map.} 

 _{The framing for this project was inspired by a  commentary  published in 2021 by Jade S. Sasser and colleagues calling attention to the compounding effects of pollution, COVID-19, labor, racism, and socioeconomics. Building from their insights, this project hopes to present a narrative-style case study of the intersecting effects of air pollution, essential work, and COVID-19.}  

 _{Data for multigenerational households and average household size maps are from the feature layers entitled Where are Multigenerational Households and What's the Average Household Size? created by  dianaclavery_uo . The author modified both of the map's symbology, replaced their base map, and added county lines.} 

 _{Jose R. Becerra Vera is a lifelong Inland Empire resident and Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University in the Department of Anthropology. His research in the Flachs Lab focuses on the intersections of ecology, health, and environmental justice.} 

 _{Please feel free to contact Jose via email: Becerra4@purdue.edu}