For Joshua Cano, every cough “sounded like a gunshot.” Twenty-four years old, Cano works as a vitamin clerk at a Sprouts grocery store in the Texas border city of McAllen. For all of March, Cano says, he was working without gloves, masks, sufficient hand sanitizer, or limits on how many customers could enter the store. At home, where he lives with his parents and sister, he’d anxiously remove his potentially infected clothes and bag them, wipe down his boots, and wash his hands until they blistered. Cano had to be careful: His mother, undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, was highly vulnerable to COVID-19. His family needed his wages, but $11 an hour would be a cheap price for a life.
Then, a little over a month ago, a friend sent Cano a message on Twitter. It was a simple graphic that read, “Fight Covid-19, Organize at Work,” with a link to a Google Form to fill out. Cano entered his information, and soon got a call from Michael Enriquez, a Kansas City-based activist who’s worked for both Bernie Sanders and Fight for $15. With Enriquez’s guidance, Cano and a co-worker got nearly all 52 employees at their store to sign onto a list of demands, and they launched an online petition that, with a social media boost from Senator Sanders, has drawn around 7,500 signatures. In early April, Cano and others presented their demands to store management, and soon after, Cano says, they received masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and a limit on customers. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it bears noting, changed its guidance on masks around the same time.)
“This was my first time really organizing,” Cano, who is a full-time student at UT-Rio Grande Valley in addition to working full-time at Sprouts, tells me over the phone. “There was a lot I learned, like strength in numbers.”
