Lock-In Emerges as Serious Issue in Workplaces
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As a floor-waxer working the overnight shift, the 23-year-old immigrant would arrive at dozens of city stores just after the last customers left - and before the manager secured the door and went home with the key. Often alone and without a phone or exit, Mr. Romano remained inside for up to 14 hours, stealing time for sleep if he finished early. "They just left and said 'work,'" Mr. Romano said in Spanish. "Yes, we would have died if there had been a fire," he added with a shrug, "But we think about other things, we think about work." Mr. Romano, who quit cleaning in October to take a construction job, and others like him - subcontracted cleaners serving small, independently owned supermarkets - say few managers provide emergency contacts or exit directions. Even more troubling, workers report phones are often blocked from making outgoing calls and fire exits are frequently padlocked, a criminal violation. "It's absolutely deplorable to hear this is going on in the 21st century," said a lawyer representing Wal-Mart workers in a federal class-action suit, James Linsey. The suit alleges the company violated a false-imprisonment common law by locking in its workers, some of whom have suffered broken limbs, asthma attacks, and heart failure while under key. "People need to be reminded of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire," Mr. Linsey said. In 1911, 146 mostly Italian and Jewish young women working in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village died when a fire broke out in the locked building, raising the nation's awareness of immigrant working conditions. The disaster led to the passage of 36 labor laws and served as a foundation for New York State's Industrial code, an industrial safety model for the country. But most federal and state laws, including New York's, allow workers to be locked in as long as there is a clear exit route. What exists, says Mr. Linsey, is an overlooked situation where workers are susceptible to life-threatening injuries and are kept captive against their will. Patrick Purcell, the director of organizing for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500, which represents 22,000 New York-area supermarket workers, said scores of nonunion cleaners have told him locked fire-escape doors are a common occurrence during night shifts in smaller, nonunion stores. "You have no safety training going on, no communication going on," Mr. Purcell said. "If the fire door is locked, who is [a worker] going to tell, his boss? His boss is going to say, 'If you don't like it, quit.' " A night-shift cleaner who has worked in more than 30 stores for a subcontractor who owns the cleaning equipment and negotiates with the stores, said he just accepted locked doors as part of the job. "You get used to it, you get used to everything," said the 24-year-old Mexican. He spent two nights so far this week working in stores with their fire exits padlocked. For each shift he earns around $60. "Sometimes, 13 hours alone inside a supermarket, you want to talk to family, friends but without a phone you can't." If he completes his work early, he takes a nap in the store's basement on piles of Bounty paper towel rolls. "If you finish at 1 a.m. you can't leave because you're locked in," he said. "It happens all the time." The young man recalled a brush with fire not long ago at a supermarket in Hunts Point, the Bronx. When he smelled something burning, he called the subcontractor. It turned out there was an electrical short in the meat refrigerator and all of the exits were locked. The subcontractor said he didn't have a number for the manager and asked how bad the fire was. When the worker responded, "it's not so bad, it's just smoke," he was instructed to keep working until the manager arrived in the morning. "In all the time I've worked, maybe three [managers] have said 'here is the exit, here is a number if you have a problem,'" said the cleaner, who has been floor-waxing for three years, sometimes alone and sometimes as part of a team, in stores around the city. Supermarket managers say locking in workers is a necessary security measure for workers and merchandise. "We lock them in. Because they're just here to clean the floor," said the manager at the Forrest Hills C-Town, Charlie Braunfeld, whose store employs night floor-waxers twice a week. He said exits are marked and workers can call him if they have a problem. "Why wouldn't we lock them in? Otherwise we have to have a supervisor there all night." A manager at the Bravo Supermarket on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, where one cleaner took pictures of the padlocked fire-escape door, said there were secret exits. Cleaning the small store only takes a few hours and the workers would sleep there while they waited for him to arrive in the morning, said the manager, who declined to give his name. Asked why the workers did not just leave through the secret exits, he said they need to wait for the subcontractor to pick them up, and the neighborhood is dangerous at 3 a. m. "It's mainly about them, protecting them if something happened to them," he said of the locked doors. The manager at an Associated Supermarket on 96th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, Leon Kim, said supermarkets lock in night workers to protect their merchandise. "It is not secure," Mr. Kim said in Spanish. "If there was a person who you could confide in the situation would be different, but it's not like that. They can rob, they can rob a lot." But Mr. Kim, whose store fire exit was blocked by a trash can and a stack of crates one day this week, said it is also about the cleaner's security. "There are not problems. There are not complaints." Neither the New York City Fire Department nor the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said they had received complaints from workers locked in supermarkets. This is no surprise to Artemio Guerra, the director of organizing at the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn. Mr. Guerra, who is leading a campaign against the lock-ins. He said night-shift cleaners tend to be newly arrived, undocumented immigrants who are fearful of the government and unaware of safety rights. "None of these workers is going to approach an agency with their concerns," Mr. Guerra said. Mr. Guerra sees locking in workers and not providing them with an emergency plan as endemic in the industry. "I see this as a supermarket industry problem, not a one-contractor problem," he said. "When the Triangle Shirt Factory happened in the early 1900s, one of the lessons we learned is that workers cannot be treated this way. Impairing someone from leaving can have fatal consequences."
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