Oh Costco.....
Coronavirus: Costco Corporate Employee Dies But Campus Remains Open
Quotes from article:
An employee who worked at Costco Wholesale’s corporate headquarters near Seattle died Sunday after contracting
the coronavirus disease COVID-19, according to an internal email obtained by BuzzFeed News, and some employees are upset the company is refusing to fully close the campus or direct all employees to work from home.
“The company has handled everything very poorly,” a
Costco employee, who works in a nearby building on the campus and who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of losing her job, told BuzzFeed News. “Someone died and they’re still keeping the building open and having us come in.”
"Employees have to choose between a check or their health," said a second employee, who also asked to remain anonymous.
News of the employee’s death was first published by the Seattle radio station
KTTH late Tuesday.
When contacted for comment by BuzzFeed News, a Costco spokesperson responded after this story was first published. She said the company had received several media inquiries about their response to the coronavirus outbreak and their measures to keep shoppers safe. "Costco is not staffed to respond individually to all these questions," she wrote. "While this statement may not specifically address your inquiry, please understand that we will not be able to respond to your specific questions."
For the past few weeks, Costco has kept its sprawling campus in Issaquah, Washington, open and its several thousand workers in the office, as employees voiced concerns and fears about their health and safety as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths continued to mount in the region.
“What is [it] going to take for Costco Execs to change their path?” one staffer wrote on an employee bulletin board March 6, when the county’s death toll
had hit 10. “More cases? More deaths? A sudden quarantine that interrupts the whole campus?”
On Tuesday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed an emergency aid bill for the state after the number of confirmed cases topped 1,000. The bulk of patients, 569, live in King County and of the 52 people who have died in the state as of Tuesday, 43 of them were from that area.
Radio station
KUOW reported earlier this month on a Costco memo requiring workers to continue to come into the office despite hundreds of other Seattle companies, including
behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft, following health officials’ directives to let employees work from home.
In the email sent March 4, viewed by BuzzFeed News, the company’s senior leaders, led by CEO Craig Jelinek, explained that that while “some local companies are reportedly allowing employees to work from home,” Costco is a “retail business” and “a great number of Costco employees locally and across the country cannot work from home.”
Thus, Costco executives said, corporate employees must continue to go to the office to “support our retail business.”
“The decision may be unpopular with some, but we consider it a matter of equity and fairness,” they wrote.
Costco leadership said that employees who were unwell or at a higher risk of catching the virus could use their sick leave or PTO to stay home and that “these absences will be excused.”
A Costco employee told the
Seattle Times earlier this month that the company has “every ability to let employees work from home and many successfully have and do.”