A Natural Disaster Last June Hit My Place Of Employment Now I’m Forced To Work Outside In The Cold For The Same Rate As Everyone Else.

So for context, I work for a shipping company that was by a tornado months ago. The building caved in destroying a lot of our machinery and our operation are pretty essential so work eventually had to resume soon.

The solution they came up with was while outsourcing some of the volume we normally process to other neighboring facilities, we would set up a modular conveyer belt with a roof and some heaters but ultimately very barebones and restricting on space compared to our old work area. It’s not as safe as there’s less space to put a lot of these large packages out of the trucks, every time it rains it gets slippery because rain easily gets in between the dock station and the trucks. We have to walk through this area repeatedly so we also get pretty wet and miserable.

They’ve opened up some operations in the main building now but only a portion of our work force gets to work in there and in another off site location they run. The unlucky ones are still in the mobile dock they set up. They told us they’d have everyone inside before it gets this cold but temperatures are starting to go below freezing and we’ve heard nothing about that. The heaters do not hardly work as the dock does not retain any heat.

Do we not have a right to request a different rate for having to work outside in drastically worse conditions than the rest of the workers with the same position as us? Would OSHA be worth contacting for the shabby excuse for a work area?

We already don’t make a lot and this place is known to work people as hard as they’ll let themselves be worked to the point where the physical demands of keeping up with one’s workload get a lot of people hurt or injured.