Nora Rodriguez is stuck at home recovering from symptoms consistent with COVID-19, and she’s worried her employer won’t cover her sick leave.
Rodriguez is an employee of housekeeping company A&A Cleaning, and she tells the Scene she worked a shift at Vanderbilt Legends Club in mid-March. Shortly afterward, Rodriguez requested some vacation time off — just a week, she says. But before her vacation was over, Rodriguez started feeling ill. She had a fever, and her chest hurt — it felt like the flu but stronger, she says. She visited a doctor who found she had symptoms consistent with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and ordered her to self-isolate for two weeks.
“It’s an ugly disease,” Rodriguez says in Spanish.
She asked A&A Cleaning for paid sick leave, and was told to use her vacation days instead.
“I told my supervisor I couldn’t return to work. I had to stay at home for 14 days.”
Rodriguez has four children — one an adult, the rest teenagers or younger — and her husband isn’t working at the moment.
Workers’ Dignity, an organization that helps workers campaign for benefits, back pay and other causes, took up her fight. Prior to falling ill, Rodriguez had attended Workers’ Dignity meetings and workshops, where she voiced concerns about the lack of personal protective equipment. Cecilia Prado, an organizer with Workers’ Dignity who is advocating for her fight, says Rodriguez described handling harsh cleaning chemicals without gloves. For Prado, situations like Rodriguez’s highlight ongoing problems that only worsen in a pandemic.
“It has really exposed flaws in our system, especially around workers’ rights,” Prado says. “The systems we have right now are not protecting workers [and] do not ensure that their health, their security is going to be taken into account.”
Prado adds that the use of subcontractors like A&A Cleaning by hospitals, universities and other companies can make accountability difficult when it comes to workers' rights.
Vanderbilt students and alumni are also organizing on behalf of Rodriguez. Minnie Mangafas is a senior at Vanderbilt helping coordinate efforts of an email and phone campaign — their main tools currently, since students are mostly away from campus and gatherings are best avoided during a pandemic. Undergraduates, graduate students, alumni and incoming freshman have been involved in these efforts, she says.
Mangafas says a petition and letter of support for Rodriguez was passed by the student government Wednesday night, which makes it a piece of legislation that will go before the board of trustees.
The petition calls for the university to pressure A&A Cleaning to provide paid time off, to only contract with companies that ensure such benefits for sick employees and to intervene directly when contracted companies fail to provide sick pay.
Mangafas says labor laws in Tennessee aren’t adequate to help people like Rodriguez. Rogriguez’s chances of obtaining paid time off, says Mangafas, depend on the goodwill of this company, pressure from the university, and the fact that undergrads and grad students at Vanderbilt are interested in helping her.
“There's really nothing systematic here that she could fall back on,” she says. “It has all to do with chance and coincidence.”
The PGA general manager of the Vanderbilt Legends Club tells the Scene that the golf club will be terminating its contract with A&A Cleaning, and emphasized that Rodriguez was an employee of A&A Cleaning, and not the club or university.
A&A Cleaning has yet to respond to a request for comment.
