Spark Week — Also Known in FNS as Super-Spreader Week
Last week was one of the monthly Spark Weeks at OHSU. This monthly event is intended to promote healthy eating and reward employees for their service. However, there is another perspective to Spark Week — that of the workers who make and serve the food. For the employees of Food and Nutrition Services, Spark Week is a seven-day test of their mental and physical safety, a monthly ritual that reminds them that their safety and concerns come secondary to making OHSU look good via internal promotions and branding.
“This is supposed to be a nice thing, but it feels like punishment,” said one FNS employee on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from OHSU. It feels that way because at OHSU’s Plaza Café and the third-floor cafeteria, Spark Week draws crowds — big crowds — of employees who are often on break, dealing with mask fatigue and looking to take a rest from admittedly grueling shifts. This means crowding, table-restriction violations and, at times, lax masking protocols from customers. “Is it safe to have ten people just standing around waiting for us to make food?” another anonymous employee asked.
Unfortunately, despite pleas from Local 328 staff and stewards, OHSU’s FNS management refuses to regularly or effectively manage crowds and customers, taking an approach similar to at a restaurant: the customer is always right. Currently, there is no one assigned to manage how many folks enter the cafeteria, no one enforcing physical distancing and not a soul verifying whether the group of four employees sharing a table are from the same household (spoiler alert: they are not).
FNS workers have reported that the problems are worse since vaccinations have happened, because people have let their guards down or assumed herd immunity within the hospital. “Just because we’re all vaccinated doesn’t mean my at-risk spouse is,” responded a frustrated FNS employee when discussing the issue. While some of the responsibility falls on the individual customers, who need to be and should be more respectful and cautious, the lion’s share falls squarely on OHSU, which needs to take responsibility for the safety of its staff and the community at large, especially with COVID-19 variants threatening to send us into another surge.
As disappointing as the lax attitude is, it should not be surprising. Last spring, while the hospital geared up for the onslaught of coronavirus patients, OHSU’s FNS management decided to bring all of their employees in, rather than pay people to stay home like most departments did. FNS management proceeded to flout safety protocols, share misinformation about the virus and take as laissez-faire an attitude as one could imagine toward the health and welfare of their staff. This behavior brought on one of the first COVID-19 outbreaks at any employer in the state, resulting in roughly 15 positive cases in the first few weeks of the pandemic and eventually leading to the tragic death of an employee.
While OHSU’s upper management promised change, through a culture assessment and a new set of guiding principles and department guidelines, those words have not translated to very much action on the ground. In mid-February, our union received photographs of FNS employees who were forced to do huddles in an unventilated supply closet without any physical distancing. This was reported and the practice stopped, but to the best of our knowledge, the manager who made that reckless decision is still employed at OHSU and faced no significant penalty for putting employees’ safety at risk. Furthermore, our union is still waiting for a critical report on the FNS coronavirus outbreak done by a third-party investigator — despite OHSU’s promises to deliver said report, it still has not been turned over.
OHSU can make Spark Week safe by doing the following:
Pause Spark Week for the duration of pandemic-related modified operations.
Barring that, OHSU can make Spark Week safer by doing the following:
Enforce social-distancing, masking and table-restriction policies by a designated employee (at peak times in particular).
Make hot food self service with no substitutions, rather than made fresh to order.
Open Mac Hall Bistro and any other available spaces to decrease the concentration of people at the two main cafeterias.
Add more scoop-and-serve and pre-made salad options.
Create a maximum-occupancy standard based on the size of the space.
Utilize these standards for all spaces at all times.
Take seriously the concerns voiced by FNS workers and by Local 328 staff and stewards.
Spread food production throughout all available kitchen spaces.
Assign cooks to different production areas, instead of concentrating them all at Plaza Café and the third-floor cafeteria.
Will OHSU listen to its employees and take the above steps, or will it continue to play a dangerous game of roulette with workers' lives? With the department’s history as our guide, we are skeptical that FNS management will do the right thing, but this is a good test of how much the culture assessment will have an impact. In dealing with the FNS debacle last spring, one union official said it felt like a micro-version of World War I, where people in fancy suits were throwing poor people at problems they did not understand or know how to safely tackle and then just washing their hands of the result. One FNS employee summed it up more simply: “It’s like we are fucking expendable and always have been.”