When Brigitte Tran arrived Wednesday morning at the Rodeo Drive boutique where she works as a sales associate, she was on edge.
Smoke from multiple wildfires raging across Los Angeles County billowed overhead. The luxury shopping corridor usually bustling with tourists appeared a ghost town.
Tran’s co-worker texted their boss to let her know neighboring stores had closed, and described the acrid smoke in the air. But the woman, at home in Orange County, did not seem to grasp their concerns. “We will not be closing unless the mall instructs us to close,” she replied.
Tran, who, fearing professional repercussions, asked that her place of work not be named, grew more anxious as the hours ticked by. Around 3 p.m., she and the two other employees working that day mutinied. They packed up, told the security guard to head home, and locked the doors a few hours before closing time.
As the wildfires have raged across Los Angeles County, choking the air, closing schools and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate, employers and employees alike have had to manage a difficult balancing act between work and well being. Some employers responded swiftly to the crisis, shutting down offices and shifting to remote work, providing outdoor workers with masks and other protective equipment, and offering support for employees forced to evacuate. Others have been less adept, clumsy in their communications or wholly unmoved by worker concerns — sparking anger among their ranks as a result.
The fires have underscored the need for companies to have a clear plan in place to respond to emergencies, said Jonathan Porter, a meteorologist at private weather forecaster AccuWeather. The obligation, he said, goes beyond monitoring whether an office is in an evacuation zone. For example, as the current devastation unfolds, businesses should be aware of the “copious amounts of dangerous smoke that’s wafting into the air” and be prepared to provide outdoor workers with quality respirators or move them away from polluted air.
Some employers gave employees flexibility. Snap, the Santa Monica-based creator of the photo messaging app Snapchat, for example, kept its offices open on Wednesday but encouraged employees to work remotely, said a company spokesperson.
Others changed course after fielding criticism.
An announcement by UCLA that the campus would remain open for classes and regular operations on Wednesday drew anger from some instructors and students on social media.
Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer on campus, said in a post on X he would ignore UCLA’s mandate and hold an optional class online.
“Students have been up all night panicked about sleeping through evacuation orders, winds still high, branches falling all over Westwood, power outages across city, & our new chancellor (on his 2nd day) thought this should be his first bold call…” wrote Nour Joudah, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, in another X post.
That evening, UCLA backtracked, announcing it would close campus.
On Saturday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk released a statement saying classes would be held remotely for at least another week and campus operations would be curtailed. “We ask for continued flexibility and understanding as we all work through these difficult times,” Frenk wrote.
But for many workers, the chaos of the last few dayshas left them feeling like they are fending for themselves.
Tim Hernandez, a driver with Amazon Flex, an on-demand Uber-like program in which people use their own cars to deliver packages, was assigned a route Tuesday along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, which was rife with closures.
When he questioned whether making the delivery was safe, he said dispatchers at a Amazon facility in Camarillo brushed him off, leaving him to choose between concerns for his safety and worries that his rating in the Flex app would be hurt if he refused to go. He decided to try to make the deliveries, battling gusts of wind that knocked him over at one point. He lost cell signal, however, and was forced to return to the warehouse without completing the vast majority.
And when he arrived for his shift Tuesday, Alfred Muñoz, 43, an Amazon delivery driver who works out of a warehouse in the City of Industry, said he was handed an N95 mask but given little other instruction.
“It was just kind of business as usual,” Muñoz said.
High package counts and the number of stops on his assigned routes this week have made work even more difficult. On Tuesday, with wind gusts whipping debris around making it difficult to see, he had about 180 stops and 290 packages to deliver. On Thursday, the air thick with smoke and ash, he had more than 300 packages.
He woke up Thursday morning with a bloody nose and a sooty black crust in the corners of his eyes.
In response to a request for comment, Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was “closely monitoring the wildfires across Southern California and adjusting our operations to keep our employees and those delivering for us safe.”
“If a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so and the driver’s performance will not be impacted,” she said.
At the Brentwood location of popular Italian eatery Jon & Vinny’s, staff complained of headaches and sore throats in a text message group chat. An employee, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation at work, said that on Tuesday, staff huddled around an iPad with a fire map pulled up to keep an eye on the expanding evacuation zone. From the front of the restaurant, they could see the glow of the Palisades fire.
The employee said they were frustrated management kept the restaurant open when the perimeter of the mandatory evacuation zone was just two blocks away. On Wednesday, every server scheduled to work called in to say they were not coming, the employee said.
A spokesperson for Joint Venture Restaurant Group, which owns Jon & Vinny’s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During natural disasters and extreme weather, employers’ choices can sometimes mean life or death, said David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
He pointed to recent floods from Hurricane Helene that killed several workers at a plastics manufacturer. The tragedy has drawn scrutiny from state investigators, and a wrongful death lawsuit accuses the company of requiring employees to stay on site amid flooding after they requested permission to leave.
“It’s incumbent on employers to ensure the safety of their workers,” Michaels said. “The safety of their employees must take precedence over business concerns.”
Yasha Timenovich, 48, a driver for rideshare app Lyft and food delivery platform DoorDash, is more worried about declining earnings than on-the-job safety. With many restaurants and other businesses closed and would-be customers fleeing the city, he said that rides and deliveries have been slow. Traffic patterns have been strange and unpredictable with families piling into vehicles to flee fires.
Timenovich, who faced an order to evacuate his Hollywood apartment with his fiance and 6-year-old daughter Wednesday night, said he planned to stay with relatives for a few days in San Luis Obispo, where he hopes business will be better.
“I’m going to get out of here because it’s too crazy with these fires,” Timenovich said.
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