Gilbarco Told Greensboro Workers They Could Stay Home, Then Ordered Them In the Next Day or Get Fired

GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA — Gilbarco Veeder-Root, the fuel-dispenser and payment-systems shop headquartered at 7300 W. Friendly Avenue, put a letter in employees’ hands on April 1, 2020. If you did not feel safe coming in during COVID-19, the company would honor unpaid leave and would not issue attendance points. Layoffs longer than five days would become permanent. Unemployment help was on the table.

On April 2 the letter was dead. Workers told The AEGIS Alliance they were ordered to report or risk being fired. They asked not to be named.

«My employer Gilbarco Veeder-Root in Greensboro, North Carolina said on Wednesday and wrote us a letter saying we can be off work on Wednesday, and if we don’t feel safe we can stay home. Then on Thursday they recalled this letter and said that everyone has to come to work, and we all don’t feel safe.»

The Company Confirmed Infections. OSHA Cited Almost Nobody

By June 2020, WFMY News 2 reported that Gilbarco Veeder-Root had confirmed multiple COVID-19 cases among Greensboro employees. Those workers were told to self-quarantine. The rest of the plant kept running. Fuel pumps were «essential.» The people who built and serviced them were treated as expendable.

OSHA took more than 26,000 COVID complaints in those first months and cited almost nobody. A later GAO review said that without a COVID-specific standard before June 2021 the agency leaned on voluntary guidance — exactly the bind these workers described. A promise on Wednesday, a threat on Thursday, and a federal workplace cop that would not write a ticket.

The Parent Company Is Still Here. The Workers Were Disposable

Gilbarco Veeder-Root is now under Vontier Corporation (NYSE: VNT), spun out of Fortive. The parent has described itself as a multi-billion-dollar industrial technology company serving roadside convenience, fleet, and auto repair. Gilbarco still lists Greensboro as global headquarters. The workers who kept the pumps running in April 2020 were the ones told to swallow the risk so the fueling network would not skip a day.

The AEGIS Alliance published the letter because a company does not get to write a stay-home policy one afternoon and shred it the next without the public seeing the paper. Related: our CARES Act reporting, what happened to the jobs, the Kaiser Permanente blank-swab trial, and more Health News.