Why these workers are pushing for passage of New York’s Retail Worker Safety Act

At first, Jerome Bridges thought the sound coming from outside the store was firecrackers or a car backfiring.

It was a spring afternoon in 2022 and Bridges, the scan coordinator at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, soon noticed the sound was coming from inside the store, and that it was gunfire.

“So I ran to the conference room,” Bridges said during an April 17 Zoom event organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “I grabbed my produce manager at the time, my night ops manager, a cashier, and about six customers, and I barricaded the conference room door. You could still hear him shooting inside the store.”

What Bridges heard would soon be international news, a racially motivated shooting of 13 people, including four workers, which left 10 dead, one of them an employee.

“That day was horrible for me,” said Bridges, who paused for a couple of minutes as he dabbed away tears. “I still haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over two years.”

Bridges was among five workers who participated in the event, and they spoke in support of New York State’s Retail Worker Safety Act. The proposed law would require retailers to train workers in de-escalation tactics and active shooter drills and, if they employ more than 50 employees, to install panic buttons.

Gun shy: Lorraine Williams, who works at a Manhattan Bloomingdale’s in tech support, was there one day when armed robbers entered the store.

“There’s no security. Everyone got nervous, and you have customers, everyone’s trying to hide somewhere, to protect themselves…we’re their shield; they were hiding behind us,” Williams said during the Zoom call. “That was really frightening.”

Helpless and unable to alert management or law enforcement, Williams said she wished that a provision of the Worker Safety Act had been in place in the store.

“If we only had a panic button or something to alert someone to let them know there’s something happening,” Williams said, “maybe that could have helped out.”

Retail Brew sent two emails to the communications team for Macy’s, Inc., which owns Bloomingdales. We asked whether Bloomingdale’s supports panic buttons for workers and if they’ve installed them in any stores, or plan to. The company did not respond.