Staging Battle Against Anthrax in Mail Rooms

In the entertainment industry, working in a mail room historically has been a rite of passage, a place to spend a few months learning the ropes and the players before moving on to become a power broker. For most mail room employees, though, it’s unglamorous and tedious work often performed in the bowels of buildings under harsh fluorescent light.

In recent days, it also has become potentially hazardous as letters contaminated with anthrax spores passed through mail rooms in New York City, Washington and Florida and sent fears of death and disease all over the nation.

The anthrax scare has added mail room employees to the ranks of relatively low-paid U.S. workers such as baggage handlers, private guards and airport security people who have been thrust uncomfortably close to the front line against terrorism.

“I never expected anything like this. Now, my boyfriend’s buying gas masks. I’m probably not going to stick this out. I’m scared,” said Elise Sherman, 21, who recently took a mail room job with a major Hollywood talent agency that asked not to be named for fear of being targeted by terrorists. Last week, she had the option of wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask. She decided to skip the mask.

“I didn’t sign on for this. I just want to be an actress,” she added.

There has been one confirmed death from anthrax, and at least 40 people in New York City, Washington and Florida have been exposed to anthrax spores.

That has forced businesses, government agencies and educational institutions around the nation to implement new mail room procedures based on information from public health officials, the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI.

There also has been a run on latex gloves and surgical masks as mail room administrators seek to provide protection for and allay the concerns of their employees.

Enrique Flores, a 20-year-old employee at the William Morris agency, was wearing gloves and a surgical mask Friday. “It gets pretty hot under this mask,” he said.

He said he took the job to make contacts to pursue his dream of becoming a sports agent.

Bruce Tufeld, an agent who has represented Rob Lowe, Kelsey Grammar, Shirley Jones and Billy Dee Williams over the course of his career, started out in the business working in a mail room and says he now would be “scared to death” to be in one.

Even though the anthrax incidents have occurred mostly at media companies, mail room workers at all kinds of companies and organizations are taking precautions.

“I am washing my hands 10 to 12 times a day,” said Kiran Shah, a supervisor for mail services at UCLA, which handles about 40,000 pieces of mail a day.

“It’s stressful. We have to think about it all of the time, and we have to be careful about what we are doing.”

Although some voiced concerns for their own safety, few said they would consider quitting. And veteran mail room employees were determined to follow as normal a routine as possible.

At the One Wilshire office building in downtown Los Angeles, William Totty, 59, was refusing to wear gloves or a mask.

“These are my instruments,” he said, holding up his hands under the dim light of fluorescent bulbs in a small room devoid of decorations save for photographs of his wife and family.

“If I use gloves, I lose that sense of touch, I might miss a smaller envelope beneath a larger one and send it to the wrong office.”

As for the possibility of anthrax infection, Totty scoffed and pointed to the parking garage that abuts his small office.

“I’m probably dying of something like carbon monoxide right now,” Totty said. “I have faith in God. If I get infected, I get infected. I’m not going to let some guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan run my life.”

Ray Thomas, a senior mail processor at UCLA, has worked at university campus mail systems long enough to recall Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who killed three people and hurt 23 others with mail bombs before his arrest in 1996.

The anthrax scare, Thomas said, is more frightening because the threat could come in any envelope.

“I’ve handled 8,000 to 10,000 letters a day. It definitely makes the workplace a less attractive place. It makes retirement something to really look forward to,” Thomas said.

Thomas’ job pays between $13.49 and $17.76 an hour. Regular mail processors can earn as little as $11.52 an hour at UCLA and less at other UC schools.

Many mail rooms have implemented much more stringent procedures for mail handling along with new ways to protect their employees.

Those include the FBI’s recent advisory on how to identify suspicious packages; sample instructions for mail room employees from the Society of Human Resource Management; instructions from the U.S. Postal Service on what to do when anthrax is received; and an anthrax health advisory from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Employment law firms such as Littler Mendelson also were giving advice on what employers should do about the anthrax threat and suspicious mail.

Jeff Tanenbaum, a senior shareholder for the firm’s occupational safety and health group, said most American businesses are not likely to be targets of terrorists, and that steps taken to protect workers also might “raise additional safety and health issues, such as allergies and rashes from latex.”

“Employers should not go lightly or rashly into trying to protect their workers,” he said.

“It’s absolutely scary stuff,” said Hip Lui, acting general manager for purchasing and central services for the Los Angeles County government.

Lui said his employees had received on-site training this week from Postal Service inspectors on how to handle such situations.

On Tuesday, according to representatives of the Service Employees International Union, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will be asked to talk about the problem.

“We want to make sure that our employees are being taken care of,” said a spokesman for the union, which represents mail room workers and 50,000 county employees.

That’s given L.A. County mail supervisor Glover Keetin, 53, a new sense of importance about his job.

“We were talking about that 7-month-old baby that got exposed,” Keetin said.

“That letter got past a mail room and into someone’s office and that baby got exposed. We don’t want that to happen here.”