The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above.
Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day.
And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks."
The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse.
Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.