Read: Exclusive: Amazon confirms first known coronavirus case in an American warehouse

This doesn’t appear to be an issue of intentional malpractice by companies, but rather a failure to catch up with the severity and frequency of COVID-19 cases, and to reconcile company policies with fast-changing state and federal guidance that affect the lives of workers and their families.

Still, even unintentional delays hit workers hard. Interviews with Amazon, Walmart, and Whole Foods employees painted a picture of confusion about the new policies and who is eligible. (The Atlantic reached out to these companies for comment and has yet to hear back on most of our queries.)

Workers might, for example, fall ill before a new policy goes into effect. Or they might embark on a lengthy process of attempting to prove they’re really sick and wait for weeks to get paid—longer than many of them can afford to go without money.

Walking out of O’Hare Airport on March 18 after a trip to Spain, Christian Zamarron, an Amazon warehouse employee in Chicago, was stopped by an official who told him that because he had recently visited a country with a large coronavirus outbreak, he should stay home from work for 14 days. Zamarron said he thought it wouldn’t be a problem, because Amazon had recently granted two weeks of paid sick leave to workers who test positive for COVID-19, or who are placed into quarantine. But several Amazon employees, including Zamarron, told me the process to get paid for their time in quarantine has been byzantine and, in certain cases, unsuccessful entirely.

As soon as he realized he’d be missing work, Zamarron said, he called Amazon’s employee resource center, the company’s HR equivalent, to make sure he’d get paid. After an hour on the phone, he finally got through to someone and explained his predicament. The person told him he was eligible for an unpaid leave of absence.

He asked whether he could receive paid leave instead, according to Amazon’s policy, and was told a case manager would reach out to him within a few days. But he didn’t hear from anyone for more than a week, and he wasn’t paid. When a case manager finally got in touch, it was to provide him with unpaid leave-of-absence forms. Zamarron, who had traveled to Spain with another Amazon co-worker, grappled with what to do. “Either we take the hit, and we don’t get a check for two weeks,” he told me, “or we go to work and infect our co-workers.”

Hours after I emailed Amazon about his case, Zamarron got a call from a human resources representative who said Zamarron and his co-worker would be retroactively paid for their time away from work. (Amazon denied that my email prompted the payment.)

Another Amazon employee, who leads an informal workers’ union, told me he does know of cases in which the paid-leave policy was implemented correctly. But those workers either tested positive for COVID-19, or Amazon itself ordered them quarantined.