Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a wise man if ever there was one, described hope as “being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness”. Where do I see hope in our global Pandemic? In the struggles of people who are realising their own power to shape their lives and the society around them.
In the United States, some remarkable things are happening. Strikes of Amazon warehouse employees and Instacart grocery delivery contractors took place on Monday, demanding their workplaces are properly cleaned and they are provided with protective kit to keep them safe. Whole Foods workers, an Amazon subsidiary, plan to strike today to demand paid sick leave for all workers who self-quarantine during the crisis. There has been a boom in e-delivery shopping since the lockdown but at the end of the day there is a person that has to do the delivering.
At General Motors, workers marched six feet apart at its Boston Headquarters to demand the company switch from making jet engines to making the ventilators desperately needed in American hospitals. The protest comes as the company announced it would make 10 per cent of its staff redundant due to the crisis.
And in the UK, there’s signs of people moving into action too. 500 workers walked out of a factory of online retailer Asos on Monday in Yorkshire, describing it as a “hotbed of infection”. At Pure Spa in Silverburn workers were told they would be sacked if they did not move on to zero-hour contracts due to the crisis. They organised, faced down threats from the employer, and defended their contracts. “Our message to workers who are in uncertain positions is this: get together in a Whatsapp group and work together to demand what you all deserve,” the women said afterwards in a blog, describing themselves as the ‘Silverburn Suffragettes’.
It usually is women who are in the frontline of this crisis. In a remarkable piece of research, the think-tank Autonomy has developed a Jobs Risk Index for Covid-19 which shows that: “Out of the 1,060,400 workers who are in High Risk roles and being paid poverty wages, 1,046,400 are women (98 per cent). The majority of these women workers are in caring jobs.” 77 per cent of all ‘high risk’ roles in this crisis are being done by women. If this crisis should have brought anything home to society it is that many of the jobs which have been described as “low-skilled” and treated with disdain are actually “key” to the functioning of society. Without them, everything else falls apart.
Indeed, the truth of the labour theory of value is there for all to see. That it’s people’s work that creates economic value, and the financial system built on top of that labour suddenly looks very precarious when a large section of that workforce is idle. Workers discovering the power that they have, perhaps for the first time, can change the course of this crisis, so that the majority are not forced to pay for it again, either in the wallet or with their lives. That’s the hope I see.
The Silverburn Suffragettes, and other sources of hope
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a wise man if ever there was one, described hope as “being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness”. Where do I see hope in our global Pandemic? In the struggles of people who are realising their own power to shape their lives and the society around them. In the […]