The COVID-19 Crisis is a Wake-up Call to Rethink the World of Work
Statement by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women on the occasion of International Workers' Day
This year we are celebrating International Workers’ Day in the midst of a global pandemic. A virus ten-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter has turned everyone’s lives upside down. At the time of writing, the novel corona virus or COVID-19, as it has come to be known, has claimed almost 230,000 lives and infected more than 3 million people. The number is still growing, healthcare systems are struggling to cope with the impact and an economic recession is just round the corner. The pandemic has rendered billions of people jobless, homeless and without food security. According to an ILO estimate, full or partial lockdown measures affect almost 2.7 billion workers, representing around 81 per cent of the world’s workforce.
As we grapple with the evolving situation, a few things are clear: this virus has exposed the stark inequalities in our societies and the abysmal scenario in the world of work. It is clear, if ever there was any doubt, that most governments have prioritised profit over people. It is perhaps not surprising that discrimination and structural violence towards care workers, migrants in low-paid jobs and workers in the informal economy are seen even in the COVID-19 containment measures. Indeed, the lingering images over the last several weeks are of the exodus of migrant workers from cities under lockdown, stranded workers huddled up in makeshift accommodations queuing up for food, workers harassed by law enforcement, women facing violence in their homes and farmers with their wasted harvest and unsold produce.
Women, the Unpaid Care Workers
On this May Day we renew our solidarity with the unpaid care workers, most of whom are women. Many of whom are also in paid jobs. While COVID-19 has closed avenues for paid work for many women, there has been a huge increase in their unpaid care work burden. Before COVID-19, women were doing three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. Now with children out of school, men out of work, paid care workers not allowed into homes and heightened care needs of older persons, that burden has increased multifold for women across classes and countries. To make matters worse, there are reports of steady rise in domestic violence and child abuse during the lockdown. Confined within their homes, women have lost their peer support and many state and NGO- run shelters are now closed.
Other Indispensable but Undervalued Workers
As cities have shut down and fear of infection has spread, the precarious living and working conditions of a large number of people has become starkly visible. Many of them are internal or cross-border migrants working in small and medium-size enterprises, as part-time domestic workers, street vendors, home based workers, construction workers and in export-oriented garment and other factories. Some of these workers have temporary monthly wage-based contracts with limited or no social security, some receive daily wages, some are paid per piece and many are dependent on the day’s sales from their businesses. Some countries have taken a snap decision for lockdown, leaving these workers not just without a job but often with unpaid wages. Most of them have found themselves stranded in dormitories and without money to pay their rents and some have been thrown out of their rented accommodations. Workers in export-oriented garment and leather factories are in danger of losing their jobs forever as exports have plummeted. Emergency state support does not reach many of these workers and non-state actors are overwhelmed with demands.
One group of workers who have not lost their jobs but are working round the clock at the risk of their lives are the health and sanitation workers. While it is deplorable that there is a dearth of protective gear for doctors and nurses, it is equally shameful that the workers at the lower rung of healthcare and sanitation services are being completely ignored.
When we look at the rural scenario, the policy blunders of many states are even more glaring. For several decades now, many countries have focussed on cash crops and mono-culture. Use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser has rendered small-scale farming expensive and destroyed the land. This rural distress has been one of the key drivers of migration into precarious work. COVID-19 has left the harvests lying in the fields and the produce of many farmers unsold due to broken supply chains.
What, then, are our hopes on this May Day?
The injustice and discrimination in the world of work were not created by the virus. They were already there. They were the results of certain policy decisions that we have allowed our states to take. COVID-19 only made those imbalances in our world visible.
We hope that this crisis serves as a wakeup call for all of us: people, states and the private sector.
We call on states to recognise the value of unpaid care work and take immediate steps to address domestic violence during the lockdown period. Everyone in the household must respect the unpaid women workers and ensure an equitable distribution of such work. The year 2020, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, is a reminder of our commitments towards gender equality. We must not let COVID-19 roll back the limited gains made in this area in the past decades.
COVID-19 is not going away soon. Measures for physical distancing may stay in place for a long time. However, that must not turn into excuses for laying off workers or cutting down their wages. We demand that states put in place stronger healthcare and social security systems. Better healthcare and social security will prevent many disasters, not just pandemics.
It is likely that some surveillance measures will be put in place or become permanent in the name of containment and prevention. Those measures must not violate fundamental rights to freedom of association. Now, more than ever before, worker organising is crucial. And yet, such organising will need to happen without congregating in large numbers. Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) safeguards must not undermine freedom of association and collective bargaining. We call on states to make OSH standards fundamental labour rights applicable to all workers, regardless of their nationality, sector of work or immigration status.
We call on states to create more public sector jobs rather than contracting and outsourcing services. In the name of ease of doing business, outsourcing enables employers to evade responsibilities while contractors continue setting abusive working and living conditions away from state regulation and scrutiny.
For several decades now labour mobility has been on the rise and COVID-19 will have a huge impact on migrant workers. Mass return of internal migrants has already happened in some parts of the world and several countries of destination have requested countries of origin to take their workers back. But there are no jobs back home for the workers upon return. We urge governments to provide immediate support to the returnee workers, rethink their development paradigms and accept that models of extractivist and unlimited growth are ultimately not sustainable.
Although states of origin must rethink their dependence on remittances, we are certainly not heading towards a world without migration. Human mobility has been and will continue to be a reality of our lives. The Global Compact on Migration has underscored the positive aspects of migration and the fact that it is both a need and a right for people. We call on countries of destination to recognise the contribution of migrant workers to their economies, take immediate steps to improve their living and working conditions, stop systemic criminalisation of collective action by migrant workers and their exclusion from labour laws and not use the pandemic as an excuse to cut back on rights.
A popular slogan from the recent political protests in Chile sums up our thoughts at this moment: ‘We won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem’. Even as we long for the physical distancing measures to end, we know that in a deeper sense our post-shutdown world must not mimic the past. Our most fervent hope on this May Day, then, is for a dialogue within civil society and between the state and people. We must analyse our current development paradigms together to reimagine and co-create our collective future.
(Prepared with input from many members, partners and allies of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.)