As the people continue to face the coronavirus pandemic, women are disproportionately represented among essential workers. Women of color are disproportionately represented within these ranks. Essential workers are those in the healthcare industry, nursing homes, schools, transportation, restaurants, grocery stores, and other retail stores. Many are underpaid and undervalued and have limited rights as workers. Just over one in 10 has a union.
These women are at the forefront of the revolutionary struggle, demanding that the government take care of our basic needs and eliminate the rise of police brutality. They are in the new class of workers nationally and globally, and are the leaders in movements against evictions, to take over state-owned and corporate-owned homes, and to make “Black Lives Matter.” Electronics have eliminated the need for workers in many areas of industry, and robots are now displacing labor power, creating a new class. The new class consists of contingent, minimum wage, below minimum wage, and part-time workers, now over 40 percent of the workforce. The employed sector of the class is constantly being drawn into the growing unemployed sector that ranges from the structurally unemployed to the absolutely destitute homeless workers.
The Healthcare Community
Healthcare workers have worked tirelessly on the frontlines during this crisis. The lack of adequate protection, such as appropriate masks, contributed to the deaths of many nurses and other hospital workers. Some have stayed away from their families, fearing they may be contagious. The healthcare community has picketed for equipment and the hiring of more staff.
Home health care aides earn little more than minimum wage. Eight out of ten of them are women. Most don’t have health insurance. Of the 5.8 million people working healthcare jobs that pay less than $30,000 a year, half are nonwhite, and 83 percent are women. Women account for 73 percent of the U.S. healthcare workers who have been infected with COVID-19.
Fewer than one percent of Americans live in long-term care facilities, but 40 percent of Covid-19 deaths have occurred there. This situation reveals fundamental flaws in how America takes care of its oldest citizens. More than 100,000 residents and workers in long term facilities have died from the virus. For a long time, deaths occurred because of inadequate equipment, little protective gear, and little or no testing for residents and workers.
Since there is no national plan to get medical supplies to each state, officials in each state have had to compete with other states for supplies. Since there were no regulations on price control, corporations made large profits. An Associated Press analysis shows states spent more than $7 billion buying personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, gowns, and ventilators. Some states paid as much as $11 for individual N95 masks, which cost around 50 cents before the pandemic. Supplies often went to the highest bidder, even if they had already been promised to someone else.
In California, the union SEIU-121 states that over 2400 nurses threatened strikes over unsafe conditions during the pandemic. Educators in many states have refused to go back to in-person teaching in unsafe situations. There have been no plans to sterilize the schools, require the wearing of masks, and space the desks to ensure social distancing.
Almost 77 percent of educators are women, and they have felt the emotional impact of the pandemic. Many have to prepare extra hours for online teaching. Also, they endure the emotional strife felt when their students have gone through a death in their family, or the teachers themselves meet the same fate in their own families.
The “Rosie the Riveters” in the Present Period
Over 38 million people live in poverty. One in eight Americans report not having enough food to eat. Even in the richest country in the world, the U.S. doesn’t have adequate safety nets to help people. In March and December 2020, the government stimulus helped some people, but there were still people who didn’t receive aid. Too little, too late.
One in three jobs held by women have been declared as essential, and they keep the country running. Single mothers also have the burden of needing 24-hour childcare, and many schools are closed. Women working during the coronavirus pandemic are likened to those who worked, while their husbands went to serve in World War II. The lack of childcare hampered many women from going to work, and those who did were absent often when circumstances demanded that they tend to their children. “Rosie the Riveters” were essential workers in industry who even had to strap their children on their backs, due to lack of daycare facilities.
Employers finally realized that childcare was a real need. In 1942, emergency nursery schools were established. But at the end of the War, the government nursery schools were closed. They were replaced with expensive daycare centers, which many women couldn’t afford. There is a need today for affordable daycare. There have been examples of essential workers leaving their small children at home without someone looking after them. There are also examples of women who have formed a collective in which women take turns caring for their children.
Since 2011, the U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in the arrival of immigrant women and their children, fleeing dire conditions in their countries. But, by 2021, the Trump administration had reduced legal immigration by 49 percent. Reducing legal immigration most harms refugees, employers, and Americans who want to live with their spouses, parents, or children. It also affects the country’s future labor force and economic growth.
Women in California have been in the lead in the front of struggle to take over vacant homes owned by the government or by private speculators. Families who were living in cars, shelters, and other unsafe situations during the coronavirus pandemic decided to take over these homes, so they could go into quarantine themselves and stay healthy. An eviction moratorium was demanded by various groups across the nation, and finally, Congress was forced to place a moratorium on evictions based on these demands.
With the support of other housing rights groups, the LA Reclaimers took over vacant homes in East Los Angeles and other areas of California. They are working-class people of color who ended up homeless after not being able to pay the rent increases. Dominique Walker, a member of the Oakland, CA group Moms 4 Housing, argued that housing was a right and that the courts must give the right to possess the houses. Claudia Lara and Janil Hernandez stated that these families are scared that law enforcement can barge in and their lives will be on the line.
Women have also played a foundational role in the movement for civil and human rights in the past decades. In response to police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Alicia Garza stated, “We have watched how our community and our family members are being murdered on camera.” They started the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. in 2013 after the not guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. In 2020, the police murders of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor (an emergency medical technician shot in her own home), were central to the mass protests of 2020, demanding an end to police terror. Millions of Americans participated. Many are still fighting. ]
One positive step in this period of time is that a vaccine has been created to help people stay free from being infected by the coronavirus. But many people of color are hesitant to take the vaccine. They fear they will be dangerously used as guinea pigs, as the U.S. government did from 1932-1972 in the Tuskegee syphilis study in Alabama.
African American woman doctor Kizzmekia Shanta Corbett is a lead researcher on the Moderna vaccine and understands why the Black community is distrustful. She is very aware of the history of injustice when it comes to medicine in the Black community, and that “trust has to be rebuilt in a brick-by-brick fashion.” She hopes the community’s knowledge that she has been studying vaccines for years will help.
Women lead the struggle for universal childcare, healthcare, education, housing, and other social changes. The actual program of this new class in which women play a leading role is to abolish private property and adopt the cooperative, communist program in the interest of the whole of society. RC
March/April 2021 Vol31. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
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