U.S. Paper Calls For Backing Unions Fighting Oppression

The pandemic has confronted unions with a historic challenge. COVID-19 and the response to it have simultaneously illuminated and intensified the ways “women’s work,” labor traditionally done by women in and for social reproduction, is both essential and devalued.

Photo Insert: From nurses, therapists, and teachers to workers in jobs viewed as less skilled with lower status and pay, like aides in hospitals and nursing homes, restaurant workers, and hotel workers, it’s clear the less respect (and money) workers receive, the more disproportionately the job is done.

The pandemic has exposed our dependence on people who are paid to provide physical and emotional care, along with our society’s inability and unwillingness to support and protect these workers as they risk their lives for us, Lois Weiner reported for Truthout.

From nurses, therapists, and teachers to workers in jobs viewed as less skilled with lower status and pay, like aides in hospitals and nursing homes, restaurant workers, and hotel workers, it’s clear the less respect (and money) workers receive, the more disproportionately the job is done by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, often women.

The poor pay and working conditions of much caregiving work reflect not only who is doing the care but for whom it is being done. Low-income people of color get the short end of both sides of the stick.

Social movements for racial and gender equality have exposed disparities at the workplace, giving unions an opening to support workers who most need the protection collective representation brings. We see employers, from nonprofits to transnational corporations, giving verbal homage to correcting inequalities while failing to disrupt underlying inequalities in how work is organized, classified, and paid.

Outrage at the hyper-exploitation of food delivery services forced some of the most exploitative businesses to modify practices, stating clearly that delivery fees weren’t going to workers and providing ways for customers to tip. We should be fighting for the “gig economy” workers in food services to earn a living wage and have stable hours.

Even the modest improvement masks a gender divide. The apps and websites allow customers to tip the workers who do deliveries (mostly young males of color) while the workers who prepare, pick and package food (traditionally women’s work) remain invisible and subject to the whims of employers about wages.

Labor Day invites us to commemorate significant contributions unions have made for working people, recognizing courageous sacrifices of workers who lost their jobs and sometimes their lives fighting for the right for us to have a collective voice at the workplace, and to force both political parties to pass legislation limiting employers’ exploitation.

At the same time, we confront sobering realities of how many advances have been undercut, as labor’s economic and political power and its numbers waned, due in part to widespread acceptance of “business unionism,” which makes workers clients served by a union apparatus, rather than “owners” of their unions.

The pandemic has created a global opportunity for disaster capitalism to mask policies that increase exploitation — and profits — in rhetoric about addressing longstanding social inequality.

One ominous change is the chilling intensification, development, and application of information technology to control workplace conditions; provide social, health, and educational services; increase surveillance and data mining, and replace workers with AI.

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