MAY DAY 2020 - a reflection

So, working from home here in Kuala Lumpur, we took our first public holiday – May Day, or International Workers’ Day – celebrated as such in many parts of the world. In Sri Lanka, the country where I grew up, May Day rallies brought workers’ unions on to the streets.  Sri Lankan unions have political affiliations – so the rallies and processions provide the opportunity for different political parties to show their strength, for politicians and union leaders to make grandiose speeches and to show solidarity with labourers and working classes and in the process collect more votes.  I am not sure how many of the men and women who participate in these celebrations and enjoy the camaraderie of their fellow workers, are aware of the origins of the event.

History tells us that May Day celebrations began in 1889, initiated by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, the Second International, as a day on which to engage in  a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for an eight-hour working day. The date was chosen because it commemorated the campaign for an eight-hour working day by the American Federation of Labor which had led to a clash between workers and the police in Haymarket Square in Chicago 1886. Several workers died when the police opened fire on them. 

Ironically, May Day is not celebrated in the United States and just as ironically, despite the fact that it is almost  a century and a half since those protests, there remain workers who  continue to work longer than eight hour hours per day. We know that for workers in the apparel industry, most of them women, the only way to make a decent livelihood is to work more and more hours. Average work hours in apparel factories in Bangladesh stand at 66-70 hours per week and have gone up to 80-90 hours per week during peak production periods when purchase orders increase.  Capitalism’s ugly face has not really changed.

May Day 2020 was a day for reflection. There was no opportunity to watch a workers’ march, to listen to shouted slogans, to vicariously experience working class solidarity. Instead it was a time for reflection and my thoughts turned to the precarious world of women’s work. 

It has taken a long time for the world to focus on women’s work, but even then much of the global attention is on gender pay gaps and bringing more women into the work force.  Yet it would be a gross misrepresentation to say that women wherever they are in the world are not working – the work they do is just invisible and undervalued.  There maybe too few women in Board rooms around the world, but more important is the fact that there are too many women in jobs that have bad working conditions, low pay, no social security and no access to  redress  or too many women spending their time in  unpaid care work or labouring without pay in family farms and enterprises. The global capitalist economy has exploited for too long the patriarchal devaluation of women’s roles in society and the importance of their labour. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has begun to show up some of these inequalities and discrimination in the world of work. For instance, the unskilled workers who are at the base of the wage pyramid are the very workers who are providing essential services and helping us ride the pandemic often at risk to their own lives.  The frontline health workers, the cleaners, the care givers,  the delivery personnel, many from minority and migrant communities, many of them women, are doing more than their jobs worth to look after our health, keep us fed and ensure that we can work from home.  Their jobs are undervalued, they are not always provided with protective gear, they often have no paid sick leave or job security, but they are out there, caring for us when we fall sick, sanitizing our spaces, delivering our  food, collecting our rubbish, driving us around town, taking us to hospital.

The crowds of people leaving the cities of India as soon as lockdown was announced is a dramatic exposition of the volume of the informal sector. In India the informal sector comprises around 420 million workers and globally, the number is 1.6 billion.  In many of the countries in the global south, these workers play a major economic role and they provide income for scores of poor families who depend on their daily wages. Because of the severity and suddenness of the COVID 19 lockdowns and other containment measures these workers faced disruptions to their livelihoods, eviction from their dwelling places and in many cases violence from the authorities.  In Ugandan markets,  dominated by women vendors, the restrictions on movement and on the sale of all non-food items led to violence against those who insisted on carrying out their business so they could put food on the table for their families.  Sex workers have been particularly hard hit. Criminalisation of sex work in many parts of the world has always made sex workers’ situation very precarious, but when both they and their clients are forced to self-isolate, it has led  to complete loss of income and an inability to provide for themselves and their families, which in turn has increased their exposure to aggravation and  harassment.

Sex workers are not the only women facing violence. Women with abusive partners are suffering from domestic violence in lockdown.  From China’s  Hubei Province to Brazil, Italy, Spain, UK, Malaysia, and almost every country in the world that has implemented strict stay at home regimes, there has been a frightening rise in domestic abuse. The UK’s largest domestic abuse charity, Refuge, reported a 700% increase in calls to its helpline in a single day in early April. 

And then there is also the structural violence of the dominant economic system against those at the bottom of global value chains. Women garment workers come into mind, dispensable human bodies to be exploited for profit. When crisis hits, it’s these workers that lose their jobs.  In Bangladesh about 10,000 garment workers have lost their jobs and in April thousands took the streets to demand arrears in payment of their wages.  The apparel sector has been squeezed between the disrupted supply of Chinese raw materials and the shrinking demand and cancelled orders of the Western brands. In Cambodia, more than 110 factories employing about 96,000 workers applied to the Cambodian government to suspend production because of the pandemic. In Myanmar, around 20,000 migrants returned home from Thailand after losing their jobs due to factory closures and several hundred were fired from factories making garments for H&M, Next and others when buyers cancelled orders. Where governments provided compensatory handouts, they were barely enough for survival. It seems that when the proverbial shit hits the fan, the sahibs of globalisation have little thought for those whose labour sustained their profits over the years.  Worse off even than the workers in the factories are those in the lower tiers of the global supply chain, those who are employed by sub-contractors in small job centres or as homebased workers. Most of these women (and they are mostly women), at the best of times outside the purview of labour regulations or supply chain social audits, are set to suffer great harm by the response to the COVID 19 crisis, and it is not clear how their situation will be eased even in a post-COVID world.

Finally a word about those women working within our homes – the over 50  million  female domestic workers or the uncounted number of women - mothers, wives, sisters, daughters - whose labour of care within the family space is taken for granted and is unrecognised as well as unremunerated.  Many domestic workers spend their days close to people vulnerable to illness, like older persons.  They are also vulnerable because of long hours, low wages, and the lack of access to healthcare and paid sick days so they can care for themselves and their families. Social distancing and movement control measures pose significant challenges for domestic workers. Not all employers will pay them if they do not turn up for work, and where they do they may not be provided with adequate protective gear to reduce their vulnerability to infection.  In countries like South Africa, domestic work is covered by labour legislation, but in parts of the MENA region where many domestic workers are migrants from Asia and Africa, few have decent working conditions and most are not protected by labour laws. There domestic workers can be forced to work forced to work almost 21 hours a day without rest and no day off.  Their wages can be delayed or withheld, their ability to communicate with their families restricted, their passports confiscated and no redress against verbal, physical or sexual abuse possible.  During the pandemic, like women with abusive partners these workers can be locked in with abusive employers and the conditions they face exacerbated with  additional cooking, cleaning, and caring demands for entire families at home all day and children out of school, and with no chance of ‘escaping’ on a day off.  

Women and girls do most of the world’s unpaid care work – according to ILO estimates 76.2% of  unpaid care work globally, 3.2 times more than men.  In Asia and the Pacific the percentage is higher, 80%.  The shutdown of childcare centres and schools across  countries  has  heightened the burden on many working mothers who are trying  to work from home while caring for their children, or as in the case of health workers, women leaving their homes to go to work are struggling with issues of childcare. Where health systems are stretched many  sick people  sick with  COVID-19 or any other illness  tend to be cared for at home, adding to women’s overall burden, as well as putting their health at greater risk.

My reflection then for May Day 2020 is that much of the work that women do is  invisible, unacknowledged and underestimated. Much of it is also precarious, falling well short of a decent work standard.  Capitalism and patriarchy continue to be hand in glove to the detriment not just of women, but of society in general.  The COVID 19 pandemic has clearly unmasked the ugly side of capitalism, challenged our notions of what work we should value, and exposed how the pursuit of  economic growth and globalisation has failed to protect the human race and  the planet. When feminists came together on March 8 this year for the Global Women’s Strike we hardly expected this dramatic turn of events.  We should no longer need to strike to call attention to the discrimination and structural violence of patriarchy, capitalism, globalisation or environmental destruction. COVID-19 has shown clearly where our governments and our international institutions have failed us and has highlighted the critical role that women’s work plays in ensuring the survival of our societies and the wellbeing of everyone.  “If women stop, the world stops” is not merely a catchy slogan, it’s our reality, and it’s time that the world took notice.