Who Cares for Our Workers?
On this International Workers Day, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) would like to take a moment to honour the legions of workers who have helped us tide through a year of unsettling crisis.
During the pandemic, our physical, health, nutritional and even emotional needs are met by a constantly available stream of workers who care for us—including domestic workers, cooks, childcarers, home tutors, to workers who continue to churn out essential household goods—many of whom are low-wage, migrant workers. Many of these workers, in their ceaseless provision of care for us during the pandemic, have no equivalent “caring” services at their disposal.
Examples abound: app-based and food delivery workers have eased us into our comfortable work-from-home routines, but the precarity they experience in the hands of the algorithmic over-taxing of their labour has contributed to preventable loss of lives.
During the pandemic, more emotional and physical labour are demanded from domestic workers, including migrant domestic workers. While millions of part-time domestic workers have lost their jobs and many have not been able to renew their contracts, those who still have their jobs have cared for their host families around the clock, experienced great stress and duress while lacking reciprocal care themselves. Healthcare workers on zero-hour contracts are able to quickly bolster healthcare infrastructures and workforce by virtue of the flexibility of their terms of employment, but because of this same flexibility, they are also easily removed when their labour is no longer deemed useful.
The more fortunate amongst us have fared better through the pandemic because risks, burden and the socioeconomic devastations from the crisis are disproportionately borne by workers with few, if any, rights.
This should not be the state of things. Over the past decades, the neoliberal drive of privatisation, marketisation and the scaling back of social welfare policies have hardened the divide between those who can afford to purchase care, versus those who perpetually provide care services in undervalued and underpaid occupations. We must challenge this divide.
On International Workers Day, GAATW demands that governments, developed countries, the global middle and upper-middle class, and the enfranchised world be accountable for this contradiction: As we demand more and more care labour from workers who meet our everyday psychological, physical and economic security, who is left caring for them?
We call on states to rectify these perverse care inequalities. We demand a world that is organised along more egalitarian principles, where migrants and vulnerable groups who disproportionately carry out essential care work are similarly cared for.
If the past year of crisis has shown us anything, it is that the interdependent world we live in demands collective action over our most protracted national and transnational problems. It requires a society built on norms of mutuality, solidarity, and care for distant strangers. The call by the Care Collective to place “care front and centre of life” is prescient in this regard. Care needs to be the central organising principle of our economic and social life, supplanting the profit-seeking motives that have come to dominate both our public and private spheres, and that are responsible for many of today’s social ills.
We offer four basic organising principles to create a more caring world for workers.
1. Create a more caring world of work
Labour has undergone profound changes in the past year. Setbacks such as the increasing precarity of work, the worsening of inequalities between workers and a new techno-bourgeoise, as well as the worsening of health, social and economic positions of workers—regressions that would normally take decades, if not years—were suddenly compressed into a single year.
In the face of these adversities to labour movements, we need to urgently stem rights erosion, remove barriers to collective action, widen social security provisions, aid retrenched workers and include migrant workers in national stimulus programmes.
2. Free up developing countries’ debt to invest in care
It is trite now to mention that migrants make a huge proportion of the healthcare workforce in the global North. Workers from the Global South sustain healthcare systems in developed countries, while systems at home are left with a critical lack of qualified professionals.
Domestic and care workers who migrate leave behind “care deficits'' in home countries. Migration from labour-sending countries result in significant care drains in places where there is no alternative social provision of care, or where care is not shared equally by men, state or the private sector.
At the same time, it is precisely in these developing countries where care infrastructures remain crushed under harsh structural adjustment programmes and loan conditionalities. Debt in developing countries has risen to worrying levels during the pandemic.
We call on international creditors to act on humanitarian principles to forgive developing countries’ debt, thereby freeing up public investment for social care.
3. Improve access to healthcare for migrants in destination countries
Migrants continue to be marginalised in healthcare systems in destination countries. This includes both real legal barriers that prevent access to healthcare for non-citizens, or simply a lack of attempt by health officials to bridge language and cultural barriers for migrant populations.
Migrant workers are often asked to privately absorb the cost of healthcare, to take unpaid sick leave, while having little recourse to challenge these harmful employer practices. Moreover, there is a legitimate fear for refugees, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers when seeking healthcare due to immigration enforcement.
As healthcare takes centre stage during the pandemic, we need to transform both our language and policy approaches for a more migrant-friendly health system.
4. Support alternative models of work that challenge uncaring production systems
Many of our current “uncaring” structures stem from the twin forces of neoliberalisation and marketisation.
In the public sphere, stoked by fantastical fears of bloated government, neoliberalism has led to the systematic dismantling of social welfare policies. In turn, this has manufactured a scarcity of public services, and triggered resentment against migrants who are deemed as illegitimate users of the welfare state and public care services.
In the private sphere, a relentless model of free-market competition forces uncaring corporations to put profits over people, to pit short-term economic gains against longer-term societal well-being. The effect is often that corporations pursue ruthless cost-cutting measures amongst vulnerable workers, especially migrant workers, who are least able to defend their rights.
These twin forces have left behind an increasingly untenable world for workers. But workers have also demonstrated great ingenuity in challenging these neoliberal systems. Women’s cooperatives have proliferated in many places to challenge existing organisations of work. They enable women to balance paid work with the traditionally unremunerated care labour; they accord a more prominent decision-making role for workers; and they increase the collective bargaining power of cooperative workers.
To undo the uncaring structures of work today, we need to boldly experiment with more humane ways of working.
Low-wage and migrant workers today experience a state of increasing precariousness of care, while continuing to staff factories, hospitals, and critical services during the pandemic.
The current pandemic has been exacerbated by our failure to care for the plights of others, where distrust against outsider populations, beggar-thy-neighbour vaccine nationalism, and the willful ignorance of healthcare needs in non-citizen populations have all deepened the current state of crisis.
As workers, we demand a world built on norms of unconditional reciprocity and solidarity between the privileged and the dispossessed, between the haves and have-nots, and between citizens and "others".