The federal and provincial government’s response in the form of social distancing measures, an emergency relief benefit program, and calls on Canadians to show kindness and support to one another, assumed that this pandemic has hit everyone equally. Major news outlets, as well as speeches by politicians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, continuously highlighted the “generosity” and “charity” of the general public in Canada.
And they were correct. In this crisis, like in any other, poor people bear the brunt of the violent system. Those who have stepped forward in their communities and neighborhoods, building responses to the crisis by developing community networks – providing support in the form of food, medicines, clothing, mental and emotional care, and other kinds of mutual aid – are mostly working people struggling to meet basic needs.
While epidemiologically the pandemic has been universal, economically and socially it reveals and furthers the deeply entrenched social relations of class, race, gender, and passport, amongst others. In this way, conditions of life under COVID-19 offer us a view into the lives of society’s poor majority. The pandemic is not just a crisis of care – a sentiment on the Canadian left that calls for “band-aid” reshuffling healthcare, education, and social security funding. The pandemic has revealed a generalized crisis of the system’s ability to reproduce itself, which requires a deeper critique of capitalism using the tools provided by years of community organizing efforts.
In the Canadian case in particular, COVID-19 has defied the state-sponsored internationally exported image of a “comfortable” and charitable Canadian population. The pandemic has revealed the realities of a modern settler colonial capitalism that relies on the politics of dispossession and exploitation, reproducing society’s pre-existing inequalities and disproportionately hitting our most vulnerable: Black and Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, the elderly, the unhoused, and an essential workforce made up of largely immigrant and racialized women.11Draaisma, Muriel. 2020. “COVID-19 Affecting Certain Groups in Toronto More than Others, Preliminary Data Suggests.” CBC News, May 5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-officials-covid-19-outbreak-may-5-update-1.5556401 Despite this reality, the Federal and Provincial governments have yet to release disaggregated medical data on who has been most affected by the virus.12Zimonjic, Peter. 2020. “Trudeau, Ontario Health Minister Say They’re Looking at Collecting Race-Based Pandemic Data.” CBC News, June 5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-elliott-covid-19-race-based-data-1.5600824.
Essential Workers of Social Reproduction
In surveying the situation of essential reproduction workers, their struggles, and their organizing efforts, we turn to those involved in care work in the public sector. Care workers in particular have been compensating for the inadequacy of social and healthcare services, as the result of a years-long neoliberalization agenda: privatization and deregulation, including the more recent attacks on healthcare and education by Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford.13For historical background of neoliberal policies in healthcare in Canada, please see Armstrong, Pat, Carol Amaratunga, and Jocelyne Bernier. 2001. Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Cossman, Brenda, and Judy Fudge. 2002. Privatization, The Law and the Challenge to Feminism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Service Employment International Union (SEIU) Healthcare has called on the province and local police to launch a public inquiry and criminal investigations into deaths at long-term care homes tied to COVID-19.14SEIU Healthcare. 2020.“SEIU Healthcare calls for public inquiry and criminal investigations into COVID-19 related deaths”. SEIU Healthcare, May 5. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/seiu-healthcare-calls-for-public-inquiry-and-criminal-investigations-into-covid-19-related-deaths-879705526.html Long-term care facilities have seen some of the highest death rates including those of health care workers.
By May 5th in Ontario, 3000 health care workers in both long-term care facilities and hospitals had contracted the virus. These represented 16 % of total cases in the province.15Pelley, Lauren. 2020. “Union Calls for Public Inquiry, Criminal Investigations into COVID-19 Deaths at Long-Term Care Homes.” CBC News, May 5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/union-long-term-care-inquiry-1.5556136?fbclid=IwAR0BA4HIXW51y76e9s1JDR-1Yy_SWROcizm7GsUCPi7OzWAWjxTB0QKwOOQ. Rapidly, as of May 12th, the numbers of infected staff, patients, and care facility residents more than doubled, totaling 7894.16Ontario Health Coalition. 2020. “RELEASE & REPORT: Staff & Patients Infected by COVID-19 Outbreaks in Health Care Settings Almost Doubled, Death Toll Increased by 333.7 % in 2-Weeks: Outbreaks Are Not Under Control.” Ontario Health Coalition, May 12. https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/update-hospital-and-long-term-care-health-care-workers-long-term-care-residents-infected-with-covid-19-5/?fbclid=IwAR0HdXLAk874JfaG180VBJOXXIS5hUxyGTdKBU5vz1q39AnunKphjhkWUps
Many frontline workers had to juggle the reality of their overexposure to the virus and the need to push for better conditions at work. Nursing staff across the country have participated in various protests since the outbreak occurred. Issues ranging from lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) to overwork have pushed many to organize. Staff at one downtown Toronto nursing home, Sherbourne Place, refused the unsafe working conditions that come with low wage front-line jobs, compromising their devotion to their patients, risking being seen as entitled and not self-sacrificing enough for the love of their patients in the eyes of the Canadian public.
Given the serious concerns of illness and death on the part of personal support workers, these refusals signal the need to challenge failing healthcare infrastructure – an indictment of the politics of late capitalism. The disposability of front-line workers mirrors the reality of the vulnerable populations they care for. Both are unproductive from the perspective of capital by virtue of their existence as “dependent” and unprofitable subjects of care and “natural,” “loving,” “devoted” feminized and racialized caregivers.
Care workers’ organizing has become a necessity. The very recent Designated Early Childhood Educators’ (DECEs) successful unionization drive is a case in point. DECEs – essential care workers tasked with looking after the children of working-class families – support elementary school teachers in Ontario in facilitating all-day kindergarten. Black and immigrant women are overrepresented in the ranks of DECEs. With the expansion of kindergarten to full day, these workers make it possible for parents to work longer and more flexible hours.
Yet these workers are underpaid, with no access to benefits, including many who work as on-call “occasionals.” Amongst the many cuts to social programs and privatization schemes, Ontario’s Conservative government under Doug Ford has particularly weakened the public education system. Cuts to programs like Grants for Student Needs, resulted in a loss of at least 2500 positions that provide in-class support to students and disproportionately affected services provided by education assistants, custodians, school secretaries, library workers, child and youth workers, speech language pathologists, and early childhood educators.17Kaiser, Kathryn. 2019. “What Doug Ford & the PCs Have Done in Ontario.” Art Blog, April 30.https://artblog.kathrynkaiser.ca/what-doug-ford-has-done-since-ontario-election/.
While the well-off were able to supplement the loss of public school programs with the private education services needed for their children’s development, it is working people and their children who bore the brunt of these cutbacks in provincial spending and who cannot afford market-based solutions.
Aminah Sheikh, an organizer with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) speaking on the recent organizing of ECE’s during the COVID outbreak, explains:
What drives a worker into solidarity in a workplace union drive with their colleagues is dignity and respect. That also applies to why workers come together outside the workplace and fight for dignity and respect in the community. Both spaces are intertwined, you don’t magically stop being human when you enter work or vice versa. Early childhood educators are fighting for dignity and respect in the classroom for our students but also in their communities for their students.