Blue-collar lockdown
New Zealand united against Covid-19, we were told. In reality, there were two versions of lockdown: while the working classes kept the country safe and tidy, white-collar Kiwis eased into their home offices. Andy Fyers, Carmen Parahi and Steve Kilgallon r
Rose Kavapalu is proud to be a cleaner. She has two jobs and clocks up 65 hours a week, working Monday to Friday. God and her family give her the strength to keep working the long hours, she says.
At 7.30am, she leaves her rental home in Ma¯ ngere, a low socio-economic neighbourhood in South Auckland, to drive to the inner-city, wealthy Auckland suburb of Mt Eden.
She spends eight hours cleaning St Cuthbert’s College, the prestigious private girls’ boarding school. When she’s finished, she drives south to the O¯ ta¯ huhu police station to start her second job at 5pm. She cleans for another five hours and finally returns home about 10.30pm.
‘‘It’s always a blessing for me to help out,’’ she says. ‘‘The police want to look after and keep the peace if they can in the community. If that’s the case, I have a part to play to help out their health and safety through cleaning.’’
On April 22, Kavapalu was singled out for special praise as an essential services worker by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
At the time, she was cleaning at the police station. ‘‘All of a sudden a couple of boys, they were running, I said ‘Gee, where are you going?’ They were saying, ‘Rose, you’re famous’. I thought they were joking. Everybody came and congratulated me and then I realised it was true.’’
Kavapalu took the opportunity presented by the attention to issue a plea for every worker to receive at least the living wage and for social imperatives to be built into government service contracts.
‘‘There are people worse off than me,’’ she says. ‘‘Many are working multiple jobs so have to travel to two, three and sometimes four different workplaces. They need help, food, money for the basic needs.
‘‘Please help. This is us. This is our situation. We are Kiwis, how can you help us? We need help.’’
The other lockdown
The reality of lockdown for people like Rose Kavapalu is quite different to the version we’ve heard quite a lot about.
White-collar workers eased into weeks away from the office by figuring out how to navigate a Zoom call and organising their work day around the 1pm Covid19 media briefing. Working from home was an adjustment, but staying put was at least an option.
For many blue-collar workers, staying home day after day was simply impossible.
Cellphone tower data analysed by Stuff confirms the different lockdown realities between the best and worst-off New Zealanders. In virtually all communities, movement reduced significantly compared to a normal pre-lockdown day.
But lower-income areas tended to reduce movement less than high-income areas. The data is based on aggregate populations and does not track individuals.
Essential work, little reward
E Tu¯ union organiser Fala Haulangi says the data reflects how workers like Rose Kavapalu kept working, moving and risking the health of their families through lockdown.
The union has the largest membership in the country, with 54,000 members made up of hospital staff, orderlies, cleaners, security guards, home support workers, manufacturing and food factory workers.
Most of its Auckland union membership comes from South Auckland, close to manufacturing, the airport and hospitals. But many travel all over Auckland to work for different organisations, including the Auckland Council.
Haulangi believes Stuff’s analysis shows it was mainly low-paid, Pacific and migrant workers moving around because they had no choice but to keep working, in spite of the risk.
‘‘The jobs these people do, they are the invisible workers in our community [whom] a lot of our people look down on.
‘‘Yet they are the lowest-paid
. . . We don’t really have respect for these workers. It really shows in what they’re getting paid.’’
It was telling, she says, that during lockdown the Government deemed these people ‘‘essential services workers’’.
‘‘The sad thing as well is they took the risk to go and work, to clean, to look after us, while we’re all working from home.’’
Population specialist Professor Tahu Kukutai says the variation in movement started to emerge pre-lockdown, when people who had the resources to work from home were able to start setting up.
‘‘That has a definite socioeconomic gradient,’’ she says. ‘‘The extent to which people are able to exercise options varies significantly by socio-economic status.’’
Although hesitant about making generalised interpretations of the data, she says that, based on other knowledge and research already undertaken, she isn’t surprised by the mobility of those in Auckland, particularly in lower socioeconomic communities.
‘‘There’s a whole range of people not in high-status jobs not given much visibility which often don’t pay a wage that is adequate to live a life of comfort. They have very little choice but to move.’’
Kukutai says the data may lead some people to draw conclusions that are harmful and stigmatise groups that already face discrimination.
‘‘You might get a narrative about deviant behaviour, noncompliance, community behavioural patterns or don’t follow the rules . . . . I would be concerned by those sorts of interpretations.
‘‘My basic point is those with more resources have more choices. Those with less resources have less choice.’’
Making work
When lockdown was announced, 27-year-old builder Kiko Hibbs knew his work on a residential renovation in suburban Remuera would come to a grinding halt. For Hibbs, a ‘‘degree of panic set in . . . I think everyone was scared about what might happen’’.
His partner Claire Rawnsby’s marketing job also dried up, so he was ‘‘pretty much on the phone as soon as they made that announcement, just trying to figure out where to get some work’’.
Fortunately, a friend’s father owns a supermarket in central Auckland. And so he began a nightshift job, restocking the shelves from 10pm to 6.30am, fuelled by Red Bull and the music in his earphones.
‘‘I’ll be honest, it was tough, the first few days trying to adjust to the sleeping patterns – and staying awake through the whole eight hours was the hard part,’’ he says. ‘‘The work was fine, but there wasn’t too much thinking involved.’’
Hibbs is a perfect illustration of our data, although his hours were somewhat unusual. He’d drive the 26km from his home in Manurewa, South Auckland, at 9.30pm, then back again at 6.30am each day.
‘‘For the first week, there was no-one on the roads,’’ he says, ‘‘and then I guess people were starting to find work because the further on in lockdown, the more cars there were on the road.’’
He quit the supermarket work when it became apparent level 3 was looming, just to reset his sleeping patterns and spend time with his partner and 2-yearold daughter.
While working nights, he’d tried to sleep from 10am to 6pm, so he could make dinner and see his daughter before her bedtime.
Hibbs was back on the tools as soon as his site reopened. ‘‘It makes you appreciate your job. Next time I am thinking about it being a bit boring, I will think about having to do nightfill at New World.’’
Different impacts
Coronavirus is impacting different parts of the community in very different ways, says Paul Spoonley, distinguished professor of humanities and social sciences at Massey University.
‘‘We tend to homogenise it, to assume working from home is the new norm. No, it’s not – it’s only for those who can afford it and whose jobs allow it.’’
Spoonley – like Kukutai – says the inequality of lockdown has been a function of choice. Whitecollar workers often had the choice and flexibility to work remotely, whereas those in public-facing service sector roles, often living in poorer areas, did not.
Based on statistics from the US and the UK showing minority
ethnic groups falling ill and dying from coronavirus at much higher rates than white populations, Spoonley had predicted Ma¯ ori and Pasifika would get ill in disproportionately high numbers. He’s glad to be proven wrong. But if we’d had community transmission at a high rate, they would have.
The people from the most vulnerable communities were the very people over-represented on the infection frontlines: as supermarket workers, rubbish collectors and care workers (one in three of whom are here on migrant work visas) while the middle classes were at home on Zoom meetings.
The picture of lockdown mobility provided by Stuff’s analysis is not the same throughout the country. In some places – like central Wellington and Dunedin – there was little difference between rich and poor areas.
Student areas are the lowestincome parts of Wellington and Dunedin, which could explain why low-income areas reduced movement more than highincome ones. Many students returned home to other parts of the country during the lockdown, while campus sites in the heart of these areas would have seen mobility drop to a standstill with universities forced to close.
Spoonley suggests the narrow gap in Wellington may reflect the high number of civil service employees in the capital and surrounds, many of whom would have been mobile, working to address the pandemic.
He’s intrigued by the way the mobility patterns of the top 20 per cent and bottom 20 per cent mirror each other – he suspects because we still retained some of our shopping and leisure patterns even in lockdown.
But for E Tu¯ assistant national secretary Rachel Mackintosh the data says one important thing. It paints a picture of underpaid and undervalued workers doing the essential work and being put at risk to keep our country going.
‘‘It’s almost become a cliche´ . But they just don’t need applause at the end of people’s driveways; they need decent pay. They need safety; they need protection. They need to be able to participate in decisions about their own work.’’
Kavapalu, 52, has been cleaning police stations since 2005. Her family moved to New Zealand from Tonga when she was 16 after her father, a qualified builder, picked up a job with Fletcher in Penrose.
As the first born, she wanted to help her father provide for their family. She trained as a caregiver and received her ESOL certificate to start working at 17.
‘‘The body is getting old,’’ she says.
If cleaners had not continued to clean and sanitise workplaces, including hospitals, care homes and police stations, that were open during the Covid-19 lockdown, she says, people would have been left in potentially unsafe environments.
‘‘If we choose to not work then who is going to look after others.
‘‘In a way it makes me feel good to do my share. I can work, but I have to play it safe.’’
The mobility measurement used for this analysis is based on a methodology developed by Data Ventures. It looks at how much neighbourhood populations vary each day. The variations are then aggregated by median personal income quintile and compared to the variation on a normal day.
If neighbourhood populations vary a lot on a given day, that indicates people are moving into and/or out of that area – more mobility. If populations are relatively static throughout the day that indicates people are staying put – less mobility.