San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Program pays ailing workers in isolation
The COVID19 pandemic has thrust all the broken parts of our society into a glaring spotlight. One example? Paid sick leave — or lack thereof.
It should be obvious that everybody’s health is protected if everybody can get paid to stay home if they’re sick. Do we want people with the coronavirus cooking our food or cleaning the buildings we frequent because they need a paycheck? Obviously not.
But, as with so many other benefits wealthier people enjoy, that’s simply not a reality for many lowincome workers. The Pew Research Center found in March that about a quarter of the country’s workforce — or 33.6 million people — don’t have paid sick leave.
“In every aspect of our society, COVID has highlighted the vast inequality in this city and in our country.” Supervisor Hillary Ronen
One of those is Martha Otero, a mother of three from Nicaragua who arrived in California last year seeking asylum. She’s in quarantine in her Mission District apartment now after testing positive for the coronavirus this month. Thankfully, a new city program, the Right to Recover, is paying her $1,285 over two weeks so she can stay home and not go broke.
“I feel really, really stressed out and worried,” she said over the phone in Spanish through an interpreter. “I feel depressed. I feel alone. I feel desperate.”
But she acknowledged the money will mean she can pay her rent and pay back relatives she borrowed money from when she thought she had no other choice. So her desperation isn’t quite as bad as it otherwise would have been.
Otero felt so horrible — suffering from pain, dizziness, nausea, a fever and uncontrollable shaking — she had to go to San Francisco General Hospital to get tested. But many lowwage workers in San Francisco aren’t getting tested because they’re too afraid of how they’d survive economically if they get bad news.
In response, the city will pay two weeks of minimum wage to anybody who tests positive and needs income to survive isolation. It’s just the latest example of San Francisco doing the right thing when so many cities, states and certainly our federal government aren’t. Fox News may deride San Francisco values, but if believing in science and paying sick people while they stay home is on that list, sign me up.
Otero is one of the first recipients of the Right to Recover money. She fled an abusive husband who she said tried to kill her numerous times. She’s been living in the Mission since August, working as a housekeeper in private homes around the city.
She said she was careful to avoid the virus, but she did have a meal with her nephew and his girlfriend — and the girlfriend later found out she was positive despite being asymptomatic.
Otero told her 16yearold daughter, Karla, to stay with her aunt, Otero’s sister, in the East Bay while she quarantines. Another daughter was separated from her at the border because she’s 20 and not a minor, Otero said, and is currently in Mexico. Her oldest daughter, 22, remained in Nicaragua.
Otero said she has a hearing set for next month in immigration court, but without the proper paperwork, she doesn’t qualify for unemployment or other government help. When she was cleaning houses, she could make up to $700 a week, but now she has no income. She learned through the Women’s Collective — an offshoot of the San Francisco Day Laborer program that seeks to find housekeepers and nannies good jobs — that she will receive $1,285 through the Right to Recover program and said it will be “a huge help.”
Guillermina Castellanos founded the Women’s Collective nearly 20 years ago to help domestic workers find “dignified and wellpaid” jobs. Some are undocumented, and some aren’t. Castellanos said there are 65 current members of the collective. Six have already recovered from the virus, and a few currently have it. She said one woman contracted the virus when she was babysitting a little boy whose parents went to a party and brought the virus home. (Really, people? Who is going to parties right now?)
“Many members of the Women’s Collective said they don’t want to go get tested because even though the city has worked so hard to make the test free, they can’t afford to test positive and miss work,” Castellanos said in Spanish through an interpreter. “We’re trying to motivate the women to get tested by saying, ‘Look, this isn’t about you. It’s about all of us. It’s about our public health.’ ”
That’s exactly it. The COVID19 pandemic is demonstrating that our fates are all closely linked, and the health of one of us is important to the health of all of us. Sadly the obvious lessons we’re learning aren’t changing policy nearly as quickly as they should.
Castellanos said another disturbing factor is that many of the women in the collective have relatives back home — mostly in Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico — who have died of the coronavirus. They’ve lost mothers, fathers and siblings to the deadly scourge.
And losing income earners back home means many of the women feel that much more obligated to earn money here and send it back to their remaining family members.
“The people in my community have nothing,” she said. “The little we get, it’s just not enough.”
This all became evident to Dr. Diane Havlir of UCSF, who spearheaded a major study of the coronavirus in the Mission District in the spring. In four days, 4,000 people in one census tract were tested for coronavirus antibodies. It found the virus was ripping through the Latino community because its members are more likely to work as frontline essential workers and live in crowded accommodations. But some people didn’t want to get tested because they couldn’t afford to test positive, Havlir said.
“Social protection like Right to Recover is critical to the response,” Havlir said.
That’s why the Department of Public Health is calling everybody who tests positive and lives in San Francisco to ask whether they need financial help while they recover.
Those requiring assistance will be connected to a social worker to get it. They can receive $1,285 to cover two weeks of the city’s minimum wage and apply for another $1,285 if they haven’t recovered after two weeks. Many workers will earn less money through the program than they would if they were working because they make more than minimum wage or can pick up extra hours, but it’s far better than nothing.
The money — $2 million total, enough to cover just more than 1,500 people — comes from the city’s Give2SF fund, a philanthropic effort to help people struggling during the pandemic. Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who pushed the creation of the program, said she wants to raise more money privately to help additional people who test positive because the initial $2 million will probably last only a couple of months.
“In every aspect of our society, COVID has highlighted the vast inequality in this city and in our country,” she said.
On the one hand, there are huge swaths of higherincome San Franciscans who know paid sick leave is there if they need it and wouldn’t hesitate to get tested for fear of lost income while they recover.
“And then there’s this whole other part of San Francisco that doesn’t even want to know if they’re positive,” Ronen said. “Talk about a tale of two cities.”
That’s an understatement. Census data from 2018 found that the households in the top 5% of income in San Francisco make $808,105 annually, and those in the bottom 20% make $16,184.
In truth, our federal government should be ensuring all Americans can weather the pandemic safely and without going broke.
But at least we can take heart that it’s true, for now at least, that if you live in San Francisco and test positive, there’s still a paycheck for you.