Now is the time to ask the essential questions
With each day of lockdown, daily life is boiled down a little more. Who is an essential worker? What stores are necessary? How can industry adapt? Everything is being questioned, ideas bad and good being run through a sieve, sometimes leaving us with a degree of incoherence.
Lockdown is a good time to gather information, as the Star has just done on defining workers and industries considered crucial to keeping our nation functioning. We all have a mental map of our nation and our city but Star reporters Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Andrew Bailey have gathered data to give us a map of Toronto lockdown employment, a visual most people wouldn’t have bothered with much in days when we breathed more easily.
The numbers show that about 65 per cent of Toronto residents are considered essential workers, people in sectors that can remain open with some in-person staffing (some sectors including government were excluded for data collection reasons). We think of COVID-19 as a health survival story but as time progresses it becomes more about financial survival, often the same thing.
Essential workers live differently. They are more likely to have lower pay, no paid sick pay, are less unionized, more easily laid off, have fewer benefits and so on. Overwhelmingly, packed into workspaces, public transit, and small homes, and forced into contact with the public, they contract the coronavirus in greater numbers. This is an immense public failure, a historic sorrow that builds day by day.
There will always be terrible jobs. But could we use lockdown to look at the data and start thinking what can be fixed, fast and slow?
We don’t know when COVID-19 will be contained and its variants suffocated, whether new viruses will appear as the planet heats up, what supply chains will break, what has to be repaired quickly or else. It’s not helpful to stick with old ways of thinking. How do we alter work so that fewer workers become used and abused, and then ill?
There are bad ideas out there. Peel’s medical officer of health has recommended “the amount of non-essential items being purchased online” be restricted.
“This would decrease the size of the workforce required to fulfil orders and limit the amount of in-person contact,” said Dr. Lawrence Loh. In other words, higher unemployment plus greater lockdown misery.
Loh may be a fine health officer but a poor economist. Who will decide what items delivered by Amazon are nonessential? Last month, Amazon delivered to my door light bulbs, weatherstripping, a dozen books, and an OXO Good Grips Soap Squirting Dish Brush.
I can re-read old books, live in dim light, let wind blow under the door, and wash dishes with my fingers, but there’s a limit. Amazon made Toronto’s lockdown survivable, in that it’s possible to stay home, to never go out. Amazon is essential, which is ironic because Amazon warehouse are notoriously hellish places to work.
Years from now, will we understand how huge companies like Amazon and Facebook were allowed to operate in Canada as they pleased? At the moment, Amazon is fighting its biggest labour battle ever on U.S. soil, as an Alabama warehouse tries to unionize.
“In logistics, transportation and retail … Amazon is the great white whale,” writes a reporter at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. If it votes yes, it would be the first such union in the U.S. Note: in badly managed industries, unionizing will be contagious.
Amazon is evil. How evil will it be allowed to be? How long will 65 per cent of Toronto’s workers suffer until we change direction? How long before N95 masks are easily purchased and mandatory, along with a second mask (N95s don’t fit women’s faces) so that warehouse work is safe? When will public transit in Peel double or triple in capacity?
Now is the time for fresh thinking. Why is Ontario holding back federal money offered to mitigate lockdown pain? Should health care be federal? Should anti-maskers be under house arrest? Should unionization be mandatory?
We’re in lockdown. We hate it. Look at the data map of who works where in Toronto and come up with new ideas, for next time.