Page 6 - Sonoma County Gazette May 2020

OPINION: Step OFF the War Path
OPINION: Health & Safety for All Workers Act
By Jack Wikse and Susan Lamont, founders of Conversations Around the Fires Anyone who now denies we are one interdependent human species across
By Christy Lubin, Graton Day Labor Center
ALMAS, Alianza Laboral de Mujeres Activas y Solidarias, the domestic
borders on mother earth is not alive to the unprecedented moment we share today.
worker organizing group of the Graton Day Labor Center is leading the fight in California to eliminate the exclusion of “household domestic service” from California’s Occupational Health and Safety Protections.
After the 2017 fires, several Sonoma County residents came together
to consider how crisis could create an opportunity to understand our responsibility to the earth and all those who share life upon it. We gathered people to discuss new ways to respond to the intertwined crises of climate change, the economy and abuse of power.
ALMAS and the Graton Day Labor Center work to empower domestic workers and day laborers to find dignified work, understand and assert their rights, and organize around issues that impact their work and their daily lives.
Better solutions were needed then, but were ignored. In the face of a global pandemic, we can’t make that mistake again. A more compassionate and empathetic world is needed as never before.
There are over 300,000 domestic workers who work as housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers for seniors and people with disabilities. Domestic workers are primarily immigrant women who work to support their own families as primary breadwinners, and they typically work on their own in private homes for low-wages. In California, there are two million households that rely on domestic workers to care for their homes and loved ones. That number is expected to increase by more than 50% by 2022.
President Trump says we need to be on a “war footing” to combat
the “foreign enemy” coronavirus. Since WWII, the U.S. has had a war economy. It might be said that all that unites the U.S. is military spending, spread judiciously across the states, our culture wallowing in violence and nationalist fear mongering. We instinctively use war metaphors when faced with a problem. We fight wars on drugs, poverty and terrorism with little to show for it. The war analogy enables us to overlook the harmful effects on people, just as actual combat does.
While domestic work is essential to the California economy and to the ability for Californians to live independently, domestic workers have been categorically excluded from basic labor and occupational health and safety protections.
U.S. wars and preparation for war do more destruction to life on this planet than any other single source. U.S. sanctions on “enemy” countries create conditions which spread the coronavirus. These policies create more danger than safety.
Appallingly, the current COVID-19 health pandemic as well as the increasingly frequent and devastating California wildfires have magnified the vulnerability and dangers that domestic workers and day laborers face on a daily basis because they are excluded from California’s Occupational Health and Safety protections. As a result, the health and safety of domestic workers and day laborers have been put at severe risk during these disasters.
During this virus-induced pause, dolphins are returning to Venice and the air in India is more breathable. This reduction in fossil fuel consumption gives us an opportunity to reflect on our way of life and our unexamined assumptions about a healthy economy. A perpetual war economy is not healthful.
Domestic workers act as frontline and essential workers during the current worldwide health pandemic. They provide care to California’s most vulnerable to illness, like seniors and people with compromised immune systems, yet they remain vulnerable and without protections. Domestic workers are vulnerable because they work long hours for low wages, without access to healthcare and paid sick days. Many are seniors themselves and have their own health challenges.
Some say we are now “on hold,” as if we could return to some “normal” healthy state. A culture that has bankrupted itself on fruitless foreign wars and continues to militarize the planet while enriching the global 1% is not a sane or healthy society. We are now being confined to our households, facing catastrophe, and how will we manage? The main teaching of the Abrahamic religions is that ethical behavior and money making don’t go together. We’ve lost this distinction. We will need to develop a new concept of economics.
In the private home workplace, occupational risks and hazards for domestic workers include physical and ergonomic demands and exposure to infectious diseases and household cleaning chemicals. Domestic workers are also at
risk of suffering from psychological stress, and are especially vulnerable to workplace violations. They are at risk of physical, emotional and sexual abuse by employers or clients, and those risks are heightened because they work alone, in informal workplace environments, without psychological support or physical assistance.
Let’s treat the virus as something to be understood. It came about in an unregulated toxic marketplace. Let’s stop worshiping the market and honor compassion, This cannot mean “America First.” We must stop making war and begin fostering sustainable communities. Let’s demand the President invite a global cessation of hostilities, an Easter cease fire (not a return to work) to give space for the world to heal. If we lead, others will follow. Let this be a new beginning of a paradise built in hell.
During the recent wildfires, employers asked domestic workers and day laborers to stay behind to help fight fires, guard homes or pets, and clean up toxic ashes. Workers were also put at risk when their employers fail to tell them not to come in to work when the homes they work in were under mandatory evacuation orders.
As we wrote this, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for an immediate global ceasefire saying, “End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.....That is what our human family needs....” Let’s make this more than a pause and rethink the ways in which we interact as people and as nations.
In Sonoma County, domestic workers and day laborers worked at wildfire clean-up sites without any safety information or protections. Many experienced skin rashes, headaches, sore joints, and respiratory issues from smoke inhalation. At the onset of the CoronaVirus pandemic, many of our domestic worker members cleaned private homes without receiving safety information or Personal Protective Equipment from employers.
In our sheltering in place, let us reflect that, as we emerge from this catastrophe, we can look around and reevaluate our unsustainable way
of life. The rule of the 1% has confronted us with the real line of death— the destruction of our planet. We have an unprecedented opportunity to foster communities of peace and justice. Our prejudice toward war is being revealed. The political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote: “In every historical crisis, it is the prejudices that begin to crumble first and can no longer be relied upon.”
These crises and disasters have highlighted the vulnerability and dangers that domestic workers and day laborers face because they are excluded from California’s Occupational Health and Safety protections. We know that there will be more wildfires and natural disasters in the coming years, so we are calling on legislators to take immediate action to protect the health and safety of these workers by including them in Cal/OSHA’s protections.
It should not have taken a pandemic to wake us to our interdependence, but now that we are here, let’s make the most of this opportunity.
We urge you to join us in supporting SB 1257!
6 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 5/20