Featuring Janel Bailey, Co-Executive Director of Organizing & Programs of Los Angeles Black Worker Center:
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting black workers? What does it mean in light of the inequality the black community already faces? Code WACK! host Brenda Gazzar and Janel Bailey discuss the racial inequities of “flattening the curve” and explore how shelter-in-place rules are less likely to protect black workers.
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‘When America catches coronavirus, Black folks die’
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Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll talk about how black workers are being affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Janel Bailey is co-executive director of organizing and programs of the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, where black workers are organizing to combat a crisis. The Black Jobs Crisis manifests in communities where more than half of black workers are either unemployed or underemployed, which means they’re clustered in work with hourly wages of $15 an hour or less.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Janel.
Q: What challenges are black workers facing today amid the coronavirus pandemic?
Bailey: Some of the biggest problems that folks are facing during the crisis still include discrimination. The thing about the coronavirus crisis is that a lot of the things we are seeing now aren’t new. We’re seeing a lot of the same dynamics of inequality that left black workers behind. While some folks are saying ‘oh everything is totally different now,’ that’s not entirely true. Many of those dynamics continue to persist.
And so before a lot of this happened, our members got together and identified that one of the biggest issues facing black workers in California is discrimination and inability to actually get to the job, whereas many workers can identify issues like wages or wage theft, the deepest form of wage theft is never being able to access those wages in the first place. And so yeah, our organization is where both come together to kind of combat those issues.
Q: Hummm. So would you say then the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these issues or how would you characterize it?
Yeah, I would say the crisis caused by corona simply deepened the existing crises in black communities and is really just shining a light on the existing inequity and inequality. The problems that folks were having before corona are frankly just worse now. Issues like I said — access to employment, ability to hold on to it, even folks being able to stay in their homes, all of those were issues, again, for a lot of black communities before corona hit so corona is now, like I said, just shining a light on many of those things.
Q: The Advancement Project California recently released their interactive policy brief: How Race, Class and Place Fuel a Pandemic. What findings, Janel, were the most striking to you and why?
Bailey: Yeah, you know we talked with folks at the Advancement Project before the study came out and there was a whole group of community advocates and leaders that were part of putting that study together. And one of the things that was super clear to us, especially coming from the Black Worker Center, where we accompany black workers as folks are walking through their various struggles, it was pretty obvious that while folks were talking about the curve as to how the pandemic would play out health-wise, it was pretty obvious that it would play out different in black communities. That was pretty clear and so I started to wonder, one of the things I brought up before that study came out is how the curves are different because while people were having a conversation about the curve, yeah, there might be some mainstream curve but there’s clearly a black curve.
If we expect x number of cases, how many of those will be black folks? What does our curve look like? If there’s a peak during the summer, when is our peak? How many peaks will our community have?
What we’ve seen with the shelter in place, the way that it’s set up, it tends to protect wealthy white folks who tend to be able to stay home and it puts people who are clustered in essential work — and that tends to be black and brown low-wage workers — it puts them in harm’s way because a key part of shelter in place is, you know, access to shelter and jobs you’re able to do remotely so knowing all those things, it’s quite clear the curves would look different.
And so when we asked the Advancement Project to define that, I can’t say that I knew exactly what I was getting into and so when they sent out the findings from their study, the most striking thing was how awful it was. We knew that it was awful. It’s not shocking. There’s this thing that says ‘when America catches a cold, black America catches the flu.’ Well, it’s been quite obvious in this situation when America catches coronavirus, black folks die so no, it wasn’t shocking at all that the curves looked different but what was shocking was how deep they are, just the number of lives lost. I was even hesitant to even share it with my team, with the staff and with the organizing committee because sometimes in these roles, you know, we talk about the numbers and share a lot of data, but those are lives, those are family members. We know and understand that it’s really hard to stomach. I would say that was the most difficult part of the report.
Thank you so much, Janel.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at HEAL dash C-A dot org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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