Marching in Place
It feels like decades of history have passed since March 15, 2020. Political regimes have changed, legislative agendas have been strangled to death on the Senate floor, the accelerated decline of US hegemony in the world has become plain for all to see, and we have been able to celebrate a historic strike wave which suggests the possible beginning of a more expansive upsurge in the labor movement.
However, this renewal of labor organization and militancy is threatening to pass over the hundreds of thousands of unorganized restaurant workers in New York City. Deprived of a subjective force that can transform our sector – a force which will only be constituted by our future union – we find ourselves in a situation hardly different than that from which we started nearly two years ago. We are once again completely at the mercy of forces alien to ourselves as the omicron variant ravages the city.
Governor Hochul has expressed the perspective of the bourgeoisie on the current health crisis:
“We want to make sure that our critical work force who we’ve relied on from the beginning – and my heart goes out to them filled with gratitude – that our workers can get back […] You’re the ones that got us through the first many months of anxiety. We need you again. We need you to be able to go to work.”[1]
In other words: the working class exists in order to fill our pockets, and so regardless of the health consequences, workers must remain at their posts.
We know from the experience of wave after wave, that we restaurant workers have had to shoulder some of the heaviest burdens of disease, disability, and death. We can see the future ahead of us because we have lived through it already. Despite widespread vaccinations, cases are reaching record levels, and hospitalizations are beginning to rise. A particularly disturbing piece of news: pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19 have quadrupled in the past three weeks, showing that not even our children will be spared from the coming catastrophe. Once again, the message from on high is that we are entirely on our own.
To make things worse, COVID testing in the city has become a nightmare. Demand for testing skyrocketed to new heights after the city shuttered 10 mass-testing sites, and private offices are being forced to closed as well. Since we are uncompensated for the time spent in testing lines, a worker can lose an entire day of wages waiting to see if it is safe to go to work tomorrow.
Potentially even more dangerous to the mass of restaurant workers in the city is the real loss of livelihood that follows potential loss of life. The wages lost from an entire day in a testing line can make the difference between paying an extortionate rent or starting down the path toward eviction. Sudden restaurant closures, where workers are sent home for up to two weeks without pay, are decidedly not in our favor, despite the bosses’ words about keeping ‘their’ workers safe. Likewise, the fact that a positive test can mean an unpaid vacation that few of us can afford, shows that once again, the bosses and their politicians will do anything they can to make sure that they are able to ride out the crisis on the backs of workers.
This situation shows us that through the various waves of COVID, through labor shortages, and various other disruptions, restaurant workers have been marching in place. We must reject both the fake-optimism of the officials and the resignation that has set in after nearly two years of death and disease. We must fight for the measures that will see us through this newest episode of this ongoing crisis. We must build our strength through our organization. Beyond this, we must demand that all workers be compensated for time spent seeking vaccination or COVID testing. We must fight for paid leave in case of exposure, or in order to recover from illness. It is up to us, and only us, to decide if we will be sacrificed for profit, or whether we will rescue ourselves from our powerlessness.