From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Capitalism Made Women Of Color More Vulnerable To The COVID Recession
Date October 27, 2020 12:05 AM
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[For all women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic,
Black women and Latinas who perform the bulk of essential work during
lockdown, for all Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives,
capitalism is their preexisting condition. ] [[link removed]]

CAPITALISM MADE WOMEN OF COLOR MORE VULNERABLE TO THE COVID RECESSION
 
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Tithi Bhattachary
October 6, 2020
Truthout
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_ For all women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic, Black
women and Latinas who perform the bulk of essential work during
lockdown, for all Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives,
capitalism is their preexisting condition. _

Migreldi Lara, a single mother of three who is out of work as a hair
stylist due to the pandemic, stands with her daughters during a
protest outside the Berks County Services Building in Reading,
Pennsylvania, on September 1, 2020., Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading
Eagle via Getty Images

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly jobs report for September
proves with numbers what we have all known anecdotally and
experientially: This pandemic-laced recession has been disastrous for
women, especially women of color.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the
workforce, a rate four times higher than that for men. One in 9 Black
women, and 1 in 9 Latinas, aged 20 and over, respectively at rates of
11 percent and 11 percent, became unemployed in September. Compare
this to white men who have an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent and
white women who have a rate of 6.9 percent.

These figures are not very different from the spring, when the Bureau
of Labor Statistics report in April told us that women accounted for
55 percent of the 20.5 million job losses. The unemployment rate for
adult women
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then was 15 percent, as compared to the 13 percent unemployment rate
for adult men.

From the start of the pandemic, job losses for women have been so much
greater than for men that some feminist policy makers
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have called this a “shecession,” in contrast with 2008. And
“she” is most certainly a woman of color.

Sometimes numbers — percentages and charts — can obscure social
wounds. We can see the 11 percent job loss figure for Black women, but
we don’t necessarily associate that number with the impacts on
people like Kyaira Jackson, a seventh grader in my daughter’s class,
whose mother, the sole earner for her family, just lost her job at
Walmart. Her mother, Jazmine Pinckney, asked me if I could help return
some of Kyaira’s school things as the family would be moving soon.
As is the case for most Americans, Jazmine’s family’s health care,
as well as her ability to pay rent and buy food, were solely and
relentlessly dependent on her wage. She would now move back to her
childhood home in Atlanta, back to the house she left to make her way
in the world, this time with her two young children.

Jazmine’s life, like the lives of so many Black women in this
pandemic, is like Ariadne’s thread, leading us through the maze of
capitalist social relations. It helps illuminate the monsters behind
the inequality that existed long before the virus was even heard of.
The first step to understanding the devastation caused by the virus in
the lives of women and people of color, is to understand that it was
merely the spark; the kindling was there all along.

Let us begin with the wage, since its tyranny shapes not just our
working lives but crucially, our lives outside of the workplace.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the
workforce, a rate four times higher than that for men.

Well before the pandemic, women in this country earned 82 cents to the
dollar [[link removed]] that a
man earned, while Black women earned 62 cents on the dollar, and
Latina women earned 54 cents on the dollar. Often it is difficult to
determine cause and effect for gendered wages. It is because women
earn less than men that they tend to work part-time and spend their
unwaged time doing care work in the home, as both child care and elder
care remain exorbitant in the U.S. But it is also true that certain
jobs become less prestigious and lower paid when women become the ones
primarily performing them. Teaching was treated with much respect
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and remunerated better in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century when it was mostly men who became teachers; now, K-12 teachers
are mostly women, and they are neither as well paid nor well
respected.

Waged work remains inextricably braided with unwaged work. Lack of
access to quality child care and elder care forces women to consider
quitting waged work before their male partners since their jobs were
less paying to begin with. This in turn ensures that women are pushed
into, or remain locked into, lower-paid work due to “lack of
experience” or for having taken “career breaks.” Just under a
third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line
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since the pandemic, over a million of them have lost their jobs.

When schools and child care centers closed in the spring, and as they
continue to offer partial services through the fall, many women,
particularly white women, decided to leave the work force. As Stefania
Albanesi put it in _The New York Times_
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“white families tend to have higher wealth and higher average income
so they can afford to reduce labor supply, compared to most
African-American households, where earnings are quite low.”

Just under a third of single mothers were already living below the
poverty line; since the pandemic, over a million of them have lost
their jobs.

If our analysis stops at the doors of the workplace, and only pays
attention to the wage gap or unemployment figures, it will fail to see
the multiple ways in which waged work orchestrates the unwaged slices
of our lives. Ecologists use the term “cascade effect” as a
concept to understand how primary extinction of a species can trigger
multiple secondary extinctions. The tyranny of the wage has a similar
cascade effect on our life-making.

Consider the health of Black women and Latinas during this pandemic.
Low wages certainly determine the kind of health care these women have
or whether they have it at all. But we should not only be concerned
about low wages in the here and now. Historically, Black communities
have been forced to live in neighborhoods that have poor air quality
and/or contaminated water. They are 75 percent more likely to live
near polluting industries that produces hazardous waste.

Schools that predominantly serve Black and Brown communities are
chronically underfunded
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and the first ones to close during a financial crisis. Consistent
redlining through the years have ensured that these neighborhoods are
also more likely to be what the federal government calls “food
deserts”
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“areas in which residents are hard-pressed to find affordable,
healthy food.”

When a virus with no apparent cure comes into the lives of people in
these communities, who, then, shall we blame for the
disproportionately high death rates? It is not simply the pandemic or
the recession that is driving the disproportionate harm experienced by
women of color in this moment. It is an economic system stacked
against them.

For all the women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic, for
Black women and Latinas who have performed the bulk of the essential
work during lockdown and borne the brunt of the recession, for all the
Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives during this crisis,
it is capitalism that has been their preexisting condition.

 
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Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. 
Reprinted with permission.

 

_Tithi Bhattacharya [[link removed]] is a
professor of South Asian History and the director of Global Studies at
Purdue University. Her recent coauthored book includes the popular
Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), which has been
translated into over 25 languages. She writes extensively on Marxist
theory, gender and the politics of Islamophobia._

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