Miami Workers Center Demands a Better Future in Honor of International Worker’s Day
True Investment in Collective Recovery
Over recent weeks, delivery workers, home care aides, hospital cleaners, fast food workers, grocery store workers, and restaurant staff have found themselves unsupported and ill-equipped on the frontlines of this pandemic — risking their lives so that many of us can stay safely at home. Other low-wage workers, particularly domestic workers, who, prior to the pandemic, cleaned and cared for us, our children, our aging loved ones, often intimately in our homes, have now found themselves summarily discarded.
We know that women in particular, have been hit hard shouldering both the excess burden of ensuring their families daily survival, homeschooling children and a disproportionate economic impact of the pandemic, losing their jobs earlier, being concentrated in sectors that experienced more job loss, and facing discrimination that has resulted in seeing more job loss than men within these sectors.
All of these low-wage and domestic workers lack basic workplace protections, living wages, paid sick leave, access to affordable housing, and access to healthcare and many of these workers, particularly, immigrants and informal workers remain unable to benefit from the meager relief offered in the CARES Act. But if we have learned anything from this is that a low-tide sinks all boats. Improving the quality of low-wage jobs benefits us all and is essential to our collective recovery. Our collective indifference for their well-being is ironic, they have risked and cared for us but we have not done right by them. These workers deserve better.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has laid painfully bare the cracks in our economic foundations, it has also placed in stark relief just how much all our lives continue to depend on Miami-Dade’s underbelly of largely invisible, low-wage workers. As communities across Florida debate the merits of Governor DeSantis’s recent announcement regarding reopening the state in phases. We must not forget the painful truth that under the right conditions, the old normal failed us all.
Today on International Worker’s Day, as we consider the way forward for Miami-Dade County, we must grapple with an existential question about who we are, about the kind of society we want to rebuild, and about what we owe each other. We need visionary and responsible leadership to ensure that we rebuild our economy better and ensure an economy that works for those who have done so much for us all.
Santra Denis, Interim Executive Director
Miami Workers Center
