Workers' Stories Project

Jamie O'Neill

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The Covid-19 Briefings

A written submission and photographs of diary entries by Richard who is retired and lives in Edinburgh.

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I have been keeping a personal diary with notes on the daily Scotland and UK briefings. I am retired and have watched every briefing either live or a small number recorded. I initially included personal comments but stopped this after the first few days – there seemed nothing new for me to add so I stuck to noting the factual updates. I used a consistent reporting format to enable easier comparison between the days which followed the respective broadcast briefing format.

A significant reason for watching and recording the briefings, was due to my general outlook: I have a keen interest in history and I attempt where possible, to situate and understand contemporary events with a broader “historical perspective.” I realised that my scribbled notes would become a minor personal “cultural document,” which I had intended to pass onto my partner Marie and I’s grandson, Nathan.

It could be argued that “The Pandemic” is the most significant historical event which has occurred in my lifetime. As such, I felt that it was my “duty” to appreciate the details of the event per se, and to adhere to any guidelines based on “Science” and introduced by Government to facilitate the “elimination” of the virus. It felt good even in a very insignificant obscure way, to be “doing my bit.” I felt that the diary and corresponding daily watching of the briefings was my very small way to show my appreciation and greater insight into the significant sacrifice others were/are making to stem the outbreak. It also allowed me to experience greater empathy with previous generations who have also endured tremendous hardships, and the debt that we owe them, which is commonly forgotten or unappreciated.

Apart from the above reasons, I was inspired by my big brother John, who was 21 years my senior and alas no longer with us, who did a similar thing during the 1940s recording what was among the most significant historical events of his lifetime. These notes from history as it is happening can give future generations an insight into what it was like in the day-to-day of such events.

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Octopus Me/ Hannah’s Story

Hannah Gail Angus is 12 years old and lives in the Southside of Glasgow and is about to begin her second year at high school. Here she shares her story of being a carer at home through a written submission and artwork titled ‘Octopus Me’.

During lockdown me my brother and mum have had a few things happen to us including my mum getting coronavirus, When my mum had corona she had to quarantine in her room meaning I had to make meals for her and cash which was hard because I am vegetarian and they both eat meat luckily my mum wasn’t very hungry so she didn’t have big meals and cash usually eats hotdogs that are easy to make. My brother has autism so he can’t look after himself, I had to tell him when to brush his teeth, when to shower, when to eat and help him do his schoolwork, that was the hardest part because he was getting really stressed out and its hard to see your brother upset and not know what to do to make it better. Also I had to keep the house clean like dishes – which I hate DOING, sweeping, washing clothes, hanging them up to dry then putting them away, cleaning the bathroom and delivering food to my mum.

I’ve always helped around the house but maybe only one job a day but I didn’t have to do everything every day. I learned that it’s actually really hard to run a household and that loads of people have to do it every day with no pay or thanks. It was pretty rubbish but the worst part wasn’t worrying about my mum being sick or having to do all the dishes multiple times a day it was not being able to give her a hug and hanging out with her. She’s better now but I still help around the house because I didn’t realise how many jobs she had to do. Now I can’t wait to get back to school to hang out with my friends again and get back to some kind of normal 🙂

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I Watched

Erin Niven normally lives in Guildford for University but when lockdown began, she came home to Erskine and since then has been working at LittleInch Care Home in Erskine as a carer.  From her experience there she has written a poem titled “I Watched” and submitted a recorded version. This is Erin’s story.

I watched someone die today.

I held their hand and told them it was okay.

That I was right there.

But I thought silently to myself, none of this is fair.

That’s a cliche I suppose,

Cause everyone goes

But not in this way

With someone you barely know holding your hand as you slip away

Into the unknown

And at the end of my shift I’ll go home.

I’ll stand in the shower and I’ll wash it all away

The germs, the virus, but the sadness stays.

Because you weren’t just a name, a number, a statistic

You were a friend, a lover, a human, that’s what will stick

In my head and heart as I toss and turn

Cause after today the world seems to burn.

It’s on fire and I can’t put it out.

It makes me want to scream and it makes me want to shout.

Instead I’ll clap for our keyworkers but that doesn’t include Boris

Because if he’d done his job right we could have avoided a lot of this.

I watched someone die today but I also watched people live

I watched them laugh and cry and talk and give.

Give a shoulder to cry on or a smile in the street.

Give time to talk or time just to greet.

And they weren’t doing it for fame or for clout

They were doing it cause they care about

You. And Me.

The people that we are and the people that we’ll be.

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Designing NHS Louisa Jordan Hospital

This is a submission from David Ross, an architect and author based in Glasgow.

David was the lead architect for the NHS Louisa Jordan Hospital at the SEC Glasgow. Although his office was closed and his team were working from home for the first three weeks of that, he was on site most days with the NHS, design and contractor’s teams.

As well as designing and delivering a 1000 bed fully functioning hospital in 23 days, they had to adapt immediately to a team of people all working remotely from each other for the first time.

The image below sums up the project well he says. David is the one on the left of the photograph and he also wrote the words.

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Torn

A poem by Matthew Lynch an Ambulance Technician working for the Scottish Ambulance Service.

People are hiding from the danger, trying to take a stand, but we’re sliding into battle mask and apron to hand.

This PPE will protect you, your families will be glad, but why every time I wear it, I can’t help but feel sad. 

Keep your distance, risk assess, but what is it I’m going into at that address?

We’ve got these special masks to wear when times get rather hard, but we don’t have them at the moment so just be on your guard. 

Make the decision to whether people live or die, while we try to get this great supply.

Your colleagues may get sick, some will sadly pass, but everyone rumbles on, fighting this thing on mass. 

I cannot see my family, I will not risk them fall, but am I just a carrier, giving it to one and all?

You’ve seen the worst, you will try your best, it does very little to not feel stressed. 

Families will cry and families will mourn and we’re stuck in the middle incredibly torn. 

These days will pass, you’ll weather the storm but what’s up next because of the stresses that we’ve worn?

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November 2020

A written story submitted by Rose who works for a major insurer on the East Coast.

I’m in my mid-thirties and work in a call centre where I deal with home insurance queries for major brands on behalf of a large underwriter. I ended up moving to the east coast of Scotland by accident, running away with my partner from a good few years of treading water in Glasgow while we lived off my Employment Support Allowance for PTSD (and dealt with all the requisite DWP efforts to crush your spirit) and then, after we couldn’t take dealing with the deliberate hostility any more, living off the terrible earnings from various casual jobs in Glasgow, usually in call centres with awful conditions and huge turnover.

Not long after we moved my partner had started to work for the call centre I now work at too and they seemed to have made a deliberate choice to not do anything that others did to make you miserable. The wage was decent, no call time targets, no monitoring when you went to the toilet, no LEAN management and the conditions were actually good. There was an established union as well. A bit of money helped us stabilise, and I was lucky enough to have my partner and family support me while I spent a beautiful summer working and living in nature. I regained some confidence, things felt on the up and so I applied for a job at the same place as my partner so that we could live on our own again and figure out our next move. People had told me I would get it, but I felt when I walked in that I was wearing a sign on my head that said I was useless, so I was shocked when they offered me a job.

I turned out to be good at it. I had worked in call centers before which helped me. I liked that I actually had to think when I got a difficult call, I liked understanding the background of what I was doing, and I found that I was very good at speaking to people who were worried or upset. My Christmas holiday in 2020 marked just over a year of me being there – the longest I have held a job since I worked in pubs in uni. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself, plenty of people around me were doing far better and I generally despise the feeling of ‘hasn’t she done well in spite of…”, I just wanted to be doing well, full stop. Still, I knew it was a sign I was doing better than I had been and hoped the next year might see me making more progress.  And then COVID appeared.

It wasn’t part of my job, but my colleagues and partner dealt with travel insurance. I had noticed news coverage of a new virus in China and it piqued my interest but it wasn’t really affecting things for us too much, though I did start thinking back to a book I’d read around 2010 (Gina Kolata, Flu) that discussed the 1918 flu pandemic and said we seemed overdue for another significant one. Relatively few people take holidays to China from the UK so you’d hear of the odd customer asking us how it would affect them but not that many, usually someone who travelled to see their family at new year and was worried they wouldn’t be able to go this year or a student who had gone home and was now afraid of getting stuck. Our call volumes behaved normally, other more routine ups and downs were our concern, a far off novel virus didn’t get much attention while storms battered our customers and our phone lines. As COVID-19 began to spread to other countries, the questions increased. What happens if I can’t go? What happens if I get quarantined? Should I go? Will you cover my treatment if I get ill? What if my holiday gets cancelled? What happens if I die abroad from COVID?  Guidance was issued to answer all of these questions and call volumes steadily went up. With every news article and every unusually busy day for my partner on the phones I felt more nervous. Epidemiologists were starting to say this was serious and every day there seemed to be a new country with one case that quickly became a cluster, and then multiple clusters.

Work issued guidance about how to wash your hands thoroughly and posters showing the technique went up in every toilet area. We were all given a bottle of hand gel and a holder to attach to our clothes and use as we moved through the office. Anyone with symptoms was to isolate themselves but we all still sat next to each other, ate with each other, used the same toilets, used the gym, sat on transport together, and car-shared. I would usually have at least ten people within a few metres of me, often more. This all seems inexplicable to me now, like a different life. You could feel that the company was worried about what was happening, and we weren’t sure where it was going to end up. We were watching the virus roll towards us over the phone, keeping track of where people were making claims for, joking about it through gritted teeth. Travel workers were pulled into meetings and told to get ready, that things would really kick off when COVID got to popular holiday destinations and that this was really serious.

The day things really kicked off things started fairly normally. Travel lines were busy, but nothing that different from the previous weeks. I kept my eyes on the news between calls, watching to see where it would pop up next, both so I knew what was happening and so I could warn colleagues to expect a rise in calls if something big happened. In the middle of my shift a liveblog updated and announced that COVID-19 was in Tenerife. Within a minute of the news coming out my colleagues were staring down call queues of hundreds of people, then thousands, beyond anything we should ever have had to handle, all worried, all frightened, and getting angrier every minute they waited on the phone. People were drafted in to train rapidly to take the pressure off our colleagues somewhat. They took people’s anger and fear about what was happening, got a lot of abuse, and had very little time to recover between their calls. It often seems to me that people who phone up and engage in imperious, insulting behaviour don’t even consider that while they’re only having to make that one important call the person who answers might have spoken to dozens of different people already, often explaining the same things, doing the same work of soothing the customer, making the same apology for the wait time and explaining to them that they are one of thousands of people asking for help with the same issue, and then they go back to square one with the next call. To be able to act as if that person you’re speaking to is the first one that day, the most important person, and pretend that you’re not tired and frustrated,  that you’re not frightened yourself – that’s a skill that very few people appreciate even though every customer expects it of you. I understood the fear and frustration of people who were having important plans cancelled, but found myself getting angry on behalf of my travel colleagues. People would speak to them as if the time they’d waited was their fault, they would tell us that we should be prepared for this and staff ourselves in such a way that we would always be prepared for a gigantic global crisis, and just did not seem to understand that if thousands and thousands of people are going to phone up just for reassurance at the same time as thousands of people are actually having to claim then there is going to be a queue. My partner was mentally exhausted after every shift and we found ourselves in the position of sometimes just not keeping up to date on the news because COVID was dominating his days to the point where he couldn’t listen to it any more.  

Towards the end of March we were all sent home and I went from working in a loud and busy call centre with hundreds of colleagues in the building to sitting at an old writing bureau in my flat, tucked into a corner of our living room and working with a hard phone and computer equipment the company had sent out after I’d been at home for about a week with no way to work. My only colleague at home was my partner, doing his job in the spare room. We were defined as essential workers but we could do our job from home so we did. We hunkered down and waited to see what would come next. We weren’t allowed to go out except for essential shopping and exercise and so our customers and colleagues were sometimes the only people we spoke to that day, even if it was over the phone and teams. Now my job was affected too – not only were customers calling to let us know they now worked from home, we had a wave of customers who suddenly found themselves with no way to pay their premiums. We reviewed policies to reduce cover and minimise costs and deferred payments until furlough money eventually meant a customer could catch up on their bills, or redundancy or otherwise falling through the cracks of the support available meant they cancelled their cover entirely and took their chances. I spent time just talking to isolated shielding customers who found themselves without their usual support and facing huge uncertainty. Eventually, I started to receive calls where customers or their relatives had died of COVID-19. When you deal with home insurance you handle more death than you would think, and when someone dies we need to update their policy and make sure we’re protecting the interests of their estate and that everything’s sorted for their relatives. I’m fairly used to taking these calls, but they can still get to you occasionally. I nearly cried after helping a woman who had lost both parents to COVID within the same month and could not find insurance for the property to cover it until a sale, and I finally did cry after a call when a customer told me to remove cover away from home from his policy – it was only to cover them when they went away on holiday, and he wouldn’t go any more without his wife.

August 2021

Nearly a year after I first wrote down what it was like to work during COVID-19 things are very much the same for me in terms of how I work and what I do, but things around me have moved on significantly. During lockdown my partner moved in to a professional apprenticeship and is now working towards a degree while being supported by our employer. As he has moved into the professional sphere of our company I have seen our worlds diverge a little – he now gets bank holidays off but I still work those because customer service is still open, he has set tasks to accomplish as he sees fit but I am available between set hours and am judged for the proportion of time I spend on each activity in my day. I have to put a code in to my phone system when I need to use the toilet, he doesn’t have to do that any longer. And yet despite my awareness of the differences between professionals and customer service staff I am also acutely aware that I am extremely lucky. I have found myself in the disconcerting position of actually coming out of things better than before in a lot of ways while other people have lost their jobs or seen their entire industry shut down. Capitalism and the financial infrastructure underpinning it cannot be allowed to stop, not even for a second, and so my job has been totally protected. My company has not furloughed a single employee. I have had a steady income, we haven’t missed a single rent payment, and my partner is in well-supported training for a professional career. My partner and I can both work from home permanently if we wish to – this affords us more flexibility when we decide where to live in the future. The calls we deal with at work are returning to normal after a huge flurry of activity this summer caused by stamp duty holidays and last minute relief from quarantine for double vaccinated people that caused a stampede for bookings (and so new travel insurance policies) at the end of the English school holidays. I still find it bizarre that a pandemic has improved things for us by allowing us to work from home and allowing me to avoid stressors, and I doubt I will ever not feel guilty about it either. As COVID went on and customer services were strained due to staff absence, companies looked to move more services online if possible – who knows if this will threaten the stability of my job in the future. For now, I am better off than I have been in years. I hope it lasts, and I hope the families of all my customers lost to this pandemic, and all the survivors of this pandemic, find peace and justice.

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Workers’ Exhibition- COP26

As historians and trade unionists of varying stripes, very early on in 2020 we were acutely aware how the narrative of the public health emergency was already serving the interests of businesses and politicians, all the while obscuring the suffering and trauma experienced by working class people all over the country. Our intention had been to complicate and contest any monopolisation and weaponization of the story of the COVID crisis, by collecting the story of the pandemic,  in the first-person,  from below. We endeavored to facilitate a space in which working-class people could talk about what happened to them, using whatever means they felt most comfortable. We would then share these stories with other workers. In this way we could as a class build our own narratives through our own cultural forms. We could use this  understanding to identify the common moments of struggle and triumph, of grief and joy and as such, move from individual states of radical loneliness and isolation into a common solidarity. 

Our event at GalGael in Govan translated power of  building this history into an experience of community. We created a space where the stories of our archive could be viewed, read and heard collectively. On a cold and dark night in November 2021 amid the festival atmosphere of COP26, the many stories we collected over the course of a year and a half from the beginning of the first lockdown were shared for the first time, not on a digital screen but in an embodied public forum. While politicians and industrialists had occupied the city and its venues, the most important sense of recognition and consensus being approached the week of the climate conference was taking place outside COP26 itself. Striking GMB cleansing workers and tenants’ unions on picket lines around Glasgow had  brought workers’ struggle to the attention of young climate activists, while working-class Glaswegians shared commutes on public transport with conference delegates from the Global South. At the end of 2021, a tangible sense of a dying old world and a fighting appetite for something new could be felt across Glasgow for the first time in at least two years.

To witness workers recounting to a room of other workers,  in their own words and their own voice what the last 18 months had meant for them was deeply emotional and intimate experience which felt like a collective processing of the trauma of what has happened.Strength and power could be felt in the stuttering voices and trembling hands as poetry, prose, essays and diaries were read to the room. In reading the written text of ‘Work Ethic for a Hostile Environment’ by social care assistant Tommy Lusk, one cannot help but smile . Hearing the text in the voice of Tommy himself however, we get a much greater sense of his personality and extremely funny, dry sense of humour.

Atop the workbenches and machinery of the GalGael workshop, drawings, poetry and photographs sent to us by workers were also displayed. Film, absurdity and theatre were brought together powerfully in the story of one frontline worker’s struggle against racist policing and destructive landlordism in Marjorie’s Story, a film by the tenant’s union Living Rent, narrated by Marjorie herself.

Helen McGill – a staff nurse – reflected on the relationship between her work in palliative care and the image accompanying her deeply moving poem ‘NHS Prayer.’ She reassured the audience that her painting – which is a skilful and delicate painting of a pair of gloved hands held in prayer – was something she was able to do through practice and resilience not, through divine gift.

While many workers developed their stories alone, over the course of the project we also worked with creative workers (Megan Park and Stella Rooney) and the Workers’ Educational Association (Joey Simons and Katy Hastie) to build the skills and more crucially – the confidence of workers interested in submitting to the project.

The pandemic has brought into blinding relief the wilful destruction which has been accelerating since the financial crash, of the ways we have available to us as a class to organise ourselves and come together collectively to give expression to our way of life.

To invent spaces to create and share the things we have made is also to reject the narrative of culture war central to media policy of conservative war on working-class people, within which working-class people are barred from art, performance, poetry and literature – from creativity, expression and invention for its own sake. As the Welsh socialist Raymond Williams wrote – “culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind” – it is not just a rarefied sphere that only the privileged, trained and educated have permission to access. To limit our access to art and writing is to limit the ways we have to speak to each other and to give voice to our sufferings, our dreams and our demands. Creativity, imagination and craft are not separate from our domestic or working lives but part of them. Having spaces and places where we can collectively and freely share skills, try new things, be open to curiosity and use our imaginations without fear of failure or shame is to reject the corrosive values of individualism, competition and elitism. This is a way to build power and community. If we are to reject oppressive limits on how we move, live and work, then we must also refuse to accept prohibitions on how we think, speak and create. 

On that night in GalGael we invited comments and responses from everyone who attended, and the importance of coming together to listen to the inventive and emotional stories of others was explicit in many of the written comments we received. For one night, we were able to gather together to share food, laughter and tears with our comrades, colleagues, friends and families and strangers .Together we witnessed something special – a miraculous moment of commemoration, celebration and collective commitment to keep going.

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CLRTheory

This is an account of a professional actor/musician who became a greengrocer and of a surgeon who became an activist and cofounder of a charity. It is a telling of the incredible power and resilience of community in the face of crisis, and of political failings. Of two women, who collaborated, to create the Scottish branch of a charity (Medsupplydrive UK 1190337), that UK wide delivered over 500,000 pieces of high quality PPE donated from industry, to the desperate health and social care workers who needed it most; and to make music together, during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hannah is my best pal. In March 2020 she was touring in a show Pride and Prejudice (*sort of). It was when they were playing their 100th show in Bristol, when Scottish lockdown was announced. The tour abruptly ended and she returned home. By May 2020 she had become an “essential worker” as a greengrocer in her local. Everyone in Pollockshields now knows her, for her warmth and for her humour. She will have been potentially the only person that a person saw, when they were allowed out of their homes for their essential shop following days and days alone inside, and she will have been kind to them. I am very proud of her.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hughes_eilir/status/1455640351046311945?s=21

I was working as a reconstruction surgery trainee and researcher in one of the biggest hospitals in Glasgow when the pandemic hit. Many members of our team were redeployed at short notice to look after COVID-19 patients. I spent months redeployed to the emergency department, and volunteered in ICU looking after COVID-19 patients.

I was told in March that “we have two weeks of PPE left and then we don’t know what will happen”, that “the supply chains are broken”. Our anaesthetist who was intubating COVID-19 patients on the nightshift had not been given goggles to protect her from splashes in her eyes, so I brought her a pair that was donated from Innex Home Supplies. It was terrifying. 

So, I gathered around me a group of trusted family, friends and colleagues, and we made new friends, and colleagues. We played to our strengths; with my Aunty Kay who is a fashion and textiles lecturer heading up a scrub hub of volunteers who made over 2,000 pairs of scrubs from donated material in an empty school, Hannah and her partner Ella (who is a teacher) coordinated volunteers, my colleague Eleanor and I engaged with politicians and experts in occupational health and PPE and my friends Ryan and Tingy who are journalists helped us gain media coverage, my friend Vicki (an IT consultant) created our website, Louise an operating department practitioner and artist coordinated media content and Rhona, a secretary, coordinated all of us. A social media call out over a weekend resulted in 400 extra people volunteering to help us. Many of them cold called industry to find high quality PPE in furloughed companies and warehouses, and directed it to the frontline where it was urgently needed. Glasgow Taxis soon began delivering the PPE donations, for free, all over Scotland. We joined forces with groups in the Highlands, and in London who were doing the same work until it became a UK wide effort (Medsupplydrive UK https://www.medsupplydrive.org.uk/).

Soon it became clear that it was the quality and not just the quantity of PPE that was dangerous.  We know that the most common mode of COVID-19 infection transmission is through the air. We also know that surgical masks cannot protect people from infections spread through the air we breathe.

Yet, to this day, the majority of UK health care workers are still only provided with a surgical mask when caring for patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19. Amnesty International (2020) reported that the UK has one of the highest COVID-19 health care worker death rates in the world.

I joined with the CEOs and Chair People of 28 different UK professional organisations, Unions and Royal Colleges; providing representation for all job roles and workers in the NHS and Social Care. We met with the Scottish Chief Medical Officer, the First Minister of Scotland, DHSC and IPC Cell policy makers; we showed them scientific evidence that COVID-19 is in the air and that a mask called an FFP3 respirator and ventilation (using HEPA filters) protects people from breathing it in. Centres in other countries had achieved a 0% worker death rate from COVID-19 in care settings that used these measures, by March 2020. 

There are massive equality issues with PPE to contend with; as current FFP3 disposable masks are designed for the white male face and don’t fit others well, or at all. So, in my hours outside of working in the hospital, I worked with PPE manufacturers to design better ones. Reusable P3 (FFP3 grade) respirators, that would protect the worker, be comfortable, be easy to communicate through and last for years of wear with simple cleaning so that they would be cost effective (10x cheaper) and better for the environment.

There is a postcode lottery and we are still not being listened to. So far 32 trusts in England are using FFP3 grade masks, some of them have reusable P3 respirators or special protective hoods for every worker. In Scotland, two years into the pandemic, we are still routinely provided with surgical masks when working on COVID-19 wards and we are still not allowed to use reusable options. 

We are still campaigning. And we will keep campaigning.

We want to thank all of the people who have supported us during the pandemic. Those who have dedicated their time, energy, talents, knowledge, bravery and compassion to helping those around them. It gives us hope and it keeps us going.

I'm too tired...

Hannah and I started playing music together in 2017. It is our happy place and during the pandemic it gave us solace and connection. We recycled the apple boxes from the green grocers to sound proof our respective attic space and storage cupboard, to make little cosy sound booths; taught ourselves to use recording interfaces and programmes and shared with each other these love letters in song over the internet. We now have an album in the works, and hope to release it in 2022 under the collaboration name CLRTheory. Watch this space.

Credits

Lyrics and music, harmonium, percussion, field recordings by Gill Higgins

Vocals by Gill Higgins and Hannah Jarrett-Scott

Mixed by Calum Paterson

Mastered by James Grant (Sweet Wave Audio)

Album arrangement and production Gill Higgins and Hannah Jarrett-Scott

Artwork by Sébastien Sauvêtre

Music video by Bartholomew Owl

Photography by Oisín Kealy

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Plastic Worker Stories

Patrick O’Hare is an anthropologist who studies recycling economies in South America. We are publishing Patrick’s translation of a transcript from an interview he conducted with Eduardo, a Pervuian factory worker who described his job in a plastic bag plant during the pandemic.

Eduardo (Ex trabajador de Norsac, Trujillo, Perú)

The company I worked for is the only plastic bag factory in Trujillo: it doesn’t have any competitors here. The competition is in Chiclayo, which is 4 hours away, and in Lima, which is 8 hours away. There are a lot of things that people don’t know about what it’s like inside, the exploitation, the abuse. For example, in my case I had a boss who was the worst. Because of my way of being, principally due to having lived abroad, I’ve learned to value myself. I’ve always liked working, always. I always put work first, always try to do my best, to give it 100%. But in this case, the bonus that we should have earned for dealing with waste in the factory, the boss took it. I didn’t see the funny side of that. So he could get our bonus he demanded more and more from us, he increased the speed of the machines, we almost became robots. Again and again we took out the waste: to produce, to produce, to produce. And this person treated workers badly, even those who had been there for longer than me, who had worked at the company for a long time. And it made me feel angry and impotent. When he tried to treat me badly, to intimidate me, I always put the brakes on that, because I’ve never liked to be treated badly. If there’s something that I’m not doing well, just tell me or show me how to do it better: don’t shout or swear at me. But well, what can a worker do against a boss? The worker can’t do anything because the boss is a tyrant. I lasted the time I did there because I had worked hard and learned. If I hadn’t known anything, if I hadn’t learned anything, they would have had me out of there like a shot. The other thing I was telling you about was that there was lots of work to do. Last year, at one point 50% of the workers had COVID and we kept working. Say that in one area 4 people out of 8 got COVID: that didn’t mean that the workload was halved, rather that the 4 who were left had to double their productivity. The work didn’t stop, whatever happened, it didn’t stop. And that was what the work with the rubbish was like, last year.

I’ve got a few ex-workmates who I’m in contact with and they say that now, in contrast, there is hardly any work, that it goes from bad to worse. Few workers inside the plant, and little work. What happened? The competition returned to work and took their clients back. Now that the pandemic is getting under control, the competition is levelling out and the clients who had come to us are going back to other companies. And what about us, who worked 12 hours a day all year? With the money they made from us the company bought machinery. They bought machinery like crazy and didn’t give us anything, a tip. Oh well, that’s life. In February things started to even out and our orders went down. And since the orders went down, they started to let people go. They started to look for excuses to sack people. They suspended people for no reason. In my case, for instance, I was suspended twice for things that I hadn’t done, and which I said that I hadn’t done. But arguing with them just makes things worse. I was also working there when I got COVID last year, because the majority of the workers got infected. I almost died alone because my wife and children were in Lima and I was here working. When I finally recovered and went back to work at the plant, they deducted the time that I had missed from my holiday pay. I disputed this and everything but in the end, yes, they took the time from my holiday pay, which clearly shouldn’t have been the case. Yes, in the pandemic, I was hit hard, very hard, and made it out alive by the skin of my teeth. Thank god I’m now OK. There are some long-term health effects, such as a cough, but I’m OK, despite having received no benefits from the company. They had said that they would take care of it, that any worker who got COVID shouldn’t come in to work and the business would take care of it, give us sick pay. We couldn’t get through to the number for health insurance though and we were scared, because people were dying, so many people were dying. The company had said that we shouldn’t come in if we were feeling bad, that we should do the test, and if it came out positive then we would automatically be entitled to sick pay. I got COVID, I was tested, the test result was positive, but they didn’t put me down for sick leave, they put me down as on holiday. I was owned a month’s holiday leave and they discounted 12 days from this. If I had come in and worked on those days I would have earned at least 400 soles more. I lost… but what can you do? 

As I was saying, the company started reducing its workforce, suspending people. For instance, I earned 35 soles a day but if you were suspended, they didn’t take 35 soles from you but more like 100 because you also lost the night-shift bonus, the weekend bonus and so on, so the suspension was a killer, you ended up with very little in your pay check. And the company started getting people to use up their holiday leave as well, since there wasn’t enough work. I used to work 6 months and then renew for another 6 months, then it was 3 months for another 3 months, and then finally my contract was renewed for just a month. Then I was told that my contact wouldn’t be renewed and that was that. I’ve got compañeros who say that I should take them to a tribunal but you need money for something like that. I’m not usually the kind of guy to take an employer to a tribunal; sometimes I get angry, furious though because I was only one year away from my contract being made permanent, stable. People think you because you’ve been there for a year, or 4 or 5, then you have been able to save up money but the money we had saved up with the company was given out during the pandemic. Through something called the CTS, the company has to put money into a savings account for the workers. We’re talking about around 1200 soles a year, so in 4 years almost 5,000 soles. But they offered this money to the workers during the pandemic, once last year and once this year. And I had to accept it because I had been suspended and I had to keep up with the rent. My wife was out of work and she’s only recently started working again. To avoid us getting in to debt she took the kids to live with her mother, who is 70 and who also was prevented from selling things in her little shop, her fruit and veg, her groceries. So she had to be taken care of, as well as a brother who is disabled and doesn’t earn money or receive any benefits. I’m the one who has always tried to help the family, tried not to show them when I’m in trouble, tried to ‘drink the river alone’ as the expression has it. But I can’t help feeling frustrated and impotent and that’s when I feel like taking the company to a tribunal. Because when they renewed my contract the last time they made me sign a piece of paper but I didn’t get a copy of it, and that probably covered their backs. I’m a big boy, and I’ve never worried about work before. I know that things are like this because of the pandemic, and that there are better times ahead. Next year will be better, I’m sure, when the pandemic has passed…

Back at the factory I’ve heard that they are still firing people. And what makes me most mad is that we worked like animals, we worked like hell. On the odd occasion you might get sick or miss a shift and it was fine. Now that production is down, however, they have started to bother people, to suspend them without due cause, to stop renewing their contracts. And what makes me mad is that at least I wanted to finish the year, for them at least to tell me ‘Señor Gutierrez, you know what, I’m afraid we are not going to renew your contract’. They couldn’t even do that: they simply created a list and my name was not on the list. When I went to human resources, the person who I should have been able to speak to wasn’t there. And when my contract finished they wouldn’t let me back inside the plant. What gentlemen, right? Anyway, I’ve just started a new job thank God, new compañeros, new friendships, good people. A couple who take the time to explain things – you always learn something new. The only problem is the commute – two hours there and two hours back. As I told you, I never thought that I’d find myself harvesting blueberries, something that I used to sell [in the fruit shop in Buenos Aires]. But anything can be learned, it’s never too late to learn something new. 

by on

Much has changed. Much has remained the same.

This story comes from a trade union organiser based in Glasgow and captures the huge protests in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, that took place globally during the initial lockdown and summer of 2020.

Much has changed during the pandemic, but much has remained the same. Global inequalities exasperated during a global pandemic.  I work as a trade union organiser based in Glasgow, and I’ve had reservations about submitting a “workers’ story”. But what brought me into the trade union movement was the fight against racism and a fight which has become even more necessary during this pandemic. Covid-19 has disproportionately taken the lives of so many people of colour. A pandemic doesn’t sweep away the struggles that continue against the deep-rooted inequalities that exist at the very core of the system within which we live. This digital collage pays tribute to all those workers and communities who continue to resist.  

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