It is International Workers' Day (or Labour Day), but all celebrations, marches and events about it have moved to an intangible space, the Internet as most countries across the world are still in a lockdown due to Coronavirus. This day that should be a celebration of work is now surrounded by the bleak aura of recession and unemployment as many jobs were destroyed or radically transformed by Coronavirus.
Healthcare personnel and people working in essential businesses (among them supermarket and delivery services staff, but also couriers, just to mention a few of them) have kept on working all over the world even during lockdown, quite often without any proper protection equipment.
In other cases companies closed their offices, but allowed employees to work from home, while there have been factories that, quickly reconverting their production and switching onto face masks, PPE or detergent, were able to maintain (at least partially) their workforce.
Yet there are millions of people - among them shop assistants and restaurant staff, just to mention two categories - that remained at home, without jobs and with not enough money to get by.
There are companies that turned to temporary lay-off schemes for employees, but such schemes do not cover freelancers or people with temporary contracts.
Besides, while data show that men are more likely than women to die of Coronavirus, it is also true that women were hit the hardest when it came to jobs. For example, during the first wave of pandemic layoffs in the US over 700,000 jobs were lost, 60% of those jobs were held by women. Yet, it was also revealed that women leaders - Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern - did a much better job at dealing with the pandemic than men (in Italy women were absent in most meetings, press conferences and major decision-making committees...).
Experts predict that more women will be hit by job losses in the next few weeks, especially in those countries were schools will remain shut, but businesses will reopen and some women will have to quit their jobs and stay at home because they don't have other family members who can help them or because they cant afford babysitters.
For today we invite you all to think about how the Coronavirus experience has impacted on our lives, families, friends and jobs and how it will change our future, with these images of women at work. The images are taken from the University of Glasgow Library Flickr page and show women in a variety of jobs, from the late 1800s to the '50s.
There are women making dynamite cartridges for Nobel's Explosives Co Ltd, in Ardeer, North Ayrshire, in 1897; shop staff at James Howell & Co. Ltd, Cardiff in 1910; women washing casks at Tennent Caledonian Breweries Ltd, Glasgow, in 1916, and aluminium manufacturers at Banbury Works in 1946.
There are also two textile workers, one at John Templeton & Co, photographed as she loads the wool to create a Chenille Axminster weave (1927), and another operating a machine producing nylon yarn for base cloth for airhousesat at New Lanark Mills (c.1950s).
Some of these images conjure up in our minds visions of Rosie the Riveter, and all the photographs point at equal job opportunities, at the achievements of the labour movement and at workplace safety (then and now).
Comments