Federal COVID-19 relief policies failed women workers — and now feminists are fighting for them

The COVID-19 numbers have led to widespread alarm: 16 million workers have filed for unemployment, and 100,000 to 250,000 lives are at risk. “This is a public health crisis,” Senator Kamala Harris told viewers during a tele-town hall organized by nonprofit One Fair Wage on Tuesday, “that has resulted in an economic crisis.” For women workers, who make up a disproportionate number of the low-wage workers providing essential services during the novel coronavirus’s outbreak in the U.S., that crisis is both political and personal.

“The coronavirus catastrophe has exposed what has always been a devastating reality for millions of low-paid women workers across the country: Despite working hard and providing essential services that we depend on, they are paid rock-bottom wages that devalue the work they do and put them at high risk of living in or near poverty, even when they work full time,” Julie Vogtman, National Women’s Law Center director of job quality and lead author of the organization’s recent report, When Hard Work Is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs, said in a statement. “As thousands of restaurant servers, hotel clerks, waitresses, and fast food workers are losing their jobs every day due to the pandemic, their economic security and that of their families have become even more tenuous. Let this be a wake-up call to policymakers to increase the federal minimum wage, expand paid sick and family and medical leave, strengthen unemployment benefits, and shrink the gender wage gap that shortchanges them.”

These recommendations echo the demands of groups like Justice for Migrant Women, which in March launched an Emergency Pandemic Fund for Farmworkers with Hispanics In Philanthropy to advocate for the 2 to 3 million farmworkers, an estimated 900,000 of whom are women, who continue to plant, pick, and pack the food we’re all rushing to pick up at stores or order to our doorsteps.

“It took a global pandemic for the federal government to acknowledge that farmworkers are critical,” JMW founder Monica Ramirez told Ms. “Our society and our very existence — by way of stocked grocery store shelves — depends on their labor, and the work of other food production and delivery workers.”

The joint fundraising effort will help put food on the tables of farmworker families, but JMW’s work for farmworker women doesn’t end in the immediate. At the end of March, to mark National Farmworker Awareness Week, the group delivered to all members of Congress a letter signed by over a dozen other organizationsoutlining specific demands for keeping farmworkers safe, such as providing PPE and preventing ICE raids during the outbreak.

“Farmworkers do life-sustaining work,” JMW and HIP declared when they launched the fund. “Despite their critical contributions, farmworkers often live in the shadows of our society and are subject to substandard working conditions. Farmworkers are excluded from of the most basic labor protections and are at risk of wage theft, rampant sexual harassment, and severe occupational injuries from heavy machinery, sharp implements, and other unsafe conditions.” In the midst of COVID-19, the organization noted, these risks are magnified and expanded, but federal relief and policies are still falling short of protecting farmworkers.

Further down the food supply chain, tipped and service workers — 70% of whom are women — are also in particularly dire straits. One Fair Wage, an organization dedicated to eliminating the federal subminimum wage, is helping to fill the financial gap left for these women workers in the wake of inadequate relief at the federal level. The OFW Emergency Coronavirus Tipped and Service Worker Support Fund, which the organization said Tuesday had raised over $7 million to disperse to workers in need, will provide cash payments of at least $213 to service workers in need on a first-come, first-serve basis.

“Millions of restaurant and other tipped workers have lost or are losing their jobs,” OFW explained in the FAQ for the fund. “Millions of workers find themselves now unable to pay for rent, food for their children, or other bills.” What’s worse: The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers, which 43 states still allow employers to pay food service workers, is just $2.13 an hour, so service employees who have lost jobs and seen their hours cut during the COVID-19 pandemic will receive paltry unemployment payments based on their hourly wage, not on their typical earnings including tips.

Faryn Keith, a single mother and restaurant worker in Washington, D.C., made only $4.50 an hour before the pandemic. Her unemployment insurance, which she says is about “one-quarter of what I would be making,” likely won’t get her through the month — and it took three weeks to arrive. Chi Walker, a food service worker in Michigan, lost her job two weeks ago, spent a week just getting her request for unemployment submitted, and then moved in with her parents when she was forced to choose between having a car or having her own place to live. “I have zero dollars coming in,” she told reporters on a press call. The OFW Emergency Fund, she explained, made it possible for her to pay her cell phone bill. Meredith Harvey will be in better straits because she lives in California, where the subminimum wage has been eliminated and tipped workers earn a minimum wage of $12 an hour, but funds from OFW’s Emergency Fund were still a critical resource for her to make ends meet in the last month.

“These times are so tough,” Saru Jayaraman, founder and executive director of One Fair Wage, said during the organization’s tele-town hall Tuesday. “Frankly, it’s a reflection of the fact that we didn’t receive enough money, even before coronavirus. Restaurant workers were never paid enough.”

Neither were domestic workers — over 90 percent of whom are female, and who are disproportionately women of color. “Before the crisis, domestic workers earned low wages, did not have paid sick days or paid family leave, did not have access to a safety net or job security, and immigrant and undocumented workers were particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation,” Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, reminded listeners on a press call in March. “Today, amidst the coronavirus, they are faced with a series of impossible choices that no human being should have to face, and unparalleled threats to their own safety and health.”

Ingrid Vaca, who has been doing domestic work in D.C. for 20 years, cried when she told her story during an NDWA press call. “The last three years have been horrendous,” she explained, telling reporters in Spanish that she was “sad and depressed and fearful” because federal policies “make domestic workers invisible” and don’t “respect our human dignity.” Rosana, a third-generation domestic worker in Miami, told listeners that the cancellations began last month, leaving undocumented and uninsured workers like her in a precarious position. “This is very painful,” she said in Spanish, “and reminds me of the time I left Uruguay, and we came here, and we had no food. Now, I’m facing the same issues.”

According to new data from NDWA and the Economic Policy Institute, domestic workers are feeling the economic impacts of COVID-19 first and worst — just last week, 68 percent reported having lost their jobs — but many are not receiving critical relief funds from federal packages passed in recent weeks. Domestic workers are more likely to be foreign-born and noncitizens than workers in other occupations, and therefore more likely to fall through the cracks of the CARES Act, and workers who are eligible are facing bureaucratic challenges to access.

For the 80 percent of domestic workers who are breadwinners, these economic injustices put their entire families at risk. Melissa, a home care worker who spoke to reporters Wednesday during another NDWA call, made roughly $400 a week working five days a week from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. before she was dismissed with one week’s notice two weeks ago. Last week, she ran out of food when rent was due. Her story is unfortunately common: 84% of domestic worker breadwinners reported to NDWA that they cannot or may not be able to get food this week, and 55 percent couldn’t pay rent for April.

NDWA is providing immediate relief for women like Melissa through its Coronavirus Care Fund for domestic workers, which had raised $4 million as of Wednesday, and continues to advocate for local, state, and federal COVID-19 relief funds without restrictions or exemptions to ensure that all domestic workers can make ends meet during this time.

Until such victories bring relief to all workers, and especially some of the most vulnerable women in the workforce, organizations like OFW, NDWA, and JMW will continue to fill gaps in the federal response to COVID-19. “This virus does not discriminate,” NDWA senior policy advisor Julie Kashen told reporters. “Our relief policies must not discriminate either.”

COVID-19 relief funds in this article:

• OFW Emergency Coronavirus Tipped and Service Worker Support Fund
• NDWA Coronavirus Care Fund
• JMW Emergency Pandemic Fund for Farmworkers