What does reopening mean?
I write to you on this Monday with a heavy heart.
There is a lot going on in the world. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed. I know it’s easy to just turn it all of and wait until things go back to the way they use to be, but is that what we really want?
I don’t know how it is where you are. Maybe they already opened everything up and the perspective I am giving you seems strange. I can understand that. This is a global issue with local responses; we were all pushed into boats but each boat seems to be made up of different materials depending on where you are.
I heard New Zealand has zero active cases and are currently starting to ease more restrictions apart from border controls. That’s incredible. While it is important to celebrate this win for the female Prime Minister, New Zealand is not like everywhere else. Where I am in Canada we have the second highest reported cases in the country and there looks to be no end in sight. At first we seemed to be on a good track to get through this, then somewhere in the minutia of it all we fumbled. Public Health said one thing, the provincial government said another, the Feds were locked up in Ottawa trying to fill the most holes, and every other gap is stuffed with misinformation on social media. With a fluctuating graph and changing data by the day on the health of this country, it’s hard to know what to do. So you know what some leaders and large corporations seem to think is the right thing to do?
Reopen businesses and encourage people to spend money they don’t have!
Now don’t get me wrong. I understand the economic angle of this crisis. I am no more than a statistic when it comes to the “She-cession” as many economists have penned it. Economics are an incredibly important element to this whole situation that should not be overlooked one bit. Yet is forcing back a portion of the population that almost exclusively relies on low-paid service jobs to feed themselves and their family, a safe and honest way of getting things back to normal? It sounds like greed to me.
Not everyone in this pandemic has been afforded the same luxuries, we’ve seen that on countless occasions. A Global news report cited that while the United States has collected some data on the racial and socioeconomic impacts of Covid-19, the Canadian government has refused to release that information to their citizens just yet. If you have worked a customer facing job in this pandemic it has meant potentially putting yourself at risk of infection at the bare minimum. And on top of that many of the workers in those precarious positions have not received a living wage despite being deemed essential by governments. I can’t imagine the hurt and confusion that must have caused for some people.
As someone who has worked in the service industry since 2011, I have experiences under independent business, family run business, and multinational corporations. As an employee with the least amount of power in all of those institutions I started to move towards the idea that as much as I love independent and family run business, at the end of the day I was safer to stay with multinationals. Something about the accountability I would often ramble on about. Yet here I am almost 10 years later coming to the realization that multinational companies are hollow shells of vacant ideas that only serve one purpose, to make money.
I still work in the service industry, so I had to go back to work. Sitting through ‘going back to work’ training during a pandemic feels something like this. You hear people through a hollow digital connection, perhaps on a Zoom call. They start by discussing how brave you are and how thankful they feel that you’re coming back to the ‘community’. Then they discuss the excitement for all the growth and changes you are about to experience. Afterwards they take you through a team building exercise to get you comfortable to break social distancing guidelines from the comfort of their couches while continuously insuring your utmost safety. You listen and nod, you don’t want to lose your job at a time like this, what other job would you have to fall back on? They explain the expectations they have of you and remind you that there is no increase in wages for this work coming back. Instead, they focus on the corporate community you missed while you were gone. Community to corporation is not community as it is to grassroots organization. This community is bought for under 10 dollars and shareable through social media, but that’s all that matters. Their community isn’t the one dying from a rampant contagious virus, their community is in the bottom of a disposable paper cup.
If I can make any recommendations right now it is to focus and remember to support your local businesses. At the end of the day if there really is an economic crisis, they are the businesses that will be lost forever. It has been my experience that a lot of those smaller businesses are also ones that have not made a lot of big plans for massive reopenings, and seem to be many of the ones continuing to offer curbside and delivery options. As much as it’s hard to see, there is still a global pandemic going on that has not been eradicated. Of course it is ignorant to sit around idle and wait for a vaccine, but we should not in the same breath ignore the advice of health care workers on the front line of this pandemic and put ourselves or others in danger. We need to think critically during this time and not be persuaded to give up and ‘go back to the way things were’. If we need to start reopening the economy let’s look towards finding a way to do so that ensures the safety of employees and the communities they encounter and not push for the idea of massive reopening because it helps the company line.
Be mindful, now more than ever does every one of your dollars count. It’s up to you to make the decision on where you want that money to go.
