Editorial
We stand on the edge of something monumental, facing a medical and economic crisis the scale of which has not been seen in living memory. This is a crisis unlike any other. We have seen the entire shut-down of any part of economic life that doesn’t directly contribute to sustaining us, or saving the lives of those infected with Covid-19. Governments are comatising their economies to stop the spread of the virus and putting them on life support through measures that before would have appeared unthinkable.
Capitalism seems so immovable, so unshakable from its hold on our imaginations. It is times like these, when the entire infrastructure of society must be totally redirected towards capitalism’s continued survival, that we are able to glimpse the cracks within it.
Across the globe, people are losing their jobs in huge numbers — 26.5 million people in the US alone. Many will have no support network, no savings. They are left with rent to pay and food to buy that they could scant afford anyway.
Crises like these affect people in different ways. Your capacity to deal with shocks depends on a myriad of other factors: your ability to borrow money from family, your ability to access money from the state, your housing situation. These combine together to make up your vulnerability. An event like the one we are currently facing compounds existing vulnerability, with those on the fringes being those who will be worse affected.
Forty years of neoliberalism have left us in a position of rampant inequality, with an increasing number of us in precarious work, living month to month. Since the 2008 financial crisis, in the UK the number of people on zero hour contracts has nearly quadrupled to 896 thousand, and self-employment has reached 4.8 million.
Around the world, we are already seeing the compounding of this existing precarity as renters, people in precarious work and those on low pay feel the effects of the crisis much more keenly than those sheltered by the security of property ownership, savings and stable employment.
The 2008 crisis left us with a decade of austerity, the gutting of our public services, the rise of the gig economy, the trebling of tuition fees and house prices that are beyond the reach of the masses. This appears to be a crisis even greater in scale, what it will bring we do not know.
The Invisible Worker has always strived to provide a space for workers to tell us about their lived experience, in a bid to understand how the seismic changes within our economy are affecting peoples’ lives. We feel that there has never been a more relevant time for this.
Over the coming weeks and months we are going to be seeking out the people at the sharp end of this crisis and asking them to tell their stories. We won’t be speaking for them, but working with them to allow them to speak for themselves. Only by listening to the voices of the vulnerable in society can we hope to change our economy to one that works for everyone.
We will be posting peoples’ stories online as we move forward, putting out a diverse range of perspectives from around the world.
We are setting out on this project without a map; we don’t know what this project is going to look like, we don’t know where it is heading, but we feel like the time to start is now.
It’s markedly different from anything else that we’ve done and the speed of change in the situation is so rapid that we will need to be ready to adapt as the situation changes and unfolds. Along the way, we expect to hear things that shock us, that challenge our preconceptions and which ground us. This will be a record of an unprecedented time, but where we are heading, we do not know.
But we simply can’t do this without your help. We are a small group of volunteers, working without any external funding. As a project we are working with people who have lost all, or large sections, of their income and we believe that the only ethical approach is to pay them for their work. Currently we have a small budget, largely made up of parts of our savings, and we have had to cancel all our planned fundraising events. We will continue to put out peoples stories, but we will only do this whilst we can provide payment.
If you can, please support us by donating what your can to our fundraiser, even a small donation is a massive help. All proceeds will go to paying people facing economic hardship to tell their stories.
If you want to contribute in any way, or if you have any thoughts or advice, please get in touch.
Fundraiser: https://bit.ly/invisiblewrkr
Contact: theinvisibleworker@gmail.com
