“I take what I get. And they know that”: unemployment in the Covid crisis
Words by Gráinne Charlton
As an “army of the unemployed” is growing across the globe, Gráinne Charlton reflects on joblessness and the pursuit of work during the Covid crisis. It is now, she writes - when unemployment numbers are swelling - that we need to forge a new understanding of unemployment, and move away from the isolation and shame that come with it.
At the end of February, I moved to France. I packed my first days with trial shifts, firing off CVs and arranging childcare and tutoring jobs. It was starting to look promising; it felt like I was starting to settle in. Covid-19 changed things. Two weeks in, and the lockdown was imposed. I lost the childcare and tutoring jobs I’d set up. I was unable to access state support packages because I had no work contracts and no self-employed registration. I saw friends around me (both here and in the UK) lose their jobs, especially in the service industry. The split between those who could work from home and those who couldn’t became more stark. It is a false divider, of skilled and unskilled labour.
Childcare is not something you can do virtually (‘unskilled’), unlike tutoring (‘skilled’) which though feasible, became highly competitive due to quarantines and restrictions the world over. This amalgamated in tutoring platforms encouraging lower hourly tariffs and offering first lessons for free.
I was already unemployed before the pandemic: I have been looking for a job since June 2019. I have had nine interviews since last July — I sent off a total of forty-seven applications. I am one of thousands of unemployed workers who are located in a wide, diverse, reserve army of labour “waiting” in the wings for work. Our “waiting” work: applications, bureaucratic hoops and interviews. This is just some of the work we do that, like social reproductive labour, it is unvalued and invisible. And now more than ever, unemployed workers as a reserve army of labour are increasing at an alarming rate due to Covid — with evolving predictions of record worldwide unemployment equivalent to the loss of 400 million full-time jobs , with 6 million (21% of workforce) in the UK alone.
In March, April and May, in quarantine, I tried to find tutoring jobs online. It stalled. My internet wasn’t strong enough, I have no router yet, just a personal hotspot, I didn’t have the uniform (a red polo shirt), I hesitated too long when I was told to sign permission for an unknown boss to record (and use for advertising) my lessons. I was back to square one, with no job fourteen days later, and with hours of work unremunerated. A friend helped me to get one tutoring gig from a friend of a friend. Alongside this, I resorted to “networking” with childcare agencies (weary of their facebook requests for fear of rejection over my labour and union related posts) and a few promised they could guarantee me work in the first weeks post-quarantine.
Post-quarantine, I went for interviews within the first two days of freedom. The agency, who made me register as self-employed to avoid employer responsibilities, told me at a family’s house in the middle of an interview to remove my mask in the home. “That it wasn’t needed”. Meanwhile, families were persistently demanding my commitment for their convenience: “We want you to stay long term here, but we will give you a day’s notice when we want you to work.”
That was the gist. Parents continue to insist on my long term availability without any guarantee of start dates or length of proposed employment. The excuse: Covid. The reality: I have no contracts and little work. I take what I get. And they know that. One family — having pushed to know every detail about my life plans — promised I would start in May, then June and they left the country for the month. They’ll get back to me, they said, in July. In July, I’m still waiting. One of the jobs I set up before the quarantine, I lost (the baby childcare job), or that’s how I have interpreted their radio silence. No sorry, just silence. I’m disposable, they don’t need me anymore. After a string of texts back and forth each week for four weeks straight, never clear if I would start the following week, I started a different job that I got pre-quarantine. I asked myself, is this “normality” returning? Not for long: I lost it. “Summer holidays” the parents said — “maybe you can restart with us in September”.
Whilst tentatively walking the tightrope between “unemployed” and “employed” status in informal work like childcare or tutoring, I remind myself that beyond the individual, workers facing growing daily exploitation by bosses with little means of accountability links directly with unemployment. Because exploitation is made feasible every time there is one more unemployed worker. The pandemic no doubt marks an unprecedented increase in unemployed workers, and this surge should be the ground for a new societal understanding of unemployment. It really isn’t individual or subjective: unemployed workers face a job market structured around a profit driven economy, pandemic or otherwise.
Covid-19 is used as an excuse by employers (which includes those who don’t categorise themselves as such) to make work more precarious. The knowledge held by all of my potential employers is simple: as an unemployed worker I need work, they dictate (and ignore) as they deem fit. Knowing I would accept any work conditions even during a pandemic allows them to raise expectations of standards and commitments to the work I am “fortunate” they “award” me.
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