Together we’re strong
Words by Jesús Jiménez. Jesús is orignally from Latin America, and is working as a cleaner in London.
Translation from Spanish by Diego Jenowein.
On 18 March 2020, we started our day of work as usual, at four in the morning, in our workplace located in Mayfair, London. The air was already saturated with the smell of disinfectants that we were instructed to use because of the virus. The atmosphere was also saturated by the different rumours of what our fate would be.
In the middle of the day, our supervisor announced ambiguously that our manager would get in touch to give us instructions, however he confirmed very clearly to most of my colleagues that from the next day onwards we should not attend work until further notice. Dispirited and upset, some colleagues left to take up new jobs and the rest of us returned to our homes. It was hard to keep our minds from foreseeing bad things happening, such as getting infected or being laid off without pay — or even worse, both at once.
Around 4 pm, I got a call from the manager confirming what we had thought. She told me that our client would close the club due to Covid-19 and will no longer require any staff, and that until further notice we were suspended without pay. Consequently, the company would follow the terms of the contract we had signed, namely that we would be paid for our work days up to that point, with an additional five days at a rate of £29 per day regardless of our suspension. She also mentioned later on that she would send us a letter via email to formalise this arrangement and that this was entirely legal.
Receiving such a call from your manager is disturbing when you are at the same time thinking of how to cover the rent, the bills, the food, the additional expenses related to your children, if you have any. The only thing I managed to ask is whether we would receive any kind of support. She replied that her lawyers had no idea about it, that I should report to a Jobcentre and ask them. Later on, I had a number of calls from my colleagues to ascertain if we had all been told the same thing — and it was indeed the case.
The mere thought that Brexit had just been bolstered, and knowing that all my colleagues were foreign residents for work purposes like me, with limited English proficiency, made me question whether I should have made that enquiry. At that point, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had emphasised the protection of the economy but had expanded very little, if at all, on social benefits. The uncertainty was overwhelming, just like our levels of stress.
In the heat of the moment, I came to the conclusion that almost all poor people in this world experience the same thing, as if this was some sort of curse. In this muddle of feelings, a fragment of memory came over me like a wave.
‘A story is told of Mariano Melgarejo, a dictator of a century ago, who forced the British ambassador to drink a barrelful of chocolate as punishment for sneering at a glass of local chicha. The ambassador was paraded down La Paz’s main street sitting backward on a donkey and then shipped back to London. An infuriated Queen Victoria supposedly called for a map of South America, chalked an X over Bolivia, and pronounced the sentence: “Bolivia does not exist.”’ Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 1971.
I do not believe in curses, but in effect I am confident in saying that to this day, when it comes to power and dignity, Latin America does not exist. For rich countries, stealing natural resources and workforce amounts to nothing more than the exercise of a natural right. But of course, if this is not a curse, then what could linger like this from the second half of the 19th century to the dawn of the 20th? I cannot find a logical relationship that could explain my own situation. However, emotive memories are not misleading, and maybe this is not the right question to ask.
Maybe one should ask instead: “why am I remembering such distant events?”. Well, because I’m Latin American and I work for one of the most distinguished clubs of the London élite (With this in mind, anyone would imagine that I earn a decent salary. As we know, decency doesn’t always correspond to legality, and the truth is that I’m on minimum wage, regardless of the fact that the club is located in the London Living Wage proposal area). I am linked to my company by a zero-hour contract as a cleaner, but I actually work thirty-six hours a week, in the early morning.
According to the process of globalisation, it is lawful for rich countries to establish their companies in poor countries to multiply their profits. But since this is not entirely possible with the service industry, it’s South East Asia or Latin America which are sent instead to clean a club for example, and this workforce comes voluntarily to them from those places, like birds chasing bullets only to be hurt.
Harking back to the labour dispute I am concerned with, despite this cocktail of nerve-racking ingredients such as working in one of the least protected sectors in the UK in terms of work regulations, or the consequences of coronavirus, the implementation of unfavourable laws following Brexit, the absolute lack of interest of our employer for the wellbeing of its workers, our unfamiliarity with labour rights, and so on — incredible as it may seem, we did encounter a ray of light in this turmoil of obscurity.
The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, an excellent team of expert campaigners with great human qualities and on top of this providing support in Spanish, provided us with information and formalised our membership. They also helped us to claim our rights before our employer in order to avoid unfair dismissals and malpractice, and ultimately secured the eighty-percent pay scheme announced by this government going adrift through its inaction. When my colleagues and myself saw our furlough pay on our payslip and bank account, it felt like we had woken up from a macabre dream. I must add that this would never have happened hadn’t we come together as a collective. Evolution as a competitive process based on the survival of the fittest did not take hold. The current paradigm demonstrates that survival actually occurs when organisms best show that they can work together.
Considering first the disastrous outbreak of Covid-19 with expert predictions regarding novel epidemics, in addition to the vulnerable status of the worker as an individual trying to come up with solutions in the face of this atrocious capitalist system, and finally the unfavourable measures taken by the UK in the wake of Brexit, targeting the most exposed classes and proving once again our individuality is invisible in this system. The best thing that workers can do is unite and organise. We all know that one swallow doesn’t make the summer. Dignity can only be achieved through the strength of unity and daily struggle.
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