(PHOTO CREDITS: Global Alliance for Tax Justice)
While most workers will not have the opportunity to take the streets and raise their challenges, we need to enforce a core message: the COVID-19 disruption is playing out along the lines of class, gender and wealth. And it is playing dirty, revealing a system that fuels inequality
By Caroline Othim and Joy Hernandez
The latest buzz word, COVID-19, depicts a disease that has ravaged many parts of the world, leaving millions of people globally infected and hundreds of thousands dead. The impacts of the global pandemic are not limited to health; it also affected peoples’ lives socially and economically.
While May 1st each year provides an opportunity for workers’ solidarity and protests to commemorate the International LabourDay, this year will be different. Workers will not have the opportunity to collectively and publicly take the streets to raise the challenges that they face everyday in the world of work. This comes in the backdrop of governments’ directives to enforce containment measures for COVID-19, including by imposing quarantines to those repatriated, closing schools, universities, restaurants, and shops; cancelling public and private events, including religious activities; shutting down of transportation services (internal and external); locking down of affected areas and in some places, imposing curfews to restrict movement and observe social distancing, frequent handwashing; and cancelling or banning flights.
