All Three Of My Workplaces Closed
Anonymous
I am a part-time worker at a Hot Yoga Studio, a part-time worker at a fancy retail chain store, and an unpaid intern with a children's book publishing company. My jobs were already precarious before COVID-19, and while I am earning unemployment for now (I almost didn’t make enough to qualify), I have no idea when I will be back at work.
The week before the closures started, none of my bosses were taking COVID-19 seriously, though Massachusetts has a high number of cases. Even though several of the conferences for the book publishing company were canceled, my bosses still decided to travel to London and Houston. I was so glad the office was closed before they got back, because I was terrified that they would give us the virus. The yoga studio was still open, and the cleaning procedures were almost the same. I refused to work at the yoga studio after the first week of March, because I was just terrified of catching the virus. At Anthropologie, one of the managers said people were just blowing it out of proportion, even though the ERs in Italy were starting to fill up, and the death toll was starting to mount.
Finally, all three of my workplaces closed late last week; but the past week was really terrifying.
I am lucky to live at home with my parents, or else I do not think I would survive on a part-time minimum wage. I am very concerned about everyone who works in the service industry.
Meanwhile, my bosses at my internship are not being understanding. At the beginning of my internship, they gave me a crappy laptop from 2007 with a busted battery, so it had to stay plugged in; so I could not bring it home. Therefore, I’ve had to start all of my projects from scratch at home, and my bosses have not been helpful at all. Unpaid internships are criminal and must be abolished.
We need socialism now! We need to organize the working class, and we need full unionization of all industries, and we need a universal healthcare system now. Private for-profit healthcare systems must be replaced with well-funded public healthcare. We need to end austerity and capitalism now.
The two-party system is broken.
We needed socialism yesterday, but we need it now more than ever.
